#127 - Building Successful Products With Game Thinking - Amy Jo Kim

[00:01:05] Episode Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello again to all of you, my friends and my listeners. Welcome to the Tech Lead Journal podcast, the show where you can learn about technical leadership and excellence from my conversations with great thought leaders in the tech industry. If this is your first time listening to Tech Lead Journal, subscribe and follow the show on your podcast app and social media on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. And for those of you longtime listeners, if you find my podcast helpful and want to show your appreciation and support my work, you can subscribe as a patron at techleadjournal.dev/patron, or buy me a coffee at techleadjournal.dev/tip.

My guest for today’s episode is Amy Jo Kim. Amy is a game designer, startup coach, author, and the co-founder of Game Thinking. In this episode, Amy shared how we can use game thinking to build better and successful products that people want. She first described some top reasons why products fail and gave a few tips to avoid product failure by validating our ideas before building the product. Amy then explained in-depth the 3 core ideas in game thinking, which are identifying your superfans, building a sticky core habit loop, and validating the product concept using storyboards. Towards the end, Amy shared how we can get started with game thinking and why we should do it early in our product journey.

I really enjoyed my conversation with Amy, learning about game thinking, a well-proven technique that has been used in multiple successful major games and products, such as Rock Band, The Sims, eBay, Netflix, and nytimes.com. I believe you will also find this concept interesting to apply in your product development and avoid the costly mistakes of building products that do not solve real user problems.

And if you do enjoy listening to this episode, please help me share it with your colleagues or within your community so that more people can benefit from listening to this conversation. Also help me grow the podcast by leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to have more people discover it on the platforms. Let’s go to the conversation with Amy after a few words from our sponsors.

[00:03:42] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today, I’m very happy. I attended her workshop back in 2016 in Singapore. I think that was pretty long time ago. And at that moment, actually, I attended this workshop called Game Thinking. So my guest today is Amy Jo Kim. She’s actually pretty well known for this concept, game thinking, and she’s also named by Fortune as one of the top 10 influential women in games. As you can tell, Amy has a lot of game design kind of background, also involved in publishing some of the famous games like Rock Band and the Sims. So today we’ll be talking a lot about game thinking, how we can apply it to actually do product validation, building product MVP, and things like that. Amy, thank you so much for this opportunity. Looking forward for our conversation.

Amy Jo Kim: It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:04:32] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: So Amy, I always like to start my conversation with my guest by asking you to share any story about your career or any turning points or highlights that you want to share with us here.

Amy Jo Kim: Sure. Like many of my friends in the gaming industry, I’ve got an eclectic background in psychology, neuroscience, and computer science. And that includes a PhD in behavioral neuroscience. So what that essentially means is that I really understand how to use the scientific method to get answers. And I switched from being an academic to going into tech and computers when I realized that I could build things that millions of people used.

And so I did that. I built multimedia databases at Sun Microsystems doing client server engineering, and then I switched over to design and producing, working with brands like MTV, Nickelodeon, and Star Trek. Getting them onto the worldwide web, working with Paramount Viacom, who’s a major media conglomerate. And that was amazing, combining tech and media.

And then came one of those turning points in my career, where they were moving our design lab to New York from California. And I was given a choice to go ahead and move and uproot my whole family and move to New York. Or stay and get severance. And that’s what I did. And I launched with my partner, a design studio to bring game and community design to brands and startups and game studios, which is who we’re still serving. And through that design studio, I worked as a game designer on The Sims, on Rock Band, on eBay, working on their reputation system, on Ultima Online, and early on Netflix, Covet Fashion, Bejeweled, and Tetris with my partner. And recently, very controversial and explosively popular AI chatbot called Replica.

And so I found that in my career, whenever something was a little bit scary to me, felt maybe a little outta my depth, but I felt like I would work with great people I’d learn a lot from, and I could lift up and learn and become better at my craft. Every time that happened, and I took it, I was glad I did. And that’s one of the things about leaning into discomfort. I look back on all these hits, every one of them at some point was a nightmare. We wondered if it would work. It was very uncomfortable. But that’s part of the secret of innovation is that’s kind of how you know you’re on the right track.

So that’s where game thinking came from. What you learned about in that workshop and what we now teach teams worldwide in our training programs is what we learned working on all these hits about what works, and also even more importantly, what doesn’t work when you want to validate ideas and build the right product for the right people.

So you can read about this in our book Game Thinking, which we published in 2018. You can learn the step-by-step system by signing up for our mailing list. We offer training programs. And we’re really on a mission to save millions of entrepreneurs and product leaders billions of hours of time by testing ideas smarter and faster.

[00:08:08] Quitting and Starting Own Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: Thank you for sharing your story. So one thing that I found very relevant in these days, right? So you mentioned that you took severance package and started your own journey. I think in relation to some of the scenes happening in the tech industry, right? There are a lot of layoffs. People are also not certain in their jobs. So what made you take that decision during that time, when you decided you want to take severance package and start your own journey? Maybe some people here are contemplating and thinking about that. Maybe can share a little bit of how you make your decision back then.

Amy Jo Kim: Absolutely. That’s a great question, because it wasn’t an easy decision. I absolutely loved the job I had. It was very prestigious. I got to work with top creatives at MTV and Nickelodeon. It was crazy! But I knew I didn’t wanna move. We didn’t yet have a family, but we wanted to, and I wanted to be near parents, potential grandparents. So I was at that time of my life. So I knew I didn’t wanna move. And the other thing that made me take severance, frankly, is I had clients lined up. And this is I think one of the takeaways I’d like to give to anyone listening. Relationships are a long game. If you just think extractively about relationships and think what can someone do for me, of course, and naturally we think like that, we like to hang out with people that can do stuff for us. But part of why I was able to quit that job, take severance, and start my own design studio is I had developed a lot of relationships.

During my time at Sun and at Paramount, and then Viacom bought Paramount, so then I would travel to New York every month, which is part of I knew I didn’t wanna move there, and I developed relationships there as well. And I had people lined up that were like, if you ever have extra time, I’d really love to work with you.

So part of it was, I put in the time. I think of it as putting in my dues. I really developed very practical, useful skills that I brought to the table. And I’ve built relationships. I went to conferences. I stayed in touch with people. I wrote for various publications then. That was even pre-web. But I really shared what I was learning. I developed relationships. I stayed in touch with people, and it’s hard for me. I’m an introvert. I like this like remote work thing. It worked for me. But it paid off because when it was time to quit my job, I had a lot of people that really enjoyed working with me in one way or another and were eager to know what I was up to and if I would have room in my schedule, and that gave me a lot of confidence.

I basically had three clients lined up. But what was interesting is I really needed a break. Because as much as I love that job at Viacom, at the time was my boss, it was all consuming. It was a very intense job. And there was a lot of political stuff going on that complicated it. I bet some of you are nodding your heads. Cause that just happens. When we work in the real world, we are always doing our best in highly imperfect situations and the politics can get really exhausting and you feel like if you’re away for a weekend, all hell can break loose. So there was just a lot of stress to that job and we were at playing at a fairly high level, which was exciting, but stressful.

I knew I didn’t wanna do that, but I also knew that I had relationships with people that would vouch for me, that would introduce me to people. I got a gig 10 years later that was based on the relationship I built at Viacom years ago. So I was able to leave. I really needed a break, and part of what I did was, because I had severance, I said to all of my potential clients, I’m not doing anything for two months. If you really need something right away, I can recommend some people, but I need two months. And part of why I did that is I’ve learned something. People that are in too much of a hurry often wanna dump their problem on you, and I’m really careful about taking clients in too much of a hurry. It’s a red flag. So that kind of got rid of the red flags in my world. And in all honesty, I spent a bunch of time playing music, which is, I was semi-pro for years, and I just really loved music. I was playing my bass all the time. I was playing in a band. I did more gigs. You know, I was really into that for a while. I need it. And I highly recommend giving yourself a break, even if it’s a month or two. It’s so important to get clear on what you miss, what you wanna do, what you care about. So I got really clear on that. I had job offers, but I decided to launch my own studio, did it with my partner, who’s also game designer. And started taking clients I wanted to work with. Sometimes one at a time, if it was really intense, like Rock Band. Sometimes, several at a time. Did community design, did multiplayer game design, did UX design thrown in, and a bunch of system design. And my background at Sun Micro, and as a computer scientist and as a neuroscientist, system design comes naturally to me. So that was a place in gaming that I gravitated to. Also when you do client server engineering with multimedia databases, you’re building fault tolerance systems, right? On game teams I would often play a system design / UX / early prototyping role. And that was really gratifying. And the other thing that let me quit my job, take severance, and start a business is I had a focus, which is community / game design. I was early on the internet. Sun was on the internet, really early. They built the internet. My job was helping brands get onto the internet, in the mid nineties when the web was launching.

So I had a lot of history with getting onto the internet and dealing with multiplayer systems, and that really became my specialty. And I can’t recommend enough niching down. If you’re wondering, gosh, can I quit my job? What does that mean? What can I offer the world? Am I just a contractor? One client at a time? Or do I have a package? What do I do? The more you’re clear about what you can do that’s differentiated in the market and that the market needs—key phrase the market needs—the less you’ll have to worry about quitting your job. Because if you have something the market needs and you know how to deliver it, you can make a business. Especially now with companies cutting back, a lot of people are using freelancers. But at the same time, I know a lot of people might not have that. And in that case, maybe look for another job. Or maybe there’s something else you can do. That’s not really my specialty. I can really speak to myself, which is I think as you’re building your career, getting clearer and clearer on what you offer, what your edges, what your unfair advantages, what you bring to the table, how you make companies and people money is critical. And the bottom line of why I always had work as a studio owner and freelancer is that I help people make a lot of money. That’s always what it comes down to. And that doesn’t have to be avaricious. It’s about staying focused on providing value.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! So there’s a lot of things to take away from your story. I think it’s really relevant for some people, I believe. And when you said something about politics, and stress, burnout, and things like that, I’m sure many people could relate that as well. Especially these days, there are so many pressures, so many distractions as well, and so many competitions. So I believe some of you would relate to this story. And a few things that I take away from your sharing just now is that relationship is a long game, right? So build your relationship right, network with people that you want to be associated with, and build the relationship along the way. Who knows, one day they will come back and maybe become your friends or your clients, right? And the other thing is that before quitting, you already have a few clients lined up. So I think that always helps. So instead of quitting your job and starting from start, I think that is always the the danger of putting pressure on yourself.

And the other thing that I took away is that you advise people to take a break, right? Finding out the things that we miss doing. So I think that’s also very important. We don’t want to just quit and find another gig, right? So sometimes we have to look back, what do we miss and take away on some aspects of those that probably will be useful for us going forward. So thanks for sharing your story, Amy.

[00:16:44] Top Reasons Products Fail

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned in your intro that game thinking actually helps to save billions of hours for entrepreneurs or product designers. So maybe if we can go there. What do you think are some of the top reasons product ideas failing? Maybe you have done a lot of consulting with many clients, so if you can summarize maybe what are the top root causes do you think?

Amy Jo Kim: So there’s a lot of different ones. The world is a complex place, but by far the most common reason that products fail is the team build something that they think is the right thing, but that the market or the people, their customers that need to use it don’t really need. So building things people don’t need. Building features people don’t need, or a small part of a market needs, is by far the most common failing. And it takes many different forms, that type of failure. But if you dig in, you find that the root cause is often that the team didn’t really validate the ideas or they gave it lip service, but they didn’t really let the ideas have room to fail. That’s something that happens a lot. Often, if we go back to politics, often there’ll be a culture at a company where executives rise up and get further by saying, “I have a great idea. Let’s do my great idea.” And that’s not actually how really good ideas get validated. But it can be scary to say no to the rising star, the big boss, so people don’t say no. That can be part of what goes on.

The other thing that can happen, and this is where you really need rapid innovation skills, not just innovation skills, is the market can change right out from under you. We published a video recently, a little mini case study of an Indian client of ours, a brilliant, very successful serial entrepreneur, two exits, love this guy, learned a lot from him, but he had a point and some of his companies were, you know, IT outsourcing companies that grew and grew. And there was a point where business software was switching the SaaS a few years back, and it was a huge shakeup in his industry, and he was really struggling with it. He came into our game thinking training programs and used game thinking to change the way he approached the product. Cause the whole industry was getting pulled out from under him. And that happens repeatedly. If you’re in tech, disruption is the name of the game. Right, Henry?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, that’s correct.

Amy Jo Kim: It’s how it goes. You can’t just go, “Oh, we’re done.” I work with VP of Engineering, Head of Engineering all the time on leadership teams, you know, tackling tough products, product issues, and it is very much a moving target. You can make yourself crazy by trying to stay up to date on everything. You have to pick your battles. You have to pick your stack, right? And really invest. The thing that game thinking brings to the table is a lot of techniques from the games industry, but also from the tech and product industry, of how to test ideas early and let yourself be wrong on the path to being right, which again, it’s easy to give lip service to, it’s really hard to implement for political reasons, for “I don’t know how to do it” reasons, and what we do is make it step by step easy to implement. And the reason that we develop this is really simple. Burning market need.

If anyone listening, including you, Henry, and like, I’ve got 30 stories like this. If anyone listening has ever been part of a project you are really excited about, and then you ship it, and then you get that terrible feeling in your stomach, and you’re like, this isn’t catching on. This isn’t working. This is not how I thought it was gonna go. It’s very frustrating to think that you have to even build a prototype to do that or design detailed screens. You don’t!

What I learned working on hits is that you can use low fidelity storyboards, sketches, all kinds of techniques like that to figure out what works and what doesn’t without detailed designs and without building a thing. The building and design goes on in parallel, but that’s not the fastest way to learn. And once I discovered that and I saw hit after hit use these techniques, while a lot of projects I worked on didn’t, I thought, hold up, more people need to know about this. And that’s why I say saving billions of hours.

There’s really three core ideas and we’ve built product sprints around them. And I don’t wanna overwhelm you with all the details, cause it’s a pretty sophisticated system, and it works. But there’s really three core ideas. The first is who you talk to, and it turns out we have this concept of super fans. It means high need, special beachhead niche of your market. That’s what it means, and finding a particular slice of your market that is seeking solutions, and they show you through their behavior, not their words and aspirations, that they’re looking for the solution. Finding that slice of your market isn’t easy, which is why we have all these templates and guidance. But when you do, five to seven of those people is more valuable than thousands of demographically relevant people that don’t have those qualities. So there’s a surgical precision in testing your ideas that will speed up your ability to hit the mark and build the right product like a hundred times. It’s astonishing! And we call that super fans, and we have a technique called the super fan funnel. So that’s one idea is you don’t just talk to your customers or your potential customers. You talk to really specific ones that represent exactly the people that are going to give you the feedback you need to listen to, to make your product decisions.

The second idea is really very much out of gaming. It’s something we call the core loop, or the core habit loop, or the core learning loop, or the compulsion loop, but in gaming, at least the multiplayer online gaming that I practice, you’re thinking about retention from the get-go, because, you know, often the business model’s built around that free to play or subscription. So how do you do that? Well, You have to have a habit. You have to have like stuff they do over and over again that pulls them back. But the stuff can’t be boring. It has to get more interesting over time. How do you solve that problem? Well, you build a learning loop or a habit loop that has some sort of repeatable, pleasurable activity in it—that describes most games, usually, there’s a chain of activities—but the loop itself, the journey it’s embedded in, changes over time. It gets more interesting over time. That’s what keeps people around. And it’s so that combo, which is something I just learned working on, you know, dozens of games, including these massive hits, is something that any product can adopt, if you wanna drive retention. It’s not at all limited to games, but you don’t see it in popular methodologies like design thinking or lean, agile or even jobs to be done, all of which we embrace and pull the best elements from. You don’t see how you build a sticky habit loop. You know, it would be nice to do it, but how do you do it? And then who do you talk to if you want to really test your ideas on the right people quickly in rough form?

And then the third piece is concept storyboards. And this is a mix of what game designers call paper prototyping, where let’s say you’re doing a board game or even other kinds of games, and some UX people do this. You know, cut up little paper pieces. Or if you’re doing a board game, you mock up, you know, with cardboard and paint or markers, your game pieces, and you might work out the rules of the game, you know, with your buddies over afternoon tea on your dining room table, like that would be paper prototyping. Done a lot of that. It’s low fidelity prototyping. A lot of people understand this. But, you also look at what Pixar does with their storyboarding, and they do rough storyboarding for like a year, working out their story, testing in on various people before they commit to the very expensive and detailed process of animation. So you don’t need to do it for a year, but it turns out that you can storyboard your end-to-end experience, not the details of the screens, not your prototype, but just what experience do we want to deliver? You can do that before you’ve built anything. Before you’ve designed anything. Before you’ve committed to a design direction. You can do it for features, major features you’re thinking of launching. And you can test it, especially if you know exactly the right people to test it on.

Those three things. Super fan funnel to find the right people. Loop design to create the experience that people will wanna stick around for. And then concept testing so you don’t get lost in the weeds. And you actually figure out your experience. Those three things together as a system, working as a system, where the input of one chunk is the output of the previous, right? For every engineer out there. I have a big engineering background. I’ve built a lot of systems. And that’s how it goes. You modularize it and you figure out your inputs and outputs. And that’s how game thinking works.

We’ve run our signature training program, which is the Game Thinking Masterclass, hundreds of people, dozens and dozens of teams have run through it, and the thing I most often hear. A few things. One, I wish I’d done that six months ago. So if you’re wondering if it’s like too early, it’s like the earlier the better. But you can also do it once your product is out there and you’re trying to fix your leaky bucket retention issues. A lot of people do that. The other thing we hear all the time is, that save me probably a year, nine months to a year. I thought, now I know something. I thought it was gonna take me a year to figure out. And that’s why we do what we do, because we see the results. And we hear, not from what we think, but what the people who did it think how much time they think it saved them.

[00:27:37] Validating Before Building

Henry Suryawirawan: That sounds really amazing to me! Just now what you mentioned, right? I think it makes sense. So one thing that I just wanna touch on a little bit. These kind of things have been shared by many people, right? Maybe especially in the product. So we don’t wanna build a product that the market doesn’t need, but somehow I think many people, including me, sometimes when I have an idea, right? So sometimes the tendency is for us to just go build and design it, instead of validating, doing this prototype, finding people who actually want it or need it, right? Talk to them. Maybe, a few tips, like the last tips that you wanna give for people who know about this concept, they understand the theory, right? But why they are not moving into that direction and start building instead. So maybe a few tips how you would nudge people to just, again, go by the direction of, you know, testing your idea before you actually build. Any tips that are there, Amy?

Amy Jo Kim: Yeah. Well, I wanna start with empathy. Because I was that person with itchy hands wanting to build stuff and wanting to design specific things. Because I think once you know how to do that, and you’ve had success with that, we all as humans lean on the techniques and strategies that have brought up success. So I think if that’s something you know how to do, you’re naturally inclined to do it.

We also have some people who are engineers who manage to kind of prototype their way into certain things. That’s really what the Lean Startup is. It’s something written by an engineer and that’s the kind of things he knows how to do. So I have a lot of empathy for wanting to do it, for feeling like just ship it, build it. That’s how you learn. And occasionally it works, which is occasionally you also win the lottery. Occasionally you win at Vegas, but the house has the advantage. And one of the most dangerous things I see, and I work with some really high level clients, is people that kind of stumbled into building something and it worked, and then they try it again and they try it again, and they try to reproduce that magic and they blow through hundreds of millions of dollars. If they had a big success early on, it doesn’t work as a technique. But sometimes you luck out and you stumble into it.

So I wanna acknowledge that if you’ve ever felt that way, it absolutely happens, but it doesn’t work over and over again, is what I’ve seen with my own clients. When I’ve seen people, including myself, make the transition, advice number one is it’s gonna be uncomfortable. It’s gonna feel like walking over hot coals. It’s gonna feel wrong. Your brain’s gonna go, why am I wasting my time? And if you’re so easily swayed, then stop listening. Like, I can’t really help you. I don’t work that hard to convince people, cause I’ve learned you gotta walk with the willing. And there’s a lot of willing, I’m not in the business of arguing about terminology or convincing people. I’m in the business of holding your hand when you walk over the hot coals. So you get to the other side and get to the value. And if it’s not uncomfortable, you’re not learning is what I’ve learned. So that’s one thing is that there’s a discomfort that you can actually use to guide you.

Another thing is there’s help, there’s a lot of advice out there. Our programs, you know, let you do in three months what it would take you a year. So you can get guidance specific expert weekly coaching and advice and all that stuff. It’s out there if you want it. So come and check out all the things we offer, because as you can see, I’m very passionate about saving people time.

Another piece of just hands-on advice for you yourself is who you ignore is every bit as important as who you listen to. And one of the most common things that startup founders, including myself do is want to be everything to everybody, then they say, no, no, no, I’m narrowing it down. I’ll just you know, moms with young kids ages, you know, 20 to 45 and that’s not narrowing it down. It’s very, very hard to lean into the reality that you need to niche way down to grow big. You need to get really specific. You need to find people with the problem in the market. People say, oh, I’m innovating. I can’t do it. And that’s bullshit. You can always find people with a problem. You just have to know where to look. And if you can’t find people with a problem, that might be a signal to you that this isn’t a problem the market needs solved. And guess what? Finding that out after two or three months of low fidelity work versus building and shipping something. Just think for a minute about how much time and money that saves.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! So I think that’s very precious tips. I think it’s very uncomfortable, especially for engineers who know how to build, right? We always jump into solution instead of thinking what problem we wanna do. Thanks for sharing that tips. So I feel that people here need to hear this more often, because that’s where the learning is.

And don’t forget, also, you have to narrow down before you go big, right? So always thinking in that space rather than thinking how do I make this big, how do I make this successful or viral? So thanks for sharing that.

[00:33:03] Identifying Super Fans

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned this term called super fan, right? And I hear you saying that, yeah, we need to find people who really need the solutions that we wanna deliver, right? So is there any specific technique how we can find people who are really like the super fan, right? People who are really in dire needs to have this problem solved.

Amy Jo Kim: So we have a pretty detailed process, and I’m not gonna lie. If it was snap your fingers easy, everybody would do it. There are some ninja shortcuts though that are the absolute best way to do it, if you’re in a hurry and you wanna cut to the chase and be smart. And my best ninja shortcut is, figure out who your closest competition is. And don’t say you don’t have competition. Figure out what they’re doing instead. Cause if you launch something or not, people are still gonna be like out there getting their problem solved, right? Regardless of your solution. So if you either have something in the market or you wanna launch something, or you wanna make a major new feature, update that sort of thing, find people that have the problem that you solve that are already trying to do something in the market using a competitor, which doesn’t have to be an app. Sometimes the competitor is a spreadsheet or an exercise class at a park or something like that. But find people that have actively searched for a solution that you would then serve who are using a competitor and interview them. Don’t get them to tell you about your product. Get them to tell you about how they use the competitor product. And we, again, we have a whole technique for doing this. But irregardless of our technique, this is something that you can go do. It’s frigging gold. It causes you to do all the right analysis, which is who are our key market competitors from the customer’s point of view, right? Not from our point of view, from the customer’s point of view. And then getting them to tell you about their problem in the context of the competitor, what’s working, what’s not working, gives you a view of the problem space that might take you four to six months to get otherwise. It’s amazing!

Henry Suryawirawan: I think that’s really a powerful shortcut, right? Look at your competitors, interview or talk to people who use that competition products, and validate what works and what doesn’t work. And for people who think that their idea is really niche or maybe uniquely new, I think maybe think again. So almost everything in these days would have alternatives in the market, right? So maybe it is not totally new kind of a problem to be solved. So thanks for sharing that.

[00:35:41] Building Core Habit Loop

Henry Suryawirawan: The second part of your game thinking is building core habit loop, right? So is this something that, a technique that you take from, maybe things like power of habit or maybe hooked, right, from Nir Eyal. Is there something that we need to think about how to build habit loop?

Amy Jo Kim: Well, both of those books really lean more heavily on behavior modification loops. I’ve read both and in detail. I like Atomic Habits much more because it brings in identity, and it doesn’t try and sell a behavior modification Skinner box loop as a solution, which the Power of Habit, if you just literally look at their loop, it’s a Skinner box. And same with Nir Eyal’s book. He’s moved on. He’s talking about new stuff now. I wouldn’t take that too seriously. Be inspired, but be really careful about the techniques that boil down to behavior mod. I like Atomic Habits and our core loop really comes out of my experience in game design, being a working game designer and system designer and needing to understand that and model it, it was just something that was part of my arsenal that I learned from working with other people and then incorporated and then developed and you know, it was part of how we understood, okay, what game are we gonna build and how are we gonna tune it? And blah, blah, blah.

I think that Power of Habit, Hooked, good starting point. Beyond that, I definitely recommend Atomic Habits, and then I’d look at game thinking, because what we’re really getting into is system thinking and system design, but we’re not calling it that. We’re slipping it in the back door, because this isn’t a system design book, but there’s a ton of system design in it. And I’d say that’s really the difference is incentive design, system design progression design versus a manipulative behavior mod loop. Anytime someone tells you that a variable reinforcement schedules the secret to engagement, they don’t understand what real engagement is, because that’s what the one arm bandit gambling loop is. That’s very addictive, but it’s also outlawed in a lot of states. So no, you don’t want your Uber app giving you a variable reinforcement. You want it to be consistent and reliable. So I think there’s a lot of bad advice out there that sounds good. And in some circumstances make sense. And I use certain behavior mod Skinner box mechanics in certain designs where it makes sense, but it’s not a panacea.

So, you know, to help you understand what do I mean by system thinking? So if you’re designing a habit loop, a core loop. Sometimes it’s called a compulsion loop that tends to get more into that Skinner box design. Let’s say you’re designing something for a casino, right? That’s a kind of game design that you’re gonna drive certain behaviors, but those loops are a system, and it’s not just a trigger and a habit and a result, it’s an incentive system. And if you don’t put learning and skill building into your loop, it’s gonna get really boring, cause there’s nothing to get better at. So the core idea of a learning loop, which comes out of games is your habit loop has skill building built into it, and that’s what keeps it interesting. There’s something you can get better at in some way. And that’s completely missing. That idea is completely missing from the first two books you mentioned. And that’s a really, really, really important idea, because Skinner box mechanics backfire over time. They have really good stats at first, but they backfire over time.

And again, we have a lot of psychology that we share with our customers in an efficient way to help you understand why that is and how to combine extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to drive long-term engagement, which is, if you want that, that’s the way to do it. You walk that middle line. So for system thinking, we have this core loop, which I like to think of is, what are people doing on day 21 or day 30? Model it out. How’s it different than day two or day three? You know, kind of get started there. And then there’s how you design incentive and progression systems. So simple gamification levels and points and badges often results in something that feels like clutter. A really good progression system might not even be visible. It might just open up new challenges or maybe things get harder. It really depends on what you’re doing. And incentive systems are related to progression systems. But when we talk system design, you can look at any progression system including, “Hey, I threw some points and badges and levels at it. How about a leaderboard? Yeah, I think I’m done, right?” You can put that in, but then what are you incentivizing? It totally depends on like where you put it and what behavior is it shaping and all that. So a lot of what we work on in game thinking, we give you the tools to understand how to tell what the right incentive system is, how to tell what the right progression system is. If you wanna throw some gamification in there, great. Here’s how to test it with the right people. And they will tell you if it’s working or not. The other thing is systems are 90% balancing and tuning, 5 to 10% design. And that’s something that a lot of people, especially if they came out of web design or they design pages or, you know, they design something that’s a little bit simpler, they don’t really understand them. And so part of what game thinking brings to the table, again, that takes it beyond agile and lean and design thinking is understanding that and building artifacts that help you know which systems to build. Cause this is how real stuff happens. The interesting part of games isn’t the points and badges and the graphics, it’s the systems underneath.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, there are so many things you unpacked here. So if I can maybe take a few things that I took away. First is that you don’t just build a cue, trigger, and then you build a habit and then you get the result, right? It’s not as simple as that, but there’s a whole associated systems underlying your product, or maybe your games if you’re building a game. And a few things that I picked, the first is about skill building, right? Don’t just build a loop in which it’s more like a habital behavior change, right? But it’s also a skill building where people have progression, there’s a new challenge, new difficulty, or maybe new features that they need to unearth by using your product. And the second is also think about the incentive and progression, especially related to skill building. Because people at the end of the day, after using a product several times, they want to get challenged or they wanna find something new to upskill themselves. So I think this is also a key thing for us to build a product that maybe is more sticky, or has a higher retention rate compared to other products. So thanks for sharing that, Amy.

[00:42:48] Storyboarding

Henry Suryawirawan: So the last part what you mentioned is about concept validation or storyboarding. So, for for people who hear about storyboarding, is it really necessary to build some kind of persona journey, user journey, or things like that? So maybe a little bit of explaining what do you mean by concept storyboarding and validating it?

Amy Jo Kim: So it’s really easy on any project to dive into the details of screen design and feature lists and PRDs, right? I’ve definitely lived in that world for many years and a lot of agile teams get into building fast and effectively, but maybe you’re not building the right thing, which is why I said the most common problem is not building the right thing, but how do you figure out how to build the right thing?

It turns out that you can get a lot of false positives with very detailed designs. People get involved in discussing the details. It looks so pretty. They can say, I love it, but it might not actually solve their problem. How do you know if you’re solving the right problem? How do you actually validate if you’re solving the right problem? How do you validate if the string of features that you’re imagining delivering, how do you visualize the experience your customer’s gonna have if indeed you were to deliver those features? That’s what you can do with the concept storyboard. You can visualize in a very low fidelity way, not what your product looks and feels like and all the details of it, but what your product will do for your customers in their environment over time.

You can do it with stick figures. You can do it with Canva plugin stuff. In our programs, we have a whole set of these plug and play little figurines that we’ve developed over time. You can hire storyboard authors. There’s so many ways to do it. But again, it’s low fidelity. It’s super simple, and it forces you to think through your end-to-end experience and then to introduce, for instance, new features you’re thinking of in the context of that end-to-end experience, which you visualize by removing a lot of the detail about your product so you don’t get lost in all that detail, and really focusing on, here’s a person, they’re engaging around and about, and inside your product. Sometimes they might be talking about your product with someone else. Sometimes they might be logging in. What triggers them? It’s day 21. What reminds them to log in, right? What happened if they turned off notifications? And what you do is you don’t show every screen, which is very hard for designers. You show the key beats of the experience your customer’s gonna have that’s gonna deliver the value they’re there to get. Bottom line.

And so you abstract out all that detail and you really say, okay, what are they doing? Where are they? Are they holding their phone? Are they in front of a computer? Are they, you know, what are they doing? When are they using this over time? Who are they interacting with, if anybody? And it’s not easy to do if you haven’t thought about it, which is why we have training programs and templates. But, when you do that, you have an artifact that serves multiple strategic purposes in your organization. One, it’s amazing for communicating with stakeholders. It’s not all the details. It’s just here’s what this product’s gonna do for people. And often a stakeholder when you’re trying to explain what you’re doing, why you wanna do it, you’re negotiating for resources, this is incredible. I have seen this kind of document, this kind of storyboard when you’ve tested it and gotten results, get multiple projects funded and green light. So it’s an amazing stakeholder communication doc.

It’s also an amazing team communication doc. How does the Head of Engineering and the Head of Design and you know, maybe the Head of Customer Service or Marketing, how do they all agree on the thing you’re building? Is it all the detailed screens? If you can get your cross-functional team, whether it’s, you know, a product manager and a researcher and a designer, or I work a lot with executives, so it’ll be heads of all the people that care about the product. If you can get them working together and understanding what you’re building, one, you can test it, and it turns out if you get the right super fans for testing, 5 to 7 of them, and you get the answers you need with these storyboards.

So it’s good for stakeholder communication, it’s good for team communication and collaborative design, and it’s good for idea and feature and incentive system testing of all kinds before you’ve designed or built anything. So these concept storyboards serve the right purpose. There’s a really great book called “Understanding Comics” by Scott McLeod. I recently published a short review of it and it’s our like top five books for innovators. And he talks about the power of having as little detail as possible in your graphics so that the person looking at the graphics can read themselves into it and identify.

Henry Suryawirawan: So, wow! I think the key message here is not about building elaborate design and building elaborate user journey. I think the key thing here that you mentioned is to figure out how to build the right thing, or even validating whether we are solving the right problem, right? So we don’t need a super elaborate details, high fidelity, and things like that. But do it in a prototype manner, low fidelity, maybe even paper napkin or maybe sticky figures like you mentioned, so that we get the validation and also figuring out whether we are solving the right problem.

[00:48:48] Getting Started With Game Thinking

Henry Suryawirawan: So thanks for sharing that, Amy. I feel like there are so many things, good concepts here that you’ve shared. For founders or entrepreneurs or maybe product leaders out there who hear about this techniques from this episode, is there any takeaways that you wanna give for them to start thinking about game thinking? Because I feel that in some parts of the world, I just feel that this is not popular enough for people to know. They are more towards lean, agile, design sprint, and things like that. How would you nudge people to start looking at game thinking?

Amy Jo Kim: So it’s true, it’s not as popular, largely because we’re not invested in pushing it hard. We’re invested in working with people and getting results. I hear some good takeaways. Game thinking embraces what you already know, and it pulls the best out, and fills in the problems and the things that are missing. So if you’re already familiar with design thinking, lean, agile, jobs to be done, personas, scenarios, you don’t have to give any of that up, you can embrace it and then you can level up your practice. And that’s really the right way to think about game thinking. It’s very modular, it’s very system like. It’s not orthodoxy, but it’s a powerful timesaving tool.

I’d also say the more you care about retention and engagement, the more relevant this is. You don’t need to build a prototype or do detailed designs to figure out a lot of what works and what doesn’t. If you’re a founder and you wanna make the most of your run rate, this is gold. This will give you in three months what would take you at least a year. And that’s what I hear again and again from founders I work with. So the earlier you adopt these techniques, the more time and money you’ll save. And it’s not easy. It requires a lot of discipline. When I need to apply game thinking to my own projects, I need somebody else to like guide me and be my product manager. Cause it’s really hard. It really is like walking over hot coals. But the results, it dramatically accelerates your ability to find success and to build something people want. And if that’s the thing you care about the most, market truth, building something people want, this is a set of techniques that’s really designed to let you do that.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. And not to forget these techniques have been used in popular games, which are successful. So things like Rock Band, The Sims, many other games which, actually they use this in the industry, but it’s just specific to games, right?

Amy Jo Kim: No, but it’s not specific to games. These techniques were used at Netflix to help them solve a retention problem. They were used at eBay to help them design their core systems still in use today. They were used at the New York Times to help them design their paywall. So, it’s way beyond games.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Thanks for clarifying that.

[00:51:48] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks again, Amy, for your time. So, unfortunately, due to time we have to wrap up. But I have one last question in my show is to ask the guests to share what I call 3 technical leadership wisdom. But you can also think it like a 3 product leadership wisdom. So will there be any advice that you wanna impart for the listeners here, maybe taken from your journey or experience, Amy?

Amy Jo Kim: Figure out how to get the support you need to fail fast on the way to being right. That’s one. It can be hard, especially if you’re junior, to fail in front of other people. But see if you can find a way to do that. Maybe it’s a little under the radar.

And that leads me to my second piece of wisdom, which has to do with relationships. Always be on the lookout for colleagues, for collaborators, for stakeholders in your company who might have an incentive to want to get involved in your project and support you. Be very aware of who could be an ally. Always be on the lookout for allies. Look at the world not necessarily as a bunch of competition, although of course it often is. We compete for scarce resources. But be on the lookout for allies and collaborators. They will emerge from unexpected places. You know, not slimy networking, but just keep that, I’m interested in people. Let’s stay in touch. Let me know if I can be helpful for you. Energy going. And keep your eyes open for collaborators. They will fall in your lap and they will help you and they will be excited to help you. So keep that in mind as a positive thing to be on the lookout for.

And the third thing is don’t take anything personally. If somebody pisses you online, it’s more about them than you. Don’t take anything personally. Give people a lot of grace. I mean, don’t be an idiot. Don’t be fooled twice in three times. It’s good to be a shrewd judge of character, but most of life is not about you. So don’t take anything personally and just hold yourself to your own standard. If you behave with integrity, you will get a reputation for behaving with integrity and you will draw high integrity people to you. That’s part of why I have so much repeat business.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, that’s really beautiful. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, so to speak. So Amy, for people who want to connect with you, maybe continue this conversation, is there a place where they can reach out online?

Amy Jo Kim: Absolutely! Go to gamethinking.io. We have a contact form. That’s where our programs are. You can take our free innovators quiz and get your own MVP Canvas, one of our cool tools. You can also find out at gamethinking.io how to join our free community G school where I hang out more, you can DM me there. But all of it can be easily found in one url gamethinking.io.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I’ll make sure to put that in the show notes. So thanks again Amy for sharing your game thinking concept here in this episode. I really enjoy and learn a lot from you today. Thanks again for that.

Amy Jo Kim: My pleasure.

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