Mark Pincus, the guy who built Zynga, has this deceptively simple framework for product development. He calls it Proven, Better, New.

Every product should start with something proven, make one or two things meaningfully better, and add just a touch of something new. But most people do the opposite. They decide to be original everywhere.

Step one is starting with proven. Proven is the part of the product that users already understand without onboarding. A poker game that behaves like poker is proven. You don’t get extra points for changing those.

Step two is making something better. Better doesn’t need to be flashy. It just needs to matter. It has to be something where nine out of ten people say “yes, that’s better.” Cheaper counts. Faster counts. Fewer steps counts. More fun counts. When Pincus started Zynga Poker, most games made you download something before playing. Every extra click killed half the funnel. He removed the download. One obvious improvement. That one change made the product spread.

Only after that comes step three: new. New is fun. New is where your taste shows up. New is also where almost everything fails. Pincus solves this by assuming new will fail. He budgets for it. He limits new to maybe 20 percent of the product so that even if it flops, the 80 percent that is proven and better still stands. He made Zynga Poker social. Playing with real friends instead of random avatars was the new. It worked. But even if it hadn’t, you would still have had poker and you would still have had no download. The product would still have been useful.

Too many founders cling to new ideas out of ego. They want everything to be new because that feels more innovative. They don’t want to build something the feels like a cheap copycat.

Take Quibi. They tried to innovate on everything. Short-form video. Mobile-only. New content format. New viewing behavior. Nothing was proven. The whole thing collapsed.

There’s a second framework I like to pair with Proven, Better, New. It’s from Slava Akhmechet. He says every feature lives in one of three buckets: gamechanger, showstopper, distraction.

A gamechanger is the reason someone buys your product. A showstopper is something you must have so people don’t reject your product, but it won’t make them choose you. A distraction is everything else.

The pattern he’s seen is that good products have one to three true gamechangers, a bunch of showstoppers that keep you from losing, and almost no distractions.

The hard part in product development is not shipping more. It is telling the difference between something that makes people buy, something that just keeps you in the game, and something that only makes the team feel productive.