Data vs. Creativity Balance

Siqi Chen shares insights about the balance between data-driven approaches and creativity in business, particularly in gaming. He draws from his experience at Zynga, where data analytics were paramount, but acknowledges that different environments require different approaches.

• At Zynga, data analytics were extremely sophisticated:

  • They had "PM on call" who would daily analyze day-over-day changes
  • They would segment data to identify anomalies (e.g., "50% drop in Mexico for Farmville")
  • They could pinpoint specific issues like "a typo bug in the drop rate of this particular treasure"

• The environment determines whether data or creativity matters more:

  • "If it's a data friendly environment like Facebook... then data is all that matters"
  • "Facebook platform is where virality lets you grow from zero to a billion"
  • This approach "didn't translate to the mobile industry"
  • "Mobile was less about virality, it was just difficult to do distribution"

• When distribution is challenging, creativity becomes more important:

  • "If it's hard to get early distribution then scale makes data more important"
  • "If it's quite difficult to get early distribution then you want to be creative and innovative"
  • "Supercell had such a creative advantage because they actually built very fun new games"

• Game mechanics at Zynga were highly optimized:

  • They invented the "crew" mechanic where players needed 20 unique people to help unlock features
  • This increased distribution by forcing players to engage with more people
  • "It's rarely something like huge but it's all of the details added together that makes the difference"

• The culture was intense and metrics-focused:

  • "We were working like eighty ninety a hundred hours a week at zynga and that was kinda the norm"
  • They had sophisticated real-time metrics tracking systems
  • Even small changes were analyzed for their impact on key metrics