In corporate innovation one of the major biases is the bias for complexity. When innovators aim to carve a niche for themselves, there’s a natural drift towards the uncharted, the novel, and the intricate. This is often fueled by a desire to stand out, to justify hefty funding, and project an aura of strong originality. Performance systems often encourage this behavior as well, making the bias even stronger.

However, history has shown that the most revolutionary ideas often spring from refining what already works, making it faster, more efficient, or of superior quality. But focusing on such a challenge for innovation teams can be a tough truth to accept. It contrasts starkly with the glorified perception of what constitutes ‘true’ innovation in popularized stories.

I learned this lesson repeatedly the hard way. Take my experience at Zynga, for instance where I led a team that developed PokerBlitz in 2010. PokerBlitz was a unique blend of slots and poker, catered to those unfamiliar with Poker. While the process of creating such a new concept was invigorating and the result was genuinely fresh, the social game failed to gain mass traction.

I distinctly recall as PokerBlitz entered alpha testing that a top game producer at Zynga shared feedback that we should turn this game into a conventional slots game. This was well prior to mass market social casino slots games being available in the market. Slots our team thought? That just sounds so boring…who would want to play that? How is that innovative? Figuring out how to teach people Poker just felt way more exciting and we had research suggesting it was a gap in the Poker market.

Well as it turned out, Social Slots became a multi billion dollar industry and PokerBlitz did not achieve the scale we hoped. PokerBlitz was just too different for users whereas slots was easy for users to grasp. And this ease translated into high engagement & retention.

Several trailblazing startups have echoed this core lesson: perfecting an existing concept can often be vastly more impactful than introducing a brand new unfamiliar concept to market. Simplicity often wins.

As we work with founders on their visions at StartupGrowthSecrets this bias towards complexity is one of the key biases we seek to address. The art of keeping it simple is a key lesson all product teams can embrace in their efforts to bring more amazing products to market.