Denise Brosseau - Building Well-Connected Leaders
Innovation Games: Put the fun back in market research!
A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to take part in a consultant's master class for Innovation Games, run by Luke Hohmann. It was a terrific two days, filled with interesting people, a lot of learning and the chance to play fun (but serious) games. Luke is a one-of-a-kind facilitator who genuinely likes people, is NOT afraid to NOT know what’s going to happen in the room and is ok with the possibility that things may not go as planned. He also had tons of great ideas and experiences to share and made great connections with and between the people who attended. Luke’s a little wacky, in all the best senses of the word, and is genuinely motivated to get real learning to happen by creating environments where people are having fun together.
Innovation Games are a series of about 12 games originally designed by Luke and his team over the last 8 years to bring companies together with their customers to hear from those customers what they want in a product. Since I come from a software product development background, it was readily apparent to me why these sorts of tools would be hugely valuable in software (See below for other ways they can be useful too!). Let me give you an example. The first thing you learn when developing software is that there are hundreds of features that you’d like to put in a product and only a limited amount of resources (time/money/product flexibility/user interface design possibilities) to make them happen. The dream of every product designer, developer and product manager is to get the best set of features and functionality possible for a particular type of customer at a price they are willing to pay and in a timeframe that beats your competitors.
But how do you know what your customers want? If you rely on the information from your tech support group, you are only hearing about the problems people are having with your product. If you rely on your developers, you are likely to get a product that is overly packed with features that you’re not sure anyone wants. If you rely on the managers, sometimes you focus more on what’s cheap and fast and less on what is good. And if you use traditional market research approaches, you can get a narrow set of requirements that can lack imagination or only serve the needs of the loudest users. That’s where Innovation Games comes in.
In the Buy A Feature game, for example, the product team lists out a set of potential features for the next version of the product and weights them by the cost (in money or time or degree of difficulty) that they would take to deliver. The company then brings groups of customers together to use the ‘buying’ power of a quantity of Monopoly® money to purchase the features that they most want in a new product. Individual customers can purchase inexpensive features on their own, using just their own allocation of funds, but they can also work together in a team of 5-8 and can negotiate to ‘buy’ the features they most want in the new product by pooling their funds together.
At the end of a two-hour game, the product team has a fairly comprehensive idea of what each team of customers prioritized as the most important features, and also has a richness of data from observing the customers' negotiations and seeing how much they were willing to ‘double-down’ on a single feature or how hard they worked to get others to join them in purchasing an ‘expensive’ feature. The observers – all company employees – now have a unique opportunity to visually experience their customer’s preferences and a great deal of rich data to process to more easily prioritize the feature options. Innovation Games offers this game as either an in-person or online game. Learn more.
In the Prune the Product Tree game, customers gather around a picture of a tree on the wall of a conference room. All of the possible features for the next version of the product are arrayed around the tree on leaves that they can pick up and move anywhere they wish. By joining together, they can shape the evolution of a product or service by grouping features, moving them closer or further from the trunk of the tree and adding new leaves as needed. Again, the observation of the process provides a lot of unique data that is simply not available from either a focus group or from quantitative research. It is much more difficult for one person to dominate an interactive group session like this and much easier for even the quietest customers to get buy-in for adding or moving a product feature 'leaf' on the tree.
I could spend a lot more time outlining some of the great games that we learned in the facilitation training, but let me instead open your mind to the many possibilities for Innovation Games beyond product development. I recently used one of the games, Speed Boat, to understand and improve team dynamics for a team I work with at PG&E. Next week I will use the online version of Buy A Feature to gather input from the Springboard community about how they'd prioritize potential topics for their upcoming reunion caucus event in June. Last week, I helped facilitate an Innovation Games gathering of Michigan b-school alumnae who are part of the venture community as they gathered to prioritize what 'features' should be included in the health care bill being voted on today in the House. (Note: every team agreed that the public option was one of their top priorities. Too bad they aren't our representatives in Congress!) The alumnae group felt this was a great way to engage their members in an interesting dialogue and let them get to know each other in a way that they couldn't through a simple cocktail gathering.
Innovation games can also be used by communities to overcome complex budget challenges, hear from conference attendees how to improve next year’s conference or even to gather thoughts for a book. Not only was I immediately able to put these games to work for my clients, as I am also working hard on my book on the Well-Connected Leader, I am in the midst of planning how to use the Innovation Games model to bring friends and colleagues together to help me brainstorm and prioritize what topics should be included. If you’re interested in participating, let me know!
Meanwhile, I wanted to let you know that Luke will be offering another consultants master class on May 6 and 7 in Mountain View. If you are a consultant interested in learning more about becoming a certified facilitator for Innovation Games, contact Luke Hohmann (lhohmann@enthiosys.com) or Tami Carter (tcarter@enthiosys.com). I highly recommend the training and the price is very reasonable, around ~$500 for the two days. (No, I am not getting a kick-back, I just think these games are just what companies and organizations need and want to see more consultants get trained in how to use them!) If you are not interested in the training, you can buy Luke’s book online at http://bit.ly/bYdLT4. All the details about all the games are included in the book.
If you have any questions about the program, I am also happy to answer them.
Posted by Denise Brosseau on 21st March, 2010 | Comments
Tags: well-connected leader, Innovation Games, Consultant Training, Luke Hohmann, Market Research, Buy a Feature, Prune the Product Tree There are no comments for this post Post a CommentHTML is not allowed in comments, http://... will be automatically linked.
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