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Lead
Gaming for Product Development
Serious gaming can help solve some of the complex problems
related to product development like understanding customer requirements, writes
Varun Aggarwal
 One
of the biggest challenges in software product development is to understand customer
requirements. Though it may sound simple the fact is that most customers are
not aware themselves as to what they want from a product—this entails re-engineering,
re-designing and re-architecting the entire product to ensure that it meets
the customer’s ‘actual’ requirements. Think about the time and
money that is wasted in this entire process.
Product development companies have been looking out for tools to simplify this
process of determining product requirements and what came to their rescue were
some simple concepts derived from gaming.
According to Forrester Research, serious gaming provides an alternate way to
collect and analyze product requirements. An increasing number of companies
are using serious games to inform product decisions. At the same time, a small
number of serious gaming vendors have emerged, providing both training and tools.
Serious games can circumvent many of the traditional problems with figuring
out product requirements, including collecting sufficient information from customers,
partners, and internal stakeholders to make product decisions. Not only are
the games relatively lightweight exercises, but they also offer a lighter touch
to resolve many debates over product decisions.
In 2007, Luke Hohman, Founder and CEO, Enthiosys, published ‘Innovation
Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play’, a book
outlining a series of games that product planners or managers could leverage
to understand customer needs, requirements, product use, and what they want
going forward. One of those games—Buy a Feature—was released as an
online application in 2008. Designed to understand customer needs and requirements,
the game is simple enough: Customers or internal teams receive some money and
a list of potential features for a product, and they must negotiate among themselves
to purchase the features that they collectively deem important.
The gaming philosophy
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 "Customers
do not have a concise view of what they really want. Moreover,
this becomes even more complex when you have to get inputs
from thousands of customers and pull off this into the requirements
part or manage the requirements part in a certain way. This
is where we felt we could use some of the techniques or methodologies,
which are projected across in the Innovation Games"
- Manish Rathi
Head - Delivery Management, Version 1.0/ New Venture Services, GlobalLogic
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In the complex-systems model, market research has a qualitative
bias because each customer constitutes a market reality unto itself. For example,
the commercial airline businesses at Airbus and Boeing have perhaps two hundred
or so primary customers worldwide to consider. Statistically averaging insights
across such a modest customer population makes no sense. Instead, you want to
delve deeply into the specific circumstances of each account, seeking out unique
patterns, not mathematical correlations. This is where war stories and hypothetical
scenarios, even just the occasional apt metaphor, can prove so insightful.
Game playing provides a relaxed, less rigid environment and
increases creativity in such scenarios. It leverages research from cognitive
psychology and organizational behavior. The games utilize verbal, written, visual
and non-verbal forms of communication thereby providing greater volumes of information.
Some games provide wonderful player artwork, which you can retain and share
with others. The games have many uses, including strategic planning, sales effectiveness,
product road mapping and customer relationship building.
Success galore
Innovation Games are fun ways to collaborate with customers
and understand their needs better. Companies have used them to improve thinking
about holistic design, discover new business opportunities, drive strategy and
product road map decisions, improve the effectiveness of sales and service organizations,
fine tune marketing messages, and create more intimate, durable relationships
with your customers. Here is how some companies have used Innovation Games.
SAP has used multiple games from Innovation Games over the past several years
to manage the evolution of its technical platform, typically in a multi-step
process. In the first step, it uses in-person, open-ended games such as Spider
Web and Prune the Product Tree to identify new opportunities and potential changes
to its platform. They it uses the online prioritization Buy a Feature to leverage
its global community to rank these ideas.
Another instance is of VeriSign’s Global Customer Support
leadership team that wanted to include its entire worldwide employee organization
in the prioritization of a project portfolio backlog consisting of 46 potential
projects. Unfortunately, traditional telepresence or survey-based market research
did not provide for the kind of collaboration desired by the VeriSign leadership
team. To resolve the problem, Enthiosys worked with the VeriSign team to leverage
the online version of Buy a Feature to create a multi-round tournament structure
that enabled the Global Customer Support (GCS) organization to collaborate and
prioritize the 46 candidate projects into the top seven projects. These results
were subsequently organized into a roadmap through the use of the Innovation
Game Prune the Product Tree and Enthiosys’ agile product and portfolio
road mapping processes.
| Speed
Boat |
Draw a boat on a whiteboard or sheet
of butcher paper. You would like the boat to move fast. Unfortunately, the
boat has a few anchors holding it back. The boat is your system, and the
features that your customers do not like are its anchors. Customers write
what they do not like on an anchor. They can also estimate how much faster
the boat would go when that anchor was cut. Estimates of speed are really
estimates of pain. When customers are finished posting their anchors, review
each one, carefully confirming your understanding of what they want to see
changed in the system. |
| Product
Box |
Ask your customers to imagine that they
are selling your product at a tradeshow, retail outlet, or public market.
Give them a few cardboard boxes and ask them to design a product box that
they would buy. The box should have the key marketing slogans that they
find interesting. When finished, pretend that you are a skeptical prospect
and ask your customer to use their box to sell your product back to you. |
| Spider
Web |
Put the name of your product or service
in the center of a circle. Ask your customers to draw other products and
services that they think are related to your product. As they draw these
products and services, ask them to tell you when, how, and why these are
used. Ask them to draw lines between the different products and services.
Encourage them to use different colors, weights, or styles to capture important
relationships (e.g., you can use a thicker line or a different color pen
to draw extra important relationships). The Spider Web game works well with
the Start Your Day game: as your customer reviews when and where they use
your offering, you can also capture the various relationships that exist
between the different products and services that they use throughout the
day. |
| Show
and Tell |
Ask your customers to bring examples
of artifacts created or modified by your product or service. Ask them to
tell you why these artifacts are important, and when and how they are used.
For example, if your product is a software system to manage invoices, ask
them to show you the invoices, reports, or spreadsheets that they have created
through the use of your product.
Pay careful attention to anything that surprises you - artifacts you expected
them to create or modify that they have ignored, artifacts that are not
used, or artifacts used in unexpected ways. What do these tell you? |
Now in India
GlobalLogic and Enthiosys have collaborated to offer technology firms full product
development lifecycle services including customer need analysis, software development
and support, business model design and strategic roadmaps. The partnership combines
GlobalLogic’s award-winning expertise in distributed Agile development
with Enthiosys’ extensive knowledge of Agile product management and training.
Their integrated services will enable both early stage and established companies
to accelerate their product development cycles to bring innovative software
products to market more quickly.
Talking about the need for incorporating Enthiosys’ Innovation Gaming concepts
into GlobalLogic, Manish Rathi, Head - Delivery Management, Version 1.0/ New
Venture Services, GlobalLogic, explained, “Our key business is helping
our customers evolve and build products. The process starts from collecting
requirements, managing requirements, putting up a plan, building a product,
developing, testing, rolling it out etc. Many different processes have evolved
and there are many different things out there. We were always looking for newer
techniques to really help us understand our customer requirements and their
end users’ requirements in a much better way.”
“Customers do not have a concise view of what they really want. Moreover,
this becomes even more complex when you have to get inputs from thousands of
customers and pull off this into the requirements part or manage the requirements
part in a certain way. This is where we felt we could use some of the techniques
or methodologies, which are projected across in the Innovation Games from Enthiosys
would be valuable for our customers to understand their customers’ needs,”
he added.
GlobalLogic is working with Enthiosys to come up with online Innovation Games,
enabling thousands of customers to play the game simultaneously. They are also
helping their customers fully understand these games and are working on building
new games to help them serve better. Many Indian customers including Makemytrip.com
are already showing interest in Innovation Gaming.
varun.aggarwal@expressindia.com
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