Innovation Games

Play innovative games with one’s team – unleash your creativity and your team’s creativity! Play, share, learn and have fun!

Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Product Games are utilized by Agile teams in prioritizing features to deliver value. Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games - http://innovationgames.com/ include the following:
• Product in a box
• Speedboat
• Motors & Anchors
• Buy a feature
• Prune a product tree
• Remember a feature

Example: product in a box
You are given an empty box and have to devise the following:
• Product name
• Tag line
• List of features
• Detailed description

Product Name: Agile 101 Workshop
Tagline: Agile for smart people
Agenda
• Teaching the mindset shift
• Terms jargon (sprint, iteration, retrospectives, continuous integration, refactoring, etc.)
• Sell the experience – learn from an example
• Exercise to practice agile
• Retrospective
• Prize draw!!!

How would one illustrate on a box the product of agile 101 workshop?
• Show picture of people in a release planning, iterations, sticky notes
• Have a drawing of 3 smiley faces connected with an arrow to value – illustrating happy collaborative people delivers value
• Draw diamonds with checkmarks on it leading to $ - illustrating delivering value leads to cash

Takeaways
• Team collaboration
• Team learns to think from the perspective of the end user/customer
• Live example – learning by doing - brings product to life in having to sell it on the box – why should someone buy my product over a competitor’s (can your customers clearly see, touch and feel the product’s value proposition)?
• Brings out the teams’ creativity – software development is an art and a science. Human side of software development
• Tools to start – exercises, supplies (index cards, sticky notes, etc)
• Had fun – happy customers + happy team