Agile 2008 Attendees Collaborate with Enthiosys to Create New Products
On Tuesday and Wednesday (Aug 5-6) at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto, hundreds of attendees joined Enthiosys, the Agile Product Management consulting company, in a real-time collaborative exercise to design a new product. These Agilists collaborated with Enthiosys to define, prioritize, schedule and price a new generation of “Internet Sunglasses”.
See YouTube and Flickr from the event.
This collaborative process incorporated customer-interaction techniques from Luke Hohmann’s book “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products through Collaborative Play” and other essential Agile Product Management techniques. During each half-day period, a different step in the product definition cycle was highlighted, giving attendees a taste of the Agile Product Management experience.
Following is a step-by-step summary of the process.
1. Brainstorming Features
Tuesday morning, attendees played Prune the Product Tree to brainstorm possible features for our Internet Sunglasses. Individually and in groups, participants invented parts of the imagined product, wrote them on apples, and posted them directly onto feature trees. Conference attendees proposed more than a hundred features including:
- GPS
- Prescription lenses
- Altimeter
- Unbreakable Frames and Unscratchable Lenses
- Voice Command
- Landmark Lessons (GPS city tour)
- Stock Ticker Stream
- “Find Nearby Friends”
- Darkness Controls
- Integrated Headphones
- Traffic Directions
- Streaming Music
- RSS Feed
- Scalp Massager
- Heads-Up Display
- Wind Blocks
- X-Ray Specs
The purpose of this exercise was to generate lots of interesting ideas – in fact, enough to create a massive backlog and overload our imagined development team.
2. Prioritizing the Backlog
Tuesday afternoon, throngs of Agilists came back to jointly prioritize our backlog by playing Buy A Feature. The game lets players collaboratively decide which features are most important by giving them limited funds to collaboratively purchase items on the backlog. Since players each get very little money, they have to negotiate with each other, explain their choices, and build consensus for winning features.
Negotiating energetically, Buy A Feature players pasted their pretend money directly onto a grid of available features. When the posted price for a feature was reached, it was “purchased” by the team. Throughout the afternoon, teams self-organized and ranked potential features they thought would make a great pair of Internet Sunglasses.
The feature purchased most often included prescription lenses, traffic directions, GPS, voice command and integrated headphones.
3. Building a Product Roadmap
Continuing our product journey, attendees came back Wednesday morning to create roadmaps. They joined our Internet Sunglasses product management team by choosing product segments – groups of consumers with a common set of needs and similar buying preferences. Segment suggestions included:
- Drivers, who wanted unbreakable frames and lenses, GPS, traffic updates and directions, voice command, streaming RSS, and finding nearby friends.
- Outdoor athletes, who were interested unbreakable frames and lenses, darkness controls, streaming music and wind blocks to keep their eyes from drying out.
- Vacationers, excited by GPS-driven audio tours of the cities they visit, plus voice command to keep their hands free for packages.
To our surprise, every single segment demanded prescription sunglasses so that they didn’t have to carry two pair of glasses.
We also looked at market rhythms from the viewpoint of the vendor. (“We need to have our product on the shelf by August if it needs to sell in the Q4 holiday season” and “Ski season starts in November.”) This let us match roadmap deliverables to the real world calendar.
4. Value Exchange and Business Model Framework
Finally, folks came back Wednesday afternoon for one last bit of collaboration – defining the pricing models for selected features. Using our new customer segments, Agilists were asked to assign a price and a pricing unit to selected features. (“I would charge $_ per _ because…”)
For instance, streaming music for outdoor athletes might be priced on a subscription basis ($5.99 per month) or subsidized with advertising (free but with commercial interruptions). Landmark lessons could be sold as one-time transactions (“download our walking tour of central Toronto for $8”) or monthly for heavy travelers.
The goal of the exercise was to highlight opportunities that software provides for mixed business models: charging flat fees for licenses or hardware, while adding services and subscriptions for value-added information. Interestingly, our outdoor athlete segment was mostly priced for one-time hardware costs, while automobile drivers were much more interested in information services.
We saw that some features were
- Purchased up-front, such as shatter-proof lenses, which customer “own” for the life of the sunglasses.
- Subscription-based, such as GPS and streaming music services. On average, our group decided that drivers would be willing to pay $15 per month for a bundle of GPS and streaming music services.
- Advertising-Based, such as local restaurant recommendations.
What We Learned
The overall experience demonstrated the power of Agile Product Management – using Agile tools for more than just prioritization and user stories. Of course, this was a simulation, without the constraints of real markets and real technologies… but we had fun and learned from each other. Agile 2008’s creative attendees let their collective imaginations run wild.
When consulting to our own customers, the Enthiosys team applies its deep expertise in Agile Product Management to help transition companies to Agile, inject live customer input, price for value and profitability, and build actionable roadmaps shared across the organization. This multi-day exercise gave Agile 2008 attendees a peek into the Enthiosys approach.
The two winners of our sunglasses drawing were Derek R. of Wichita KS and Andrew R. of Portland OR.
