Cooper Journal: “Cooper Hosts Innovation Games Class!”
I was intrigued by the Enthiosys display at the Agile 2008 conference. Every time I passed by, the booth was filled with folks filling out colorful stickies and pasting them on posters containing grids and trees. Once I overheard a group of people engaged in passionate discussion about the relative benefits of different kinds of sunglasses. I asked what was going on, and learned that this was an Innovation Game called “Buy a Feature.”
Because I am somewhat skeptical about feature-collection as a product design mechanism, I asked Rich Mironov to explain this to me. Did he really believe that you could ask people what features should be in a product and use that information with any confidence? Rich explained that you didn’t listen just to what people said they wanted, you need to encourage discussion about why those features would be valuable, and how they would be used if they were available. At last, I suspected I’d found an ally in the product management world who understood that you needed to get behind feature requests to the human needs those features serve.
01 Feb 2009 | Source: Cooper Journal
