An Innovation Game approach to bootstrap your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The upcoming Meetup is about discovering the characteristics / features of your Minimum Viable Product or Service. This time we will explore a method drawing on serious gaming, to find value and prioritise the features.

Many times, development teams are very excited about features they should add to their products/services, and a little less so when it comes to evaluating the resources they need to add them.

Giorgio (http://ch.linkedin.com/in/giorgiop5) and Vincenzo (http://www.linkedin.com/in/vincenzopallotta) help us uncover ways to develop more relevant products or services by introducing a customer-centric product innovation process.

Customer-centric innovation refers to various techniques we can employ to drive product and service innovations through interactions with customers.

The technique chosen for this Meetup is a game called Buy a Feature – selected from a toolbox called Innovation Games (http://innovationgames.com/).

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/3/0/2/c/event_213432332.jpeg

Participants take away 3 powerful insights:

How to create a list of your product’s features and how to price these features. A customer-centric technique that helps you prioritise the initial set of features for your Minimal Viable Product (MVP), through serious gaming. First hand and real-time observation about how a simple (but not simplistic) game can engage customers as a group and how this group can make a major contribution to validate your assumptions.
Why it is relevant to Lean Startup?

Designing the first version of a Minimal Viable Product is not easy. Typically, after having “gone out of the building” to interview customers, the startup has an understanding of the customer’s problem.

But, what about the solution? Since the solution is based on our work, we tend to see everything we have done - especially those features that required a considerable effort - as necessary to the solution.

However, this is only our perspective... which might well be different from the customer’s perspective.

With this game, we can bootstrap the product validation by involving potential customers from the very beginning. We're able to observe and check whether customers support our hypotheses about which features are most important.

Exceptional - number of participants limited!
Given the formal structure of these games, we’re limiting the number of participants to 40. Please be enthusiastic about signing up, even if the event is full.

If we have many people on the waiting list, we’ll organise a second Innovation Games Meetup later. People on the waiting list are earmarked for guaranteed participation.

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As usual, there’s informal networking as of 20h30 hours. A contribution of CHF 5 per person is kindly requested (for drinks and nibbles).

Looking forward to meeting up once again with all of you.

The Lean Startup Organising Team
Giorgio, Vincenzo, Jim, Doris