Innovation games: Buy a Feature

May 19, 2007 by Artem

Innovation games are a special type of activities designed for embracing the innovation by helping people to collaborate and discuss in a form of playing a game. These games are a way more useful and more interesting, than any traditional requirement workshop based on reviewing the requirement document proposal. Innovation games are one very clear example of applying the Individuals and interactions over processes and tools principle. Buy a Feature game explained in detail in the Luke Hohmann's book* is one of the most frequently used in the course of agile software development whenever there is a need to prioritize a reasonable amount of not very well understood features.

The Rules

In the beginning of the game the team or product manager presents a list of all the features of interest with the price tags, where price means the cost of implementing the feature in whichever units. Agile teams typically use the size estimates in story points or ideal engineering days. The units used are not important, the only important thing is the approximate relation between the feature costs, so that it was clear that feature with the price tag of 100 is a way more difficult, than a feature that costs 10.

Then all the participants, which ideally include team members, marketing, sales and real customers, are given some virtual dollars that they can spend on buying the features they like. At this point there are some variations in the game. On my Scrum Master course, the whole group was given 100 "ping-pong balls" that we had to collaboratively spend on features. Luke Hohmann likes not to force the collaboration explicitly, but to give people quite limited amount of money so that participants had to ask a partner for buying an expensive feature together. Joel Spolsky vice versa prefers to give people a freedom to buy half- or double-features if they like.

Priorities

Whatever the concrete method is, in the end a group of people form a collective and quantified opinion on the feature priorities, on what is really important to them, what is nice to have and what they could live without. This method works well, because it implicitly forces the participants, who should always include your customers, to leave the "we want it all" attitude and discuss the actual product priorities.

Links

Book Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play by Luke Hohmann*

Game description on the Innovation Games website.

A similar method was used when deciding on the priorities of the highly successful Microsoft Excel 5 features. As Joel Spolsky says "it only took a couple of hours even with a couple of dozen people in a conference room. The cool thing was that the roughly 50% of the features that we didn't have time to do were really stupid features, and Excel was better because it didn't have them".

One report on seeing how Luke Hohmann the Innovation Games book author was facilitating this game.

Small forum on applying the Buy a Feature game. There are some interesting reports and discussions on which way the game works best in particular environment.

Your Experience

Did you ever use some variation of Buy a feature game? How well did it work in your environment? What did you particularly like and dislike?

*If you buy the book after clicking links in this post, I'll get a dollar or so. Here is the non-affiliated link to the book if you don't like the idea of a blogger earning money with the reviewed product.

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