How to define an MVP in under 3 hours with Gamestorming

An experiment combining Lean Startup & Gamestorming

This was the question we asked ourselves when we planned an experimental gamestorming workshop. Our goal was to change the world of entrepreneurship from a on-man-band into a social collaboration, tapping into the collective ideas of a number of diverse skills and experience.

Using Lean Startup as framework a half-day #gamestorming workshop was planned to determine firstly what we all have in common and secondly to come up with a testable concept that we can potentially turn into a profitable business.

The Lean Startup is all about fast failure, or the ability to adapt a product or service as fast as possible based on actual data and measurements rather than mere perception.

The goal of the workshop was to get just enough information to enable a first validation of a new idea in the market. Basically, we wanted to explore whether we have enough in common at all; and whether the resulting idea is viable before investing any time in developing the concept.

With no idea of what will come out of the session, a bunch of strangers gathered, and here is a recap of our experience and the lessons learned.

The workshop was broken into 5 parts aiming to answer a few questions starting with:

After connecting on a personal level over coffee and introductions we started exploring what we had in common. Each person silently wrote possible topics they are interested in on sticky notes and posted them on the whiteboard with a brief explanation to the group.

The group was instructed to find someone else interested in a similar topic and form pairs.

The first surprise of the day was that everyone was mostly interested in one of the topics posted on the board, namely developing a mentoring app suitable for social and group entrepreneurs. Who would have imagined that a bunch of people with seemingly unrelated professions all had one thing in common?

We didn’t have time for a planned second round of ideation as the group suggested we give immediate feedback on the ideas, so we continued our discussion during the break over casual conversation and coffee, refining our idea.

The next question that popped up after we found common ground and defined it to an acceptable level of detail was:

After the break we did a quick retrospective. True to my agile value of responding to change over following a plan, I adapted the plan based on the feedback from participants. We skipped refining the product to come up with something more innovative and unique and immediately jumped into market analysis based on this rough outline of the concept.

On a grid each group mapped the potential users that might find such a product valuable, using income and usage as parameters to find the focus target market.

Each possible target group was mapped in one of the four quadrants based on their income levels and the probability of how frequently they would use the product.

Interestingly, neither of the groups selected the primary target market from the high income / high usage quadrant, which to me seemed to be the logical starting point to validate whether an idea is feasible or even wanted in the marketplace.

Each pair spent some time identifying the functions of the product and then mapping them according to how necessary it should be in the first iteration of a possible product.

The idea was to have a clearer understanding of what the product is going to look at and what to look for when analysing and observing users as part of the next phase of the experiment.

Each pair received homework, tasked to firstly do an initial competitor analysis to see what other apps are already available, and secondly to observe the chosen target market with the goal of testing the concept against real users.

Keep reading to find out what transpires in our next workshop and follow our successes and failures in our experiment.

If you’re interested in a bespoke gamestorming design to solve a specific problem, or looking for a facilitator, send karin.dames@hotmail.com a mail to see how I can help you.

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