Beyond features: How to listen to your customers and learn what they really need
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, Luke Hohmann
Successful software products deliver a set of features your customers’ value and will pay for. To determine the correct priority and presentation of features, it’s important to understand the different behaviors and attitudes that exist in the audience for your product. Ethnographic field research is very valuable, yet can be expensive, time consuming and require skilled researchers. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to use collaborative play with customers to discover how they think and what they value, and use this intelligence effectively with your agile teams.
Tentative outline
05 minutes - Introduce speakers, get to know audience
20 minutes - Presentation: Introduce Innovation Games
45 minutes - Exercise: Play two games “spider web” and “start your day” (~20 min each)
20 minutes - Group synthesis: What did we learn about what people value and how they think?
About Innovation Games
Designed by Enthiosys, a leading provider of agile product management consulting services, Innovation Games are serious games that help you understand how your customers think and what they value. After I read the book “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play,” and started to practice the techniques, I realized the potential for new ways to engage with my clients in a more fun and collaborative way. I’m excited to offer this joint workshop to Agile 2009 so Luke and I can share our combined expertise with this group.
About the facilitators
Over the past 20 years, Lane has worked in marketing, training development, technical account management and product management roles at SSC, Microsoft, Mindscape and SenSage. As a Principal Designer at Cooper, she helped companies ranging from start-ups to large corporations create compelling design solutions for enterprise and consumer applications, websites and devices and is a popular teacher of CooperU courses. Lane believes that interaction design is a bridge between product management and development, and that user experience design informs and enhances Agile product development.
Luke Hohmann is the founder and CEO of Enthiosys. He is a recognized expert on agile product management of software products and a former senior software product manager at four companies. He is also the author of three books and numerous articles on software product management. Luke is a frequent speaker at software and other industry events.
- Understand what Innovation Games are and how they are used
- Facilitate meaningful conversations with groups of customers
- Understand how to get to the real needs behind feature requests
- Communicate knowledge of customer thought patterns and values to agile teams
- Have fun with other conference participants