The context of my current client is that the director has just changed and wants to give a new direction to the department. He therefore launched a series of lunches with his collaborators to get to know them and obtain suggestions for improvement. In order to be able to prepare for this interview, I offered to lead a Product Box workshop to allow people on my set to build what they think could be the next version of this department. I had the opportunity to co-facilitate this workshop with Gilles Rosenbaum, agile coach at Good!. Here is a feedback.

What is the Product Box workshop?

There Product Box is a workshop drawn from game innovation whose initial goal is to identify the most exciting features of a product.

Participants are asked to imagine that they are going to sell their product at a fair or in a market. They are then invited to materialize it physically in the form of a box – a shoe box or an archive box generally – on which we will find the key marketing elements that they find relevant to put forward.

Material

In my case, here is the material made available to the participants:

• Archive boxes mounted upside down (to make the boxes neutral, without printing)
• A4 sheets of white and different colors
• scissors
• Different types of stickers
• Markers of different colors
• plain scotch
• painter's tape

Note: The idea here is to make the workshop fun and conducive to creativity. Be creative! 😉

In support during the workshop:

• An image of a cereal box (Chocapic in my case!)
• A list of items that usually appear on a box of this type (which I will describe below)
• A description of the structure of an elevator pitch (which I will also describe below)

Introduce the workshop

As always, this step is very important because it sets the frame.

I first wrote on a sheet of Paper Board:

What is your vision of X 2.0 / 3.0?

Sell it as a product!

Note: the use of version numbering came from a speech given by the new director a few weeks earlier. I found it relevant to reuse it directly.

The objective

Taking the example of a cereal box, it was time to present the objective of the workshop.

Your objective is to build your vision of X 2.0 / 3.0 in the form of a physical product that you will try to sell to other groups.

Note: The physical appearance of the product is important. Indeed, it is a way of concretizing an idea which, in the form of a loose leaf, does not have as much consistency.

The elements of the box

I then described some box elements (without being prescriptive):

• Front :
  • The product name
  • A picture
  • A slogan
  • Some points that motivate to buy the product

• On the back:
  • A more detailed description of the product

• On the coast :
  • An overview of product specifications

Note: The description of these elements makes it possible to give ideas in terms of form to the participants and to structure their production phase.

Format of the workshop

After much hesitation, we adopted the following format:

• 2 iterations
  • 20 mins of production
  • 10 minutes of feedback between teams.

Note: the iterative format allowed the teams to compare their ideas and have some time to develop their product

pitch elevator

For the 10-minute presentation and feedback phases, I specified that we would prefer the pitch elevator type presentation format. For those who don't know, I simply presented the following situation:

Imagine that you take the elevator with your new director and that you only have time to travel to present your product and highlight its qualities.

The exercise not being obvious as such, I shared the following elevator pitch structure:

For (customers targeted by the product)

Who (main needs)

[The Product] is (nature of the product)

Who (main benefits)

Unlike in (common practices, competitors)

[The Product] (main differentiating elements)

Note: as you will have understood, this is a way of helping teams to structure their ideas and their speeches effectively. Indeed, the objective is not to follow this formulation to the letter but not to forget these elements in the reflection and in the communication.

Finally, I invited people to self-organize to form balanced sub-groups. In my case, the 16 people formed 2 groups of 5 and a group of 6.

Iteration 1

Production (20′)

Let's go for a first iteration of 20 minutes. Despite a slightly chaotic start – the teams are not necessarily used to this kind of exercise – the focus is on the characteristics of the pitch elevator.

After about ten minutes, no team has begun to work on its box. I then briefly remind them that the presentation phase is done with the physical product and that the important thing here is not to have a completely finished product but to be able to obtain feedback: after all, we know that there is will have a second iteration! 😉

End of the iteration, first round of feedback.

Feedback (10′)

The animation of this phase is important to guarantee the timebox set at 10 minutes for 3 groups.

For each group, my attention is then focused on 3 aspects:

• Presentation of the box

I invite you to present to the other teams the outline of your product in their current version.

The choice of the first team is always special: silence reigns when we ask who wants to start. After a few minutes, people being used to the benevolent climate of this type of workshop, a team finally got started.

Note: it is important to establish a climate of benevolence in this type of workshop when a feedback mechanism is in play. It could have been relevant to display and present at the beginning of the session the rules of operation such as listening , respect, kindness…

My role here is to keep the presentations succinct but precise enough to be able to generate feedback.

To ensure that the presentation is complete, I always add these 2 words:

Something else ?

Then we go to the next step.

• Generating feedback from other teams

After the presentation of the box, I invite the other teams to give their feedback: it can be a feeling, a questioning, an advice... anything that could give areas for reflection and improvement.

During this first round of feedback, an interesting remark came up:

But what does it change compared to today?

Indeed, most of the values exposed already corresponded to those currently carried by the department. I first took the liberty of highlighting this remark before adding the fact that it was important to be more precise about the implementation of each of these values because for the same value, the representation of each can be very different!

I then gave a few lines of thought:

What are the behaviors implementing these values according to you?

What will make customers buy your product more than another?

How can you get them to buy into your vision? Make them dream?

To generate maximum feedback, I once again continued with:

Something else ?

• Trade facilitation

The main axis here is to ensure that the exchanges are as effective as possible, that is to say that they achieve the objective set: to allow the team having presented its box to improve during of the next iteration.

Note: To verify that the objective has been achieved, do not hesitate to check it. Don't forget that in this position of facilitator, we guarantee the framework, the process but are not directly concerned by the content. Instead of making assumptions, it is often easier to ask the question directly to the people concerned! 😉

It is therefore essential to observe and listen well in order to be able to intervene if the subject begins to slip or if we go into too many worthless details (with respect to the objective).

Note: This exercise is not always easy, especially when you feel that people really care about the subject. It is then necessary to find the right balance between letting people express themselves and letting them argue for hours. Just keep your goal in mind: to maintain the frame, which also takes time into account.

I then finish with my 2 favorite words before relaunching the next iteration. 😉

Reflection

As in the picture shown above, some teams failed to get out of their thinking model in time, requiring all of the Pitch Elevator criteria to be met before building their box. The result is that they didn't have much to present during the feedback phase. This is a good opportunity to introduce the notion of prototyping and validation of hypotheses step by step by comparing a sequential production mode to an iterative production mode.

Iteration 2

Production (20′)

The second iteration launched, we could already feel the teams much more concentrated. After this round of feedback, they have a better idea of where their product should go. It is quite surprising to see the commitment generated by the activity within the different groups: the ideas flow, the prototypes too.

During the iteration, I allow myself to pass in the teams by saying to them:

• What makes your product unique?
• What are the differentiating observable behaviors? (to make them more concrete)
• Remember to keep it as simple as possible and go to the essentials, the space of the box does not allow you to expand on lines and lines.
• How will you onboard customers with you?

The iteration ended giving way to the second round of feedback.

Feedback (10′)

This 2nd round of feedback was brilliantly facilitated by Gilles on the same pattern as before.

Debriefing

The debriefing of the workshop was very short knowing that there were only 5 minutes left. However, it is an unavoidable phase of great value: it allows participants to take a step back from the activity and allows the facilitators to obtain feedback in turn.

The main feedback was that the participants had been able to realize that despite the heterogeneity of the groups (different professions involved), ideas were found in all the boxes, which showed a certain coherence in their vision of the present and what required to do evolve according to them. In addition, the iteration format (even if there were only 2) was highly appreciated so that potential improvements could be implemented.

The feedback door quietly closed the workshop. 🙂

Some photos of the results

Conclusion

I had the pleasure of receiving this comment when leaving the workshop:

In any case, thank you very much Olivier for this very nice workshop and what came out of it. I was finally pleasantly surprised by this result, through a game workshop!

It sums up very well what I would like to share. The vision is a fundamental element whether in a development or transformation project. It helps to give the direction, the horizon towards which the group wishes to move. The Product Box workshop demonstrates the power of game innovation to “talk about serious subjects, without taking themselves too seriously” by providing participants with a fun setting in which they can exchange and debate effectively. Use and abuse it! :-p