Innovation Games

Blog Post Disclaimer: Initial post is stream of thought and not edited for consumption.

I have spent the last couple of days in training called Innovation Games. As a Product Manager, I went into the class with high expectations associated with the word Innovation and low expectations that a class was going to teach me games that I could play with my customers to help me innovate my products.

Luke Hohmann, author of the book "Innovation Games, Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, " taught the class based on his book and exceeded my expectations. The class was a great combination of theory and practice.

Context:
As a Product Manager in Rackspace's Cloud Integration group, we build software that accelerates the development of our Cloud Products. So our customers are internal development groups. As you might imagine our internal development groups compete with each other on some level. To that end, internal prioritization is one of our challenges.

Learned Solution:
With what I learned in the class I now know enough to select one of the twelve innovation games to run with my customers.

Right off the bat, I am going to plan a "Buy a Feature" session for all three of my products. I am excited about what I am going to learn and equally excited about what my customers are going to learn about what each other want.

Context:
As a curious person, I was fascinated to learn about the three archetypes, they have discovered in analyzing the data acquired by running theses games.  I look forward to see what happens with Collaborators, Kingpins and Sharks. Are there more archetypes?