Product Box …. worthy Agile Planning, Innovation Game

Product Box is one of the most useful agile games I have benefited from in recent times. This text shall help you understand what it is and how is it useful.

Understanding the Product Box

Every commodity that you buy from the market is wrapped in a box/cover. This box is the primary medium for the manufacturing company to market and convince you that their product is better than the competition placed alongside.

For example have a look at the following pic:

Product Box

The manufacturer is advertising various features of the milk such as :

• Original Organic Soya | Unsweetened Organic Soya
• Dairy Free
• Includes calcium, low in saturated fats
• Tastes good with tea coffee

In a nutshell
The product box provides limited print space, that the manufacturing company has to efficiently utilize to market the product.

What is the Product Box game?

1. Divide the participants into multiple teams.
2. Provide each team a blank chart paper wrapped box.
3. Arrange for stationary items like multicolored sketch pens, post-its, crayons, cartoon stickers etc.
4. Ask each team to efficiently utilize the box outer surface to sell/market the product they are currently developing (or planning to develop)
5. Time-box the product box creation/decoration activity (approx 20 mins – the lesser the time, the faster the brain imagines!!)
6. Once all product boxes are ready, one representative from each team should market the product to the audience(rest of the teams) by explaining all that is illustrated on the box.
7. Once each team is finished demonstrating its product box, ask all participants to vote for the best product box excluding their own product box.
8. The Product box with the maximum votes wins!!

Why play this game?

• The game helps in release planning a product. To create an attractive product box, the participants have to imagine hard as to what could be the set of features/USPs that your product would offer.
• If you are a product manager, playing this game with the team helps is gauging how much the team understands the product they are developing. The better the team understands the business value of the product, the comfortable they are in developing it and in coming up with valuable ideas for the same.
• Agile CSM/Product Owner training is a good place to play this game. Once the product box is ready, it can help in creating user stories for project simulations that are a part of the training.

Sample Product Boxes (image intentionally hazed)

Game Output