Product Box - A super worthy agile planning game

Product Box 

It is one of the most powerful and useful agile game in recent years that many agile teams have benefited from. This post shall help to understand what it is and how is it useful.

Every commodity that we buy from the market is wrapped in a box or a cover. The box is the primary medium for the manufacturing companies to market and convince customers that their product is better than the competition placed alongside.

Look at the below picture, the product company has effectively displayed their significant product details in limited print space.

The product box provides limited print space, that the manufacturing company has to efficiently utilize to showcase their best features to market the product.

How to play 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 multicoloured 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!!

Benefits of playing product box 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.