The Customer Speedboat Challenge

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."  -- Plato

It's common knowledge that understanding customers' articulated and unarticulated needs is a critical piece of the innovation process.  Gaining that wisdom, however, is much easier said than done.  It's easy to be overwhelmed as we hear and read volumes about ethnography, lead users, customer archetypes and other processes for gaining customer insight.

Enter Luke Hohmann, an inventor, author and software developer, who has developed a set of "innovation games" to help people play their way to deeper customer understanding.  Here's an example:

Speed BoatSM

Goal: Identify what customers don't like about your system

Activity: Draw a boat on a whiteboard or sheet of butcher paper.  You'd like the boat to really move fast. Unfortunately, the boat has a few anchors holding it back. The boat is your system, and the
features that your customers don't like are its anchors.

Customers write what they don't like on an anchor. They can also estimate how much faster the boat would go when that anchor was cut.  Estimates of speed are really estimates of pain. When customers are finished posting their anchors, review each one, carefully confirming your understanding of what they want to see changed in the system.

Materials: Butcher paper, pens, 5x8 cards to capture what customers don't like.

(For an example of how this was used with an actual client, read the story here.)

The Challenge:

There are many games available.  Pick one that appeals to you and use it with one or more customers (internal or external) and see what happens.  Then let us know which game you picked and how it worked.  We'll then share your experiences.  Because this might take a while, we'll keep this challenge open till February 14th.