BUY A FEATURE 

(game)

Brief description

Create a list of potential features and provide each with a price. Just like for a real product, the price can be based on development costs, customer value, or something else. Although the price can be the actual cost you intend to charge for the feature, this is not required. Customers buy features that they want in the next release of your product using play money you give them. Make certain that some features are priced high enough that no one customer can buy them. Encourage customers to pool their money to buy especially important and/or expensive features. This will help motivate negotiations between customers as to which features are most important.

Preparing

  • Group customers by similar operating characteristics instead of traditional approaches to market segmentation.
  • List the features that will be available for sale; too few would not provide interesting discussions, too many confuse customers. A good list is between 14 and 30 features.
  • Create a description in each feature include a meaningful label, short description, and enumeration of benefits.
  • Price your products; value-based pricing is always appropriate (relative/absolute value they give to customers).
  • Price features to maximize customer interaction and negotiation among customers.
  • Consider how much money to distribute; the total amount of money for all people involved should allow them to purchase between 1/3 and 2/3 of the available features.
  • For b2b products/services, consider how many people represent a single customer.
  • Prepare the money (for customers) and change money (for the facilitator).
  • Prepare the feature retailer role, responsible for managing the selling of features to attendees.

Playing

  • Consider between 4 to 7 customers in a group.
  • Introduce the game.
  • The feature retailer should be able to fully explain each feature and should not try to motivate customers to buy certain feature.
  • The feature retailer can keep track of which customer purchase what and record observations about the interactions among participants.
  • Participants may ask to return a feature when negotiations become complex.
  • Give customers a tracking table so it will be easier for them to keep track.

Processing Results

  • Merge the purchase features into a single list and sort them based on how many groups of customers purchase the feature.
  • The features purchased by more than one group of customers should receive the highest consideration for inclusion to your product.
  • Correlate purchase with observations about the interactions with customers; they can provide insights into messages for key segments.

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