Product managers need special methods and techniques for determining priorities and getting great business results. There are dozens of popular methodologies from gaming to the most complicated, quantitative and qualitative, for internal and external purposes.
Here’s one of the popular methods - Speed Boat.
Gaming technique “Speed boat”
This gaming method focuses on the reverse aspect of prioritizing – on identifying the least-priority product features.
If you ask people to tell you about drawbacks and complaints about the product, you may be surprised and upset. This will give a large amount of uncontrolled feedback.
If instead, you ask to talk about the possible optimization of the product in a positive way, you can get really important feedback. This is the main key for this game.
Here’s how it happens:
Draw a large boat. This is the boat, which is set to go very fast. Unfortunately, it is held by several anchors. The boat is your product; the anchors are features that have disappointed the customers.
Ask customers to tag features that do not suit them and assess how much faster the boat can move without such anchors.
Each anchor and speed rating will give you a measure of “pain”. You can work on its improvement later.
Therefore, the game visualization method considers a group approach and suggests the possibility of “sharing their complaints”.
