Morning Ritual
Below is the latest version of the facilitation guide. Since it is online, it might evolve and enrich over time. Good luck in facilitating this serious game and wishing you all the playful learning!
The goal of this gamified activity is to help teams and people in a product role to show the versatility of story mapping, MVP and prioritization of solutions or features.
This is done through a metaphor everyone is very well known with. Your very own morning ritual.
Preparations
- Post-it notes or index cards
- Markers
- The cards describing a morning routine and/or locations where morning rituals could take place.
- Preferably some masking tape
Intro
You wake up do your things and go to work. Everybody does it and we all have our own ritual for it. Depending on the context your ritual might change a bit. By dissecting your own morning ritual you’ll find ways to slice your product or services in ways you never thought could be possible. Let’s explore!
Facilitation
Have all participants gather around your prepared area and ask them the question:
1. What activitivities did you perform from waking up till showing up at work today?
Ask everyone individually to describe what their morning looked like, from waking up to arriving at work. One activity per post-it. Also write roughly how many minutes it takes on each post-it.
2. Group the item by time or location
Bedroom
Bathroom
Kitchen/living
Other
Transport
OR
Waking up
Have breakfast
Wash
Dress up
Packing
Commute
You can choose the items yourself or let the group decide. Use the cards from the deck to organize the groups on top of the swimming lanes.
Now Debrief on what happened (See Debrief ‘This Morning’)
3. What happens to your morning ritual if you overslept?
Put the ‘Overslept’ card in the lower swimminglane and tell everyone to imagine they overslept. What differences would it make to your morning ritual? Ask participants to put the things they’ll still do in the ‘Overslept’ swimminglane. If it changes time they spend on something let them change it. Encourage them to split up an activity if they feel it’s necessary to do only one part of the activity.
Now Debrief on what happened (See Debrief ‘Overslept’)
4. What if you did not work today, kids/spouse are out the house have a job interview at 11.00. How kind of activities would you do then?
Put the ‘Job interview’ card in the upper swimminglane and tell everyone to imagine they have a job interview at 11.00 and the kids and spous are out the house. Which existing activities do expand in time and/or actions? What new activities would add? Or enrich? Instruct people to make changes to the upper swimminglane
Now Debrief on what happened (See Debrief ‘Job interview’)
Debrief
Debrief ‘This morning’
Could everyone put their activities in the some location or timeslot? What does it tell you that this hasn’t always the case? There are lots of ways to Rome. The same goes for customer processes. You could change things up based on context of your user, or be sure that there is consistency in the whole process or include a functionality where people can go back without losing flow or information.
Debrief ‘Overslept’
What is the reason you didn’t put all activities in the same column? Discuss ‘Must haves’ or actual ‘pains’ Jobs to be done.
Help the people make a MVP release based on the data.
What activities take you less time? How does this affect quality?
Which ones could you split up and which ones not? Sometimes it makes sense to split things up. Sometimes it doesn’t (only dressing up in your underwear and not the rest of your clothes isn’t really an option) What activities in your current product could you split up?
Debrief ‘Job interview’
What activities did you enrich? For what reason? This might provide some insight in gains and a look into quality aspects a client might value most.
What activities did you add? What value is behind this? These are the gains of a customer.
When do you include gains? Do you ever include gains?This technique might show you that having just several gains in there for fun or to gain an advantage over competitors might help in your first release as well. Discuss with the team which ones do not take so much effort and make a choice.
Variations
You might want to split up the group and have one group on time and the other ones on location.
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