Product Portfolio Game

Antti Kirjavainen

Workshop: 90 minutes

Summary

Agile development has solved a lot of problems: how to develop software effectively both in terms of productivity and shorter time-to-market, how to plan development releases in an ever-changing business environment, and how to improve worker morale and visibility.

The prevailing concern for leaders in the industry is how to steer an agile development organization: “How to manage product portfolios and roadmaps or strategies in an effective way that takes advantage of the potential of agile?” Old ways of strategic planning are too weighty and rigid, causing conflicts with agile development.

In this session I will present a learning game I designed to demonstrate the problems of traditional product (or project) portfolio planning processes. We will also explore ways to solve this problem with the game. The solutions explored involve transparent product business model and customer descriptions, business goal-centred business value estimation and impact mapping.

More info on the Product Portfolio Game: https://learninggamedev.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/product-portfolio-planning-game-playtest-3

Short Bio

Antti Kirjavainen is an agile coach at Houston Inc., Antti helps clients such as The Nordea Bank as well as Houston’s own development teams and leaders to get results working together towards common goals. He has worked with software R&D since 1998 and with Agile since 2006. Antti has a wide range of interests: product development, lean-agile software development, game design, and designing organizations to support knowledge work better. Antti is also an executive committee member of Agile Finland association.