I recently enrolled in OpenView Senior Adviser Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games ® class, where I discovered a totally new kind of primary market research.
Innovation Games are carefully designed exercises that use collaboration, visuals, physical props, and facilitation to produce feedback and resourceful insights from participants not generally obtained by other market research. The feedback and insights can assist in driving competitive positioning, product road map, market segmentation, packaging, and messaging.
Having beheld the games in action (at three expansion stage software corporations in the OpenView Venture Partners investment portfolio), seen some of the results, and joined in them myself, here are my important take-aways for product teams:
- While a few conventional market research tools are accessible (surveys, telephone interviews, on-site visits, focus groups, user conferences), some of them are too expensive for smaller organizations and they are all restricted in terms of what beneficial information they can acquire from their targets.
- The customer mind is complex and provides various data on the same topic depending on how it is retrieved. For example, ask a buyer the very same question five different times about his pain points, and he might give five entirely different answers, and not one may possibly point toward the important insights you require! This poses a predicament for product managers aiming to be client-centric and progressive all at once.
- Rather than restraining themselves to the usual market research, product managers will need to open their eyes to new means of acquiring the data they require from buyers and potential clients. Inventiveness needs to start out with the research approach.
- Product managers will need to take into account research methods that:
- Participants will wish to enter into and will delight in!
- Occupies the participant’s thoughts by way of senses and angles that conventional research does not!
- Doesn’t have to be quite pricey!
- Will create actionable data.
- Innovation Games has shown the following elements are beneficial in attaining insightful, actionable market research data: physical props (actual card board boxes, large poster paper, magazines, photographs, stickers, and many others), a safe, open, fun atmosphere for collaboration with other individuals, and scenarios asking people to imagine, prioritize, acquire, draw, and sell while providing them tools to express themselves.
So the next time you’re organizing a user conference and are getting ready to host another hour-long panel about your consumer pain points or feedback on your product, consider having them design the ideal product for themselves on an actual box, operate a mock auction of product features, and get creative!
Igor Altman is a Senior Associate at OpenView Venture Partners.
