oobeya group

Join Luke Hohmann and Lowell Lindstrom for our next Innovation Games® Practitioner course. 

Course Description

Modern product development practices, especially those that focus on innovative products and services, place great emphasis on having development teams work directly with customers. This is good news, for the foundation of innovation is a genuine understanding of your customers, and then using this understanding to create more effective ways of solving their problems.

This two-day, interactive course, based on the material in Luke Hohmann's book, tackles the challenge of developing customer understanding by providing you with a fresh perspective on how to use a variety of games with your customers to develop the understanding that forms the foundation of innovation. You’ll find that if you use them, you’ll come to understand what your customers really want. You’ll have fun doing it. Perhaps more importantly, they’ll have fun doing it. Armed with this understanding, you’ll be able to create the breakthrough, innovative products that are the foundation of lasting success.

This course covers in-person and online games and includes sections on facilitation and presentation skills.

Target Audience

• Product managers
• Marketing managers 
• Software engineers 
• Market research professionals

Benefits

Upon completing this course, participants will be able to use Innovation Games® in new product development and ongoing product development processes to collaboratively identify, shape and prioritize breakthrough products and services.

Content Outline

• Discussion of Innovation Games and Market Research
• High-level planning, playing and post-processing Innovation Games
• Detailed planning, playing and post-processing the results of several case studies that enable participants to experience all phases of Innovation Games
• Review and shared discussion; helping participants plan their adoption of these techniques
• Facilitation and presentation skills

Prerequisites

Although not strictly required, it is helpful if participants read the book Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play before the course.

Materials

Course Presentation
A variety of handouts used to stimulate thinking and apply the materials
Case studies

Instructors

Luke Hohmann, CEO and founder of The Innovation Games Company, is the inventor of Innovation Games® and a recognized expert on the use of serious games to solve complex business problems. Luke is currently a member of the Agile Alliance and has been involved in the agile community for more than a decade. He is also a senior advisor to OpenView Venture Partners.  Luke has been a guest lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, and he has written three books and numerous articles on software product management. He is also a member of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the IEEE. Luke graduated magna cum laude with a B.S.E. in computer engineering and an M.S.E. in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan. In addition to data structures and artificial intelligence, he studied cognitive psychology and organizational behavior.

Lowell Lindstrom has been involved in developing and deploying software products for 25 years and is among the early pioneers in Agile Software Development. In 1999, while VP at Object Mentor, he worked with Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries and Martin Fowler to develop the ultimate Agile learning experience, XP Immersion™. Lowell also developed the first commercially available course on the business practices of Agile Software Development.  Lowell was the organizing chair of the first North American conference on Agile Software Development (XP/Agile Universe) in 2001, and program chair in 2004, where he was instrumental in unifying the then two leading Agile conferences. He currently serves as the Business Theme Program Chair for Agile 2010. He is a co-founder and former director of the Agile Project Leadership Network, and served as interim managing director of the Scrum Alliance in late 2009/early 2010.  In 2005, Lowell founded The Oobeya Group, which helps organizations successfully spread the successful use of agile techniques to all teams and functional areas.