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Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play

The toughest part of innovation? Accurately predicting what customers want, need, and will pay for. Even if you ask them, they often can’t explain what they want. Now, there’s a breakthrough solution: Innovation Games. Drawing on his software product strategy and product management consulting experience, Luke Hohmann has created twelve games that help you uncover your customers’ true, hidden needs and desires.

You’ll learn what each game will accomplish, why it works, and how to play it with customers. Then, Hohmann shows how to integrate the results into your product development processes, helping you focus your efforts, reduce your costs, accelerate time to market, and deliver the right solutions, right from the start.

  • Learn how your customers define success
  • Discover what customers don’t like about your offerings
  • Uncover unspoken needs and breakthrough opportunities
  • Understand where your offerings fit into your customers’ operations
  • Clarify exactly how and when customers will use your product or service
  • Deliver the right new features, and make better strategic decisions
  • Increase empathy for the customers’ experience within your organization
  • Improve the effectiveness of the sales and service organizations
  • Identify your most effective marketing messages and sellable features

Innovation Games will be indispensable for anyone who wants to drive more successful, customer-focused product development: product and R&D managers, CTOs and development leaders, marketers, and senior business executives alike.

About the Author(s)
Luke Hohmann

Luke is the Founder and CEO of FirstRoot, Inc. Our mission is to create the next generation of impact investors. Our unique go-to-market strategy supports all stakeholders as youth use participatory budgeting to invest real money in their schools. Youth learn the 5 C’s of modern education: creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and civics as they experience true agency and stewardship over their futures, learning through their own experiences how money really works. We want to get $1K into 1M schools globally and watch what happens when youth control $1B in capital. Previously a SAFe® Framework Contributor and Principal Consultant, Luke was the Founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc. (acquired by Scaled Agile, Inc.) where he worked with an extraordinary dev team to create the Weave, Strategy Engine, and Knowsy® decision agility platforms. The author of four books, numerous articles, and cited as an inventor on more than a dozen patents, Luke is an internationally recognized expert in Agile Software Development. Luke co-organized the first Agile conference in 2003, has served on the Board of the Agile Alliance, and in partnership with the Scrum Alliance produced the “Collaboration at Scale”, the world’s largest monthly webinar devoted to helping organizations with 10 or more Scrum teams in 2 or more locations scale agility. Luke is a highly sought-after speaker and has keynoted such conferences as the Agile Alliance conference, Agile Australia, Lean-Agile Scotland, Agile New Zealand, the Austrian Innovation Forum, the CXPA, and the SAFe Summit. Luke is the co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit that helps citizens, governments and nonprofit organizations collaboratively solve problems that are unsolvable without civic engagement. EVEF has been a leader in the Participatory Budgeting movement, helping citizens prioritize hundreds of millions of dollars through Budget Games. In partnership with The Kettering Foundation (www.kettering.org), Conteneo created Common Ground for Action, the first scalable platform for deliberative decision-making. A former United States National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion, Luke likes playing with his four kids, his wife’s cooking, and long runs in the Santa Cruz mountains. Luke’s an old-school Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Instead of building companies to flip, he builds companies that make the world better!

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