Number of Players
5 – 8

Duration of Play
1 hour

How to Play
1. Start by giving your players sticky notes and pens. On a large poster or white board, draw four concentric circles and label them as follows:

• Innermost: The product (ex. Pest Control Software)
• 2nd: System – direct stakeholders (ex. Manager)
• 3rd: Containing system – stakeholders of the system, even if they don’t directly interact with it (ex. Service technician)
• 4th: Wider Environment – stakeholders outside of the environment (ex. Suppliers, customers)

2. Work as a team to identify people that belong in each area. This requires you to think outside the box (or shall we say circle?), as each user persona will be connected to many others within the ecosystem.

Strategy
For further organization, you can draw arrows between personas to identify who communicates with whom; doing so will reveal the tangle of relationships originating from the system and bring attention to distant customers who use the output of the product.

Play Customer-Centric Online

You can instantly play Customer-Centric online with as many members as you would like! Clicking on the image above will start an “instant play” game at innovationgames.com; simply email the game link to your team to invite them to play. In the game, the image to the right will be used as the “game board.” As with the in-person version, the chart organizes the various people who are impacted by your product. In the upper left corner, you will see a note card icon and people icons. Begin by dragging the notecard to the center of the chart and indicating the product you are focusing on. Then, work as a team to drag the people icons to the circles and describe who they represent.

Players can edit the placement and description of each icon, which everyone can view in real time. Use the integrated chat facility and communicate with your players throughout the game to get a better understanding of each move. After the game, the results will be organized in a spread sheet to maximize the benefits of the game.

Key Points
One reason products fail is because teams do not solve the problems that are important to the right users. These personas are not always obvious, as they may be associated with the product through indirect connections. With Customer-Centric, you can identify the vast web of people your product impacts and explore the complex butterfly effect; doing so reveals which stakeholders are most important and what your product requirements are.