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Workshop Game: Focus Finder

3 minutes read

This game is part of the custom workshop I create and facilitate for a product team when I first join the project.

I previously introduced a game called Goal Rush. The purpose of that game was to generate as many user goals as possible. Now, we can use the results of Goal Rush as a start to this next game.

The purpose of today's workshop game is to prioritise the ideas and narrow down the big list to just five you’ll explore further. The final list of five will serve as the input for a next game.

The game is called Focus Finder.

Here's how you play it.

  • Time needed: 5 minutes
  • Participants: 4 - 20
  • Materials: Sticky dots
  • Prep work: None

The only requirement is a list of ideas from the previous game. Then, you, or the facilitator, can simply introduce the game by saying:

We’re going to play a game called Focus Finder. The purpose of this game is to prioritise the ideas from our previous game and converge upon the five most important ones. We’re playing this game because we came up with a lot of ideas and we want to have a short list of things we can focus on next. We’re going to use the results of this game as input for the next one. Here’s how you play.

And then start explaining the steps of the game:

  1. Each one of you will have five sticky dots.
  2. Without talking, look at the board with all the ideas and vote on the one or ones that you think are the most important for our users. You can vote by sticking one or more of your voting dots on the idea.
  3. You can vote for your idea or someone else’s.
  4. One dot equals one vote. You can stick one, two or all the dots on one idea, just as long as you use all your dots.
  5. You will have 5 minutes to do this.

There are only two rules to this game:

  • No talking throughout the game. The silence will help everyone work without debate.
  • Five dots per person.

Now, set a timer for 5 minutes and instruct everyone to get to work.

At the end, you, or the facilitator, will take a few minutes to re-arrange the board to have the ideas with the most dots at the top.

If you get in a situation where you have to pick between one or more ideas because they have the same number of votes, just pick one of them. You can always come back to the list you now created later in the workshop.

Focus Finder is a simple and effective way to look at a lot of user goals and prioritise them in a short amount of time, while giving everyone on your product team a voice.

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