Stefan
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The term Gamification and its application in software development has had a roller coaster history after being hyped in the early 2010’s, and then pronounced near-dead around 2015. The rich and interesting history isn’t shy of ups and downs, but it never lacks the evidence of its potential when applied right.
Examples of big wins for applied Gamification in products span across many industries (banking, real estate, airlines), and have also been especially pronounced in education. Mike is also in favor of swapping the term ‘gamification’ – largely due to the stigma it incurred through 2015 – and instead talk about the psychology of reward, which are the underlying powers which make gamification a transformative force for product experiences.
Start small to grow big. ~ Mike Hyzy
In his recent book, co-author Mike Hyzy, together with Bret Wardle, takes the concept and connects it to software product design.
The book is called Gamification for Product Excellence, and launched this October. 🚀
On a misty Friday last week in Chicago I met with Mike to talk about Product Management, his new book, and about Chicago’s vibrant and up-and-coming meatpacking district. We met at the local Google office, which I happened to visit for a manager offsite earlier that week.
To make Gamification a success you have to apply a strategic approach to understanding your goals. There is no shortcut to success, and no shortcut to deeply understanding what problem you are trying to achieve. Once you know that, you can investigate, systematically, whether or not Gamification is a path to increase success for the experience you are going to provide to your users.
The first step is to understand your goal and work backwards from there how Gamification can help and support those goals. I started with a naive perspective, applying gamification mostly to games (mostly due to my time at Stadia at Google, shut down last year by Google). A perspective Mike quickly helped me to expand. Gamification has helped use-cases, industries, or application categories which aren’t classically looked at as ‘games’. One example he gave was HR, and the associated needs for HR to train up workforce. Gamifying the training for a highly skilled set of workers leveraging AI-based training in a virtual environment, leveraging gamified experiences is an incredibly powerful concept.
This example also ties into the work I do at Google: to equip the technical Google workforce with the skills needed to succeed in their job, in an ever changing technological environment. Development environments, coding languages, proprietary code framework (bundles of functions making coding faster).
Mike shows conclusively how the concept of Gamification can be combined with various business goals to help drive them forward. And the results are not simple ‘layers’, but more ‘multipliers’ of existing business processes. And the results from various case studies prove him right.
The book also covers how data from Gamification can feed back into the creation process of excellent gamified product experiences. There is a whole chapter on it in the book, which goes into the details of how to better instrument experiences from a product point of view, creating actionable insights to further optimize your user experience. Mike is a big fan of the Google Analytics tool, the free web analytics tool which helps millions of websites generate actionable insights.
One of the most magical moments of our chat was when Mike told me how he works with companies to turn the benefits of Gamification toward the product development process itself. 🤯
Leveraging concepts such as levels, leaders, or ‘bossfights’ toward your sprints, tasks, and velocity metrics can really keep your team motivated during times where things are going a little tougher than normal. Fascinating. Something actionable for every product manager. Give it a theme, too. I look at dashboards, and they can be boring quickly. Giving them a theme, as it is often customary at Google, can help spice things up. Google also names their meetings rooms in a fun way, often relevant to a local theme (for me I often spend time in meetings rooms named after NASA space missions). It is fun to think I am meting someone in ‘Apollo 16’ as opposed to say ‘meeting room 16.1’).
To convince leaders using real business returns, according to Mike, is the best path for Product Managers to convince leads of the concepts. The narrative needs to be: here is how this investment will deliver for you, and here is the evidence to prove it. This helps make a case where companies see this as an opportunity, and start ranking it alongside other opportunities, as opposed to categorizing it as a fad. PMs also have a large degree of independence when selecting tools to achieve their goals.
Well, next time you are up against a tough business goal, look at it as a bossfight, grab your Zelda sword, and rally your team to choose their character, and off you go achieving the next level. 🕹️
Take Action 🎬
📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.
📚 Mike’s and Bret’s book is a true bible if you consider applying the concepts of Gamification to your product and experience. In their work, Gamification for Product Excellence, they provide foundational knowledge, practical examples, and execution frameworks everyone working on product development and design can benefit from.
📚 Mike talks about how crossing the chasm is a key concept to leverage in bringing your experience from your early adopters to larger segments of users. The book by the same name, by Geoffrey Moore is a great start to better navigate this.
📚 A book which helped me is Dale Carnegie’s classic How to win friends and influence people. It truly changed me to my core, helped me build more meaningful relationships with others, inside and outside of work. It also helped me see how to become more humble as a person, something which had tremendously positive effects on my life and opened me up to learn a lot more.
