The Fair Tradeoffs Game

1. Game Objective
Primary: Learn a technique that highlights decision factors within diverse groups
Secondary: Get the team thinking holistically about the discover/design/produce/
market product lifecycle

2. Number of participants for meaningful play: Minimum Threshold: 5, Ideal number:
15, Maximum number: 20

3. Brief Description

Your company, PierPlus Imports, specializes in finding unusual products from the
far corners of the developing world. These places are typically difficult to get to,
have poor infrastructure, and the producers have little or no experience producing
for a foreign market. In a nutshell, assessing the risk is complex.
Your team must come up with a potentially hot selling product line. To do so they
must travel the world (of their imaginations) discovering and describing exotic
products from impoverished remote areas to sell online. You will be asked to
design, package and ship their creations, secure supply lines for their production,
and then sell them online to the world.
In order to choose the product line intelligently, the team uses a participatory
exercise using a Priority vs. Effort Quadrant to collaboratively examine and decide
which products get financed, fostered and featured online for an upcoming buying
season

4. No special supplies requirements

5. Game Play

Role Assignment:
(Count heads by five until all are accounted for. Split into 2 or 3 groups with as even
a distribution of roles as is possible.)
•Ones: Owner/Investor/Founders
•Twos: Buyer/Merchandisers
•Threes: Local Guides - specific knowledge of the source country (use your
imagination)
•Fours: Local Producers
•Fives: Shipping/Packaging/Logistics

Discover your potential products: Each group represents a different source region
(e.g. Africa, Latin America, China). Each is responsible for coming up with 5 new
product ideas. Prepare a short verbal and visual description of each product

The Graph: While the region teams are busy, facilitator draws a simple graph on
a whiteboard or large poster paper. The X axis is effort. The Y axis is priority.
Lower left corner is labeled “low”. Top and far right are labeled “High”. No numbers
are placed on the axis. See http://www.slideshare.net/aikiden/effort-by-priority-
estimation

Product intro and rough ranking: When all products are ready, a representative from
each group demos their product proposals, placing the ‘product sheet’ along the
bottom of the graph.

Priority negotiation: After all products are demoed, the business owners and Buyer/
Merchandisers from each group position each ‘product sheet’ according to its
relative priority. Discussion will ensue about relative marketability of each product.
Step concludes when everyone can live with the relative priority of all products (no
consideration of effort during this stage)
Effort assessment: The business owner/buyers sit down and the remainder come
up to the board, write the name of each product on a sticky note and discuss what
level of relative effort to position each product sticky. Priorities are not changed.

Quadrant mapping: Facilitator (with guidance from the teams), draws circles around
items within each quadrant, labeling the quadrants as follows:

Upper left: Thankless Slogs (high effort , low priority)
Lower left: Frequent Fillers (low effort, low priority)
Upper right: High Risk Challenges (high effort, high priority) •
Lower right: Easy Wins (low effort, high priority)

Matching Capacity:
Facilitator DRAWS in quantity lines from 0 to 20 assigning numerical effort values,
ADDS up all effort numbers for all products on the board, STATES that production
capacity is half that, asking the teams to work together to decide what the product
line will be for that season.

Discussion Ensues. Tradeoffs are made as needed until production capacity is
matched maybe plus 10%. Keep the quadrant labels in mind. They add much
needed characterization to aid the tough decisions required. Some products are
sidelined.

Celebration: Congratulations! You have a product line that can actually be delivered
for the next season!

Conclusion and Retrospective