A “product fiction” game that makes for a great team-wide workshop

Each year, the whole team at Monito live together for a few days in the Swiss Alps for our annual offsite.

As you’ll see in the video below, it’s first and foremost about having fun times together. But it’s also about exploring new ideas and taking advantage of the fresh air of the mountains to take a new perspective on our product.

This year, we tested for the first time a “product fiction” game, which was both a great team-building exercise, a lot of fun, and a way to think definitely outside the box.

Start by defining arbitrary constraints

In a first step, the whole team brainstormed all sort of “constraints”.

For example, what would we do if the only channel we could use to communicate with our users was instant messaging, or a virtual reality headset, or a vocal assistant?

What if we were to operate in a world where access to internet suddenly became extremely expensive? What if the defiance to any information…