As I wade into what can be abstract ideas about gamifying enterprise apps, I think it will help to make them more concrete with some examples from a product I’m intimately familiar with, Accept360. This is the product for which I’m the product manager, and believe me, as a daily user of my own product, over the years I’ve experienced all the issues I mentioned in last week’s post!
Accept360 is a product planning product that includes portfolio planning, requirements management, agile management, and other related capabilities. One of the fundamental operations in Accept360 is creation of a product requirement.
In our system product requirements are somewhat complex objects that not only contain a name and description, but can also have:
And just to make it trickier, a requirement can have any combination of these and many other pieces of data associated with it. Depending on a customer’s product planning process, they might want or require more or less data for each requirement type.
A requirement is thus a this fairly complex chunk of data. It typically takes a product manager multiple hours or days of work to get from initial draft to delivered capability, over the course of days or weeks or even months, and with multiple conversations and collaboration sessions with other product managers, development managers, and developers (and customers, marketers, executives, etc. – the list of collaborators can go on and on).
I’ll use these capabilities of Accept360 as a testbed for how gamification can be applied to an enterprise application. (I recognize that not every enterprise app can be as cool as Accept360, but it’s still a good example.) Because of its level of complexity – all of which is simply a reality of the product planning and delivery process – there are many opportunities for applying game design and game mechanics to make the use of Accept360 a better experience. Some of the most obvious examples might be:
I am using Accept360 as the example application for applying gamification because it’s the one I’m most familiar with, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about other enterprise apps that are ripe for game design and game mechanics. Let me know in the comments.
Your host and author, Nils Davis, is a long-time product manager, consultant, trainer, and coach. He is the author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook, many blog posts, a series of video trainings on product management, and the occasional grilled pizza.
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