Chocolate Bar Game

Become a product owner and get feedback on your ultimate chocolate bar.

Learning goals: Product ownership, iterative feedback, customer value

Time to play: 60 minutes

In person or Virtual: Both

Number of players: 3+ people

Resources required: Recycled or scrap paper

How the game works:

The goal of the Agile Chocolate Bar game is to create the most attractive chocolate bar to your customers as possible.

Agile Chocolate Bar game rules

The goal is a scrum simulation where you have to create a chocolate bar that is the most attractive to your customers within a certain set of constraints.

The rules are as follows

• For each team, there should be a designated Product Owner. Otherwise, for a small group, each person is their own product owner.
• There is an iteration round (3 minutes) and a feedback round (1min) for each phase.
• There are at least 3 phases.

Gather the team and provide the goals and instructions.

Set a timer for 3 minutes and each team or person creates an example of a chocolate bar they think their customers would love. They can draw this out with as much or as little detail as possible for the “Plate of DOD (Definition of Done, or Done and delivered).”

Then they have 1 minute to present what they have on their plate and get feedback from the rest of the group, who will act as customers. Customers can request changes or simply provide feedback.

Based on the feedback, they re-design the chocolate bar to be presented on the “Plate of DOD”.

Each phase is repeated until the allotted time elapses.

Once all phases are completed, run a debrief. You can ask questions such as

• How did you decide how to design your chocolate bar in each phase?
• How useful was the feedback from customers, and how did you improve the feedback asked for from each round?
• How did you measure the value of the chocolate bar to the customer each time to make improvements?
• If you didn’t measure customer value, why not?
• How did the feedback you received to influence the design of the chocolate bar?
• What trade-offs did you have to find in the design?
• What proportion of the customers did you satisfy at the end?
• Would you have personally bought this chocolate bar?
• Were there any features that were added that did not come from customer feedback?
• Were any agile processes applied in the game, such as backlog, dot voting, or prototyping?
• What else did you learn from this activity that you wanted to share?

Variations to the Chocolate Bar game

You can vary to this challenge by

• Adding a score from each customer each round on their likelihood to buy the chocolate bar.
• Allowing or not allowing the design team to listen to customer feedback sessions (e.g., just the product owner gets the feedback).
• Adding constraints to the design of the chocolate, such as materials or size.