A couple of weeks ago I was involved in a series of workshops to develop a new digital product for a client. As a part of a warm up exercise Larissa from Ogilvy Dusseldorf took us through the spaghetti tower exercise, as seen on TV [TED video]. The idea is that in a limited time with a small team you have to use a 20 sticks of spaghetti and some sticky tape to place a marshmallow as high as possible.
The lessons that comes from it, and the point made in the TED video is that we can frequently make the mistake of over-planning and not leaving enough time to actually execute or by putting all of our bets on a single solution, that eventually fails. In contrast kindergarten children when faced with the same task try lots of different things, iterating and prototyping quickly to get to a viable solution.
I’m pleased to say that our group discovered another, different lesson; the value of what is known in software development as Minimum Viable Product, developing the minimum number of features that allow the product to be deployed and no more.
Our team, faced with almost no time left on the clock and a rapidly failing prototype did a quick competitive analysis.
Seeing that every other team was in a similar position we reasoned that if we just placed the marshmallow an inch in the air we’d win. Here’s the result;
