Gamifying Planning Part 2

Part 2: Gamifying Planning Poker with Thunderdome

In part 1 we introduced the gamification elements of Thunderdome.

The Goals

The main portion of the site that I’m interested in is the planning poker site (there are other areas of the site.) My goals for applying gamification to the Thunderdome app would be to:

1. Increase Loyalty
   • Entice players to play it more regularly
   • Create a strong community of players
2. Increase Value to Companies
   • Increase the importance of Teams and Companies
   • Make a reason to belong to a community, and to use that feature.
3. Improve Users Participation during Planning
   • Reward users for participating.
   • Greater rewards for participating in a constructive and helpful way

Increase Loyalty

Loyalty in this case is simply continuing to use the app. Users could choose to use it, or not use it any time they are involved in planning. Our goal is to try to make it more likely for users to choose to use the app every time they plan.

To being with, we need a way to measure loyalty since we want to increase it, we need to define a loyalty metric first. Normally a loyalty metric would be based on repeated regular use of the app. Planning poker is not an activity a team usually does daily, it’s usually used once or twice per sprint. Sprints are often every two weeks, so this could mean a user would only plan once every two weeks. Each agile team is different, so we can’t count on any specific usage pattern. We want the users to use it each time they do the planning, but we are not trying to increase how often they plan.

Some metrics that measure loyalty:

• Count how often users log in weekly.
• Count how many stories they plan with it.
• Count the time used with the app.
• Count the number of users who do not return to using the app after having used it. (drop off)

Once all the metrics are regularly counted we can determine the baseline for the metric. Then we set goals for each metric, to define what we would like to improve. Finally, we measure the metric again over time and see if we are having an impact.

For example, one increasing loyalty goal might be to reduce the drop-off rate of the site. We may find that 10% of users drop off each month (hopefully new users arrive to replace them as well!) Then our baseline is 10%, and we can set a goal say to decrease that by 2% using gamification, so that the normal monthly drop-off rate would be 8%.

How the proposed system may increase loyalty

Our hypothesis is that we can increase loyalty in the following scenarios.

Hypothesis 1: Competitive individuals will want to be at the top of their leaderboards. As individuals inside their company, and as a company overall. This will drive those users to continue to use the system, in order for all the participants to gain points.

Hypothesis 2: Competitive individuals will want to maximize their points so that their profile shows them as competent users of the system. Users may enjoy showing off their profiles with high scores.

Hypothesis 3: All users will enjoy participating and gaining points to demonstrate that they are essentially doing their job each week by participating in the battles and estimating points.

Hypothesis 4: Some users will find helping their Company to compete will be fun. Company vs Company games will entice users to play more often, and since the whole team works together to get these points, they may find that they are enjoying being in the community of players.

If it turned out that the points and competition alone did not increase loyalty, another tactic that we could use is to add streaks. The basic idea is if you use it at least once every two weeks, you will be on a streak. Streaks can be shown on the profile and to the user. They could also be used as multiplayer. So for example any points earned while on at least an 8-week streak could be doubled.

Increase Value to Companies

Value to companies can be difficult to measure. But I think the main idea here is to show that having your employees use this system, would benefit the company in some way. I believe that using a tool like this to get points into stories is a good Agile practice. So the only thing we would need to do is show the Company that it is being used.

Metrics to measure value to companies:

• Count the number of users who enter their companies name
• Count how many enter valid companies (not as easy, potentially add an URL to validate the organization when it is being created. Could also add the organization Logo for more fun.)
• Count how many users make their company public

How the proposed system may increase value to companies

Hypothesis 1: Companies would see the value of using a planning poker tool regularly, and they would be able to see the overall company performance on the Company leaderboard. This would enable companies to see the value.

Hypothesis 2: By having company competition, users would see increased value in adding their company name and ensuring it’s accurate. This is the only incentive now to make that information accurate. This is good for Thunderdome as well.

Improve Users Participation during Planning

We have two sub-goals here, increase participation and increase the quality of the participation.

Metrics to measure participation improvement:

• Count how many users vote in all plans that they participate in (count the number of time-out/skips)
• Count how often users get points for being correct.
• Count how often users match points

Lower numbers of skips would be the goal. For the ‘being correct’ and ‘being aligned’ counts, it might be interesting to compare that to see how much following the leader is going on. You could find that users are guessing what another user might say (a common problem in agile estimation.)

How the proposed system may improve participation during planning

Hypothesis 1: Users will find earning points enjoyable, and this will lead to them participating. If they are competitive this would be bolstered by the leaderboards and overall points.

Hypothesis 2: Users will try harder to estimate better since they can earn more points by being accurate.

Conclusion

In these two posts, we introduced a system that would gamify Thunderdome. Would it work? Well, we would have to build it to see! But as with all systems like this, we would have to watch it carefully, check our metrics, and decide if the numbers were going in the right direction or not. Some ideas could be wrong, and some things would need to be altered to account for that. Also, the point system may need to be balanced as time goes on, this is always a difficult thing to do, one aspect that may be helpful was the decision to make the competitions monthly. That way the changing of how points are earned would not impact the next competition about to start.