Amy Jo Kim is an advisor to Happily and the mastermind of Game Thinking, a customer-centric process for unlocking innovation in your products that she developed out of her experiences building products with the early teams of eBay, Guitar Hero, The Sims Online, and Netflix.

"The Sims is one of the games where I saw that you could merge vision with a relentless search for market truth and “find the core of fun.”"

Companies fly Amy Jo all around the world to have her teach them the Game Thinking process, but about three years ago she decided to go exclusively online as she saw her teams achieve more progress with her clients in online workshops that she facilitated. In her conversation with our CEO Sarah Shewey, Amy Jo shared some lessons learned from helpful tips on how she structures her own workshops to maximize small group learning online.

Watch the chat from our Learning Center at happily.io/learning, and read on for key takeaways from what Amy Jo shared with us.

1. Re-format the workshop into sprints

Turn your all-day workshops into a sprint: a dedicated period of time with a key focus that has a beginning and an end. During a sprint, independent work is supported by daily touchpoints with the group. Sprints help big goals feel less overwhelming and empowers participants to feel confident that the outcome of one sprint will lead to the foundation of the next. It takes a bit more upfront work to layout all the content, but ultimately a sprint achieves better results and is much easier to fit into busy workdays for your executives.

"No one wants to be online all day… With sprints, you meet for one hour every day for a week or two, and you’ll see much better results."

2. Know when to broadcast and when to discuss

Be clear on which parts of your event are in broadcast mode (eg. one presenter to many listeners) vs discussion mode (eg. small group sessions with participation). A helpful exercise is to think about the interactions you want participants to experience with each “Aha!” moment and then decide whether or not you want that to be open for broadcast or discussion.

"Unless there’s a live performance, a 45-minute talk doesn’t work."

3. Prepare for the screen

With workshops, broadcast mode is often much better delivered in pre-recorded, micro-learning segments of no more than five minutes made available for replay. Discussions are also best when done in groups of four to eight, so that everyone can have a chance to speak up. Be sure to design your docs and templates for the screen rather than a printed page, taking aspect ratio into account when you layout your slides.

Want to learn more about Game Thinking?

As Amy Jo explains, game thinking is “developing the right products for the right people and having it drive engagement with a coherent customer journey.”

She cites 3 primary practices that make Game Thinking work:

1. Leveraging super fans to speed up iteration and innovation in the early days,

2. Creating a high-level vision for mastery path/customer journey that you can test and refine to get the right mental model, and

3. Creating a compelling learning loop that empowers your customers to get better at something rather than manipulating behavior.

You can learn more about the concept in her book, Game Thinking.

Sign up her free online course, “Create Your Next Hit Service With a Compelling Customer Journey” here.

Thanks again to Amy Jo Kim for sharing her insights with us!