Weekend Escape an agile Backlog Management Game

Weekend Escape is an agile backlog management game where small teams collaborate to order a backlog with a specific business goal in mind. Once the team has produced their backlog, they review the output of another team and discuss the differences. Everyone participates and discussion plays a key part in the game. Participant’s eyes are often opened to the complexity of backlog prioritisation. The game has been designed for all staff, not just Product Owners. The Extended Version of the game ramps up the challenge. It is aimed at Product Owners, yet suitable for anyone with a little more time to spare.

Learning objectives

• Experience the challenges of prioritising and ordering a backlog.
• Understand how an agile team can help their Product Owner by making the backlog items easier to compare.
• Extended Version: Experience how business goals impact the approach to prioritisation

Suitability

• People: 6 to 20. People will be split into an even number of teams of 3 to 5 people. 
• Time for Standard version: ~30 minutes.
• Time for Extended version: ~75 to 90 minutes.
• Requires roughly 1m to 1.5m of table space per team.

The detailed instructions are available in PDF.

One example of a completed backlog

I am interested to hear any feedback about the game, especially from those that have tried it out. So please leave your comments below...