PM Escape Room: The Case of the Missing Product Vision

Product management is taught with frameworks on slides, and frameworks on slides are learned as vocabulary. What a slide cannot reproduce is the condition the frameworks exist for: too little information, other people’s opinions, and a deadline that does not move.

A scenario. A company’s product strategy folder was corrupted overnight, and the chief executive presents the new vision in an hour. What survives are fragments of product tasks, user insights and value proposition notes, scrambled and locked behind puzzles.

Teams work through rounds against a clock. A leaderboard shows where everyone has reached. A facilitator console lets whoever is running the session watch the room and step in.

The first version let teams get stuck. I added a hint and a skip at every stage, and progress bars showing how much of a round is done, so a team that cannot crack one puzzle keeps moving instead of spending twenty minutes failing at the same screen.

89 people have played it. I have no measure of what any of them retained, and a game is especially easy to mistake for learning, because the room is loud and people enjoy themselves.

The skip button was the important change. A puzzle that halts a team halts the teaching with it, and the instinct to keep the puzzle hard is an instinct about the puzzle rather than about the class.