DecisionIntermediate

Buy a Feature

A prioritisation game developed by Luke Hohmann where participants spend a limited budget of play money to 'buy' features from a list. Each feature is priced (roughly proportional to implementation cost). Since some features cost more than one person can afford alone, participants must negotiate and collaborate to fund the features they care most about. The result is a negotiated, socially validated priority list.

Duration

30m–1h

Group size

3–20 people

Materials

feature list with prices, play money or tokens per participant, whiteboard to track purchases

Origin

Community

How to run it

1
Prepare a list of 20–30 candidate features, each with a price tag (use relative effort if cost is unknown).
2
Give each participant a budget of play money — roughly enough to buy 3–4 mid-priced features.
3
Participants spend their budgets purchasing features. They may negotiate and pool money.
4
Track which features get funded on a visible board.
5
Features that run out of funding are deprioritised.
6
Debrief: ask participants why they prioritised what they did — the conversation is as valuable as the result.

Tips

Price features so some require collaboration to purchase — this forces negotiation and reveals which features have coalition support.
The discussion between participants often surfaces hidden assumptions and trade-offs.

Variations

Run as a team-only session for internal alignment, or with actual customers for user research. Replace money with 'time tokens' representing developer-days.

Where it fits

Product roadmap alignmentCustomer co-creation workshopsStakeholder prioritisationFeature discovery

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Method descriptions on Workshop Weaver are original content written by our team, based on established facilitation practices.