Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Pre-PMF Fieldnote, 3 groups of mixed sales, tech and support. Winning box shown here.
What the team took away
Sales and tech had written different taglines; the winning one was the only one that did not mention software at all.
How to run it
Preparation
Mix the groups: one engineer, one salesperson, one support person, one designer per table. Homogeneous tables produce homogeneous boxes.
Bring three real product boxes or their photos (a cereal box, a game, a gadget) so people see what front, tagline and back look like.
Prepare one board area per group with the four blocks already drawn, plus markers if in person.
Tell people to leave laptops closed. Drawing badly is the point.
Agenda
10 min
Brief Show the real boxes. Rule: the box must convince a stranger in a store aisle in 10 seconds. No internal words allowed.
35 min
Build the box Each group fills name, tagline, three selling points and the back. Force a decision on the three points: which three, in which order, and why those.
25 min
Sell it Each group has 3 minutes to pitch their box to the room as if to a customer. The room notes the words that come back in every pitch and those that appear once.
20 min
Merge Take the recurring words and the best tagline. Write one shared box on the main board. Disagreements on the three points are settled by the person closest to customers.
Pitfalls
If a group writes 'scalable', 'seamless' or 'AI-powered', make them replace it with what the customer sees happen.
Three selling points means three. A box with six points has no priority; ask 'which three would you keep if the box were half the size?'.
Do not let the design-skilled group win because their box looks nicer. Judge the words, cover the drawings if needed.
Afterwards
The merged box becomes the brief for the landing page, the sales deck and the Positioning map. The three selling points are the test for every roadmap item: does it strengthen one of them?