Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill every board, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Fieldnote, played with six owners including Sophie at the spring user day. Budget 100 € each, total shelf price 1 200 €.
What the team took away
Route planning was top of the roadmap and nobody spent a cent on it. When asked what would have made them pay, two owners said they already plan by hand in ten minutes, which is not a problem worth 250 €.
How to run it
Preparation
Price the features yourself, before the session, roughly in proportion to real cost. Prices that ignore cost turn the game into a popularity vote.
Make the total budget about half the total price of everything. If people can buy most of it, nothing is revealed.
Price at least two features above any single budget, so they can only be bought by a coalition. Those are the ones that teach you the most.
Use physical money if you can. Handing over paper notes makes the trade-off felt rather than calculated.
Agenda
15 min
Read the shelf Present each feature in one sentence and its price. No selling, no roadmap context. Answer questions about what it does, not about when.
15 min
Spend alone Each person spends their budget on their own, without discussion. This is the honest signal, before any group dynamic.
30 min
Open negotiation People may now pool money. Let it get loud. The conversation about who gives up what is the actual output, more than the totals.
20 min
Read the board Count what was bought. Then ask about the expensive things nobody touched: were they too expensive, or genuinely not wanted?
10 min
Ask the losers For each unbought feature, ask one buyer what would have made them pay. The answer is often a smaller version you had not considered.
Pitfalls
Letting the team play instead of customers. The team will buy what it already wants to build, and you will have paid for a mirror.
Prices that are all similar. Without real spread, nobody has to make a hard choice, and the game produces a ranking you could have guessed.
Treating the result as a roadmap. It is a signal of relative desire from the people in the room, not a plan and not a commitment.
Afterwards
Feed the ranking into Impact/effort or RICE, where cost and reach get a say. The coalitions that formed tell you which customer segments share a problem.