Facilitating Elevator Pitch Games

This article focuses on the facilitation aspects of the game rather than the need & benefits game itself. The assumption is that you have heard what an elevator pitch is along with why and where it is needed. I will also be assuming that you are the facilitator and are helping a group of people in creating their elevator pitch.

What is an elevator pitch

An elevator pitch is a concise and precise of way of conveying the core idea (“pitch”) of the project/product/business case etc. in as short a time as possible (usually 30 seconds or less).

There are many ways of articulating an elevator pitch. In this article, I will be using the following template.

For “target customer”

Who “customer’s need”

The “Product Name”

Is a “Product Category”

That “delivers one key benefit”

Unlike “competition”

The product “differentiator”

This template can be used for products or services or any other area where a pitch is needed. Feel free to modify the template depending on the context, provided the intent of the pitch is captured.

How is it useful

The elevator pitch is a great way to understand the product idea during the ideation & development phase. It helps to bring multiple stakeholders together and sets the common vision for the team. In addition, the elevator pitch is an excellent guard-rail against scope creep/product dilution.

Facilitating an elevator pitch

I typically start off with 2 big sheets of paper

• The first one is the template itself
• The second one is an example

The template servers two purposes. The first purpose is to server as a means of explaining the various terms to your audience. The second is to act as a place holder for the actual exercise/game itself. This template needs to be used along with the example to explain how the elevator pitch itself should be and what the outcomes are likely to look like.

It helps a lot if your example is on a similar context to the actual business problem that is being solved. This helps in letting the audience identify with the example and what is expected of them. At the same time, do not make the example based on the problem itself. This will need to a situation where the audience gets constrained by your ideas.

Once you have prepared these two sheets, put them up in the area where the conversation is about to happen. Have a lot of stickies or flash card along with glue/blue tacs etc. Also, make sure that there is enough stationery to go around.

There is likely to be a lot of debate once the thoughts are put down. So budget a decent amount of time for the debate. I would recommend booking 1–2 hours for the entire exercise. This can go up or down depending on your context (how much do you know), the audience (are they all of one mind, are they from the same team etc.), what stage of the product ideation process is this happening at (earlier stages tend to be more nebulous) etc. I have been in games where we finished up in 20 minutes to games where we had to break, do our homework and come back for another session. At the end of the day, all that matters is if the team is committed to one clearly articulated vision.

Start off by explaining the purpose of the conversation and the outcomes expected from it. This gives the audience an idea of what to do as well as letting them understand that this is a place for them to express their thoughts. Ensure that safety is not an issue i.e. people are comfortable with sharing their thoughts even if their bosses etc. are in the conversation.

There are various ways in which the audience can put down their thoughts on the elevator pitch. Some of these are

Verbal Debate

Have a verbal debate on each portion of the elevator pitch and you write down the conclusion for each portion. The first approach tends to quite in the air and is useful when the idea being discussed is clear in everybody’s mind. All you are doing here is capturing the idea and writing it down for posterity’s sake ( as well as your understanding)

1 Pitch — 1 Card

Each member of the audience writes down an entire elevator pitch on one card. Once the cards are collected, there is a debate that occurs. This approach tends to be more useful when you have stakeholders from disparate teams sitting together. This leads to the group understanding different viewpoints on what is needed to be done. In this case, you might have to follow it up with another exercise later on.

1 Idea — 1 Card

Each member of the audience writes down one portion of the elevator pitch on one sticky. For example — each audience member might write down one USP per sticky. The stickies are collected and stuck in the relevant portions of the elevator pitch templates. You might do one more round of consolidation to group similar ideas together. For example — the same need might be mentioned by the majority of the audience. This stickies for this need can be grouped together and discussed once.

I tend to prefer this approach as it lets each idea bubble up to be discussed. The only thing to be mindful of is the amount of time it takes to discuss each of the ideas. One thing you need to watch out for is the logical consistencies between various portions of the elevator pitch. For example, you don’t want to mix up the target audience from one specific viewpoint with the need from another viewpoint.

Sometimes, you might end the session with a broad agreement on what is needed. In this case, you can refine it further outside of the session and send it out for validation. In any case, always follow up the conversation with the final version of the elevator pitch.