Engaging Users with Gamification with Renato Carbone - Productized 24 TalkInTen

We’re excited to bring you more exclusive content from Productized 2024, our third conference of the year! This series continues our TalkInTen format, delivering concise, impactful conversations with industry leaders who are pushing the boundaries of product and business agility. Each episode is packed with fresh insights, actionable strategies, and real-world examples to help teams and organisations thrive.

In this episode, we’re joined by Renato Carboni and Thiago Barrionuevo, who dive into the power of gamification and its practical applications for product managers. Drawing from their combined experience, they explore how the principles of gamification and the Octalysis framework can enhance user engagement and drive meaningful interactions within products.

Renato on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/renatocarbs/

Here is the synopsis of Renato & Thiago Barrionuevo's Workshop:

Join us for an engaging workshop designed to empower Product Managers with the principles and applications of gamification. In this session, you'll learn the fundamentals of gamification, delve into the Octalysis framework, and participate in interactive activities that demonstrate how these concepts can be used to enhance your product.

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and stay tuned for more great episodes from the Product Agility Podcast!

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Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we're going to be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the art of product management, helping us all find some joy in what we do. But it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here and they're going to be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Sheev Limited. Sheev is a company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment or you know just a simple thing I've actually making OKRs work in organisations. These are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with actual tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talk in 10. Welcome. It is the second day of product hire's 2024 and we're beginning the day with Renato who had a workshop yesterday which is engaging users with gamification. That's it. Engaging and gamification great words, fun choices. Did you have a good turnout? Yes, yes. It was like incredible how people, I believe we blow their minds during their ideas of playing games and doing work, real work as well. So give us a bit of an insight into actually not the workshop but yourself. OK. So how come you're here running this workshop? OK, so I'm a loyal strategist. It means that I help brands design relationship strategies and I've been doing this for the past 15 years. And in designing those strategies, most mechanisms that we use are points, badges, leaderboards, sweepstakes and there are all game elements. So for me to perform better and understand better how we could start engaging users, I understood that the keyword there was gamification. So yesterday we did this workshop. It was me and Chago Bahionewo. We both use gamification on daily basis, me in relationship strategies, he in team building and working. And we came together to mix both of our skills in doing this workshop with the people to make them have some fun and still learn. And so just the clarity, you said designing relationship strategies, so it is a loyalty program, it's a point, it's exactly all that type of stuff. Exactly, loyalty and incentive programs. And maybe you think those things that we don't like because they are giving me one million points for whatever. And this is all due to misunderstanding what how gamification can help you engage users. If you are using points to give me one million, I'm not engaged. So there are ways to solve that problem. And yesterday we were sharing some frameworks on how to get there. Half of the people were there saying, I'm already doing something with gamification. That's why I'm here. The other half didn't know but had gaming it and was interested. And when we did the workshop, we shared a framework that we use. It's called the Octalysis Framework. So it's Octalysis Framework by the UK Show. So it has eight car drives that help you understand the users' motivations that would lead them to be more engaged with a product with whatever you are doing. And interesting enough, none knew that. So for me and Chagua was crazy, like, how are you guys doing gamification? And you don't know this method or similar methods. And that's why for us it was so interesting to do this. So we started explaining a bit more about what is games and what is gamification just to give a level to everyone. Then we played the game, Chagua designs games for companies. And we played one of his games called the Survivor. So yeah, we got everyone that no one knew each other and said, now you are trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. And it's a board game where the board is the room. And they were divided in 10 teams and they had to collect resources and they had to negotiate, trade, and survive some crazy events that was happening and trying to get at the end of that by everyone surviving together. So although they were different teams or in different villages, the end goal was for everyone to survive together. But when you start the clock in a game, you immediately see that most people start competing, even though we were playing all together, they were saying, no, this is my table and this is your table. I have my resources. So I need to get advantages from you. Yesterday, I was talking with one of the guy and he said, I realized too late that I wasn't competing with anyone, but I competed so heavily at the beginning that I lost because no one wanted to help me at the end because I wasn't a good guy at the beginning. But the one thing you can never underestimate is humans' inability to share anything. Yes. We hate sharing anything. Yeah. So yeah, the governing of the commons, someone with a lender, Austrian, I think it was from a label prize, a book which was basically humans are really shit at sharing. Yeah. And that's why the world's in such a terrible place is because we just can't share the precious resources that we've got. Yeah. But anyway, I digress. I think I can make a leap and I think you've kind of given us some little hints as to why this might be the case. But let me say engaging users, what kind of practical applications other than that, do the relationship strategies you do? What kind of practical applications do you use the gamification for? I guess you had a lot of product managers and general product people in the workshop. So how did what they learned and enabled them to be better at their job? Great. If I can take a step with you here and play one of the games that we had there, are you a gamer? I'm a vicarious gamer. I say basically, I haven't got time to play video games. Oh, but I love them. I love them. It's like playing a play through my kids. So what is your hobby now? The side of podcast. But it could be podcasting. Not a problem. Get me one more. The side podcast running. Running. Excellent. Was running at the Olympics. Was I running at the Olympics? Yeah. Not this time. No. Was I running? No, no, no. But at the Olympics, do we have running? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a game, right? Yeah. Olympic games, we run there. So running is also a game. Why? Because a game is a voluntary action to solve an unnecessary problem. When we think about that, because every time I ask, are you a gamer, you immediately go to video games. Half of the room said, no, no, I don't play video games. I don't play board games. But then when we are talking about hobbies, things that we do because it gives us satisfaction, pleasure, whatever, we get more healthy by doing that. We do it because we want, we do it because we like. And that's the same that you ask for a guy that plays video game. Why you do that? Because it gives me entertainment and whatever. When we take the huge leap and already arrive at game of occasion, what is game of occasion? Designing a design focus on human motivation. That's it. So when we started explaining that to people, we played the game and then we went to practical things. How can you do this in life? For this workshop, what we told them is the only thing that you need to succeed here is get your phone and get the apps that you use frequently. All of them have a bunch of game of occasion. They don't look like games, but you use this. You engage with those apps because the way they designed it, make you like it. For instance, Uber was one of the examples. The whole app is designed around a simple game of occasion concept that is I get into your car and when I get out, I give you a five-star review and you give me a five-star review and we build a network of people giving those reviews. And they solve a brilliant problem that is, are you boarding a stranger's car? We take those decisions in like 20 seconds, right? We push a car and then we say, yeah, there's a guy 4.8 star coming my way and there's a lot of badges. He did 2000 runs, he did whatever and you see all those game elements and say, of course I'm boarding in that car thing. And so this is one example that gamification is all around the apps and the things that we do. It's not that when they say we are trying to do some gamification, in their minds it was we are trying to do some things that are fun, things that look like games but it's not necessarily that. And this leap that we got with them showed us in the second step of the workshop how many post-its they start creating like mad people. And one thing that we realized because we had a lot of talks like this here at productize was there was a lot of talks about psychological safety, how you provide the new environment where everyone can contribute. And in our workshop, since we started first with a game, I don't know you, I set at your table and we need to decide who will be the negotiator, who will be the leader. Then we have some fun doing that. Then when we need to work together, I'm not worried to share what I think, what I want or what I believe that we should be doing. So then they start creating post-its like mad and they product in 15 minutes with tons and tons of mechanics using the same bringing concepts from apps they like. So then they had like, I don't know, there was a group that was trying to solve parcels like the second economy like I buy something and then I need to make it work more and then you can get points because you are reducing CO emissions. And at the end, it's a hybrid fusion of ways, ting their Wikipedia and a lot of apps in one place that the guy did that in 10 minutes and said, yeah, I think this is a valid product that makes sense for me and to the rest of the class as well, the room. I think you've really got me thinking, because it's very early to be thinking as well. So thank you for that. I needed that mind lubrication, as it were. Because I think, what I'm taking away from it is that gamification is a brilliant way to kind of feel that motivation gap and make people feel safe and then once people feel safe and they're motivated, and how you direct them is entirely up to you, I suppose, as to what you want to get out of it. So thank you so much for one, getting here so early in the morning and two, just sharing some really interesting insights into your workshop. It's a real tragedy I think for me and George that we get to miss a lot of the workshops in the talk. So we love doing what we do, but we also, yeah, we're one year, love to come here as a participant. So thank you so much for your time and, I guess say coming here so early, if people want to find out more information about you or contact you, I guess they can do that via LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn, you could find me. I'm, it's easier for them to listen, Renat to Carboni, I'm Hannah to Carboni at LinkedIn, and also Chago Bahir Nuevo. We can find both of us at LinkedIn and at Productize Post, we were there, and we can connect more about this. We both create content around gamification, so you can see a lot of these hints there. Lovely. Okay, well, I think I'll try and get you back on for a longer episode because we've with Tiago because I'd love to learn more about it. So thank you so much for your time. And everyone, thank you so much for listening. George, thank you so much for producing this first episode of the day. And we will back again very soon. Thanks guys.