A Philadelphia video game studio, led by a Forbes 30 Under 30 CTO, set out to build an anti-money-laundering game to train law enforcement officers to identify, detect, and report financial crime. The team had the talent: designers, architects, analysts, and engineers. It did not have a way to ship an MVP fast.
The challenge
Team members worked in functional silos while juggling new titles and live-game support. The founders were wary of outside consultants, whom they associated with process for its own sake. We asked for two days: an assessment built on interviews and direct observation, and a recommendation plan grounded in Lean-Agile.
How we helped
The engagement opened with a design thinking session focused on a rapid prototype, shown to the founders as wireframes and mockups. Features were prioritized into P1, P2, and P3, with launch scoped to P1 only. The team moved to one-week sprints with daily standups, a Kanban board went up in the main conference room, and a Lean-startup coach shielded the team from incoming feature requests. Silos and hand-offs were removed under a single mantra: one team.
The result
The game shipped with its P1 features in eight sprints, and 12 financial experts saw the first demo within four weeks. Over 120 defects were caught and fixed inside the sprint cycle. The game is now used by one of the country's largest financial institutions, more than 1,200 people have trained on it, and the studio still runs on the Lean-Agile playbook and the one-team mantra it built during the engagement.