Scenario
During the last weekend, I was in Lecce for a startup competition and spent 54 hours with a team of six persons I just met there developing a startup idea and turning it in a business model and possibly a MVP. The idea we were about to develop, brought to us by a single member of our team, was not that simple to immediately catch and understand it; more, as we were going through the discussion, I realized that everyone of us had a different concept of the original idea in his/her mind; we were also using different terminology and the discussion was leading us nowhere because of this lack of mutual understanding.
I knew we needed a way to synchronize ourselves and somehow freeze a first version of our model in order to proceed and start with the actual production; I also had some Post-it notes with me, so I tried to do the only thing I know that could work in this kind of situations: apply an agile methodology.
Something similar to Event storming, a methodology by Alberto Brandolini, was perfect to me: we had Post-it notes, we were somehow exploring a domain, so I thought it could work...and it did, flawlessly! We reached a stable business and revenue model and the understanding of who the actors of this model were in a single 40 minutes timeboxed session (thanks Giancarlo for the suggestion); plus, we gained for free an ubiquitous language everyone in the team used from then on.
Why "lite" event storming and how it worked
I managed to bootstrap the session in 30 seconds.
It was a 40 minutes timeboxed session, so we had to think and move relatively fast.
We had only single color Post-it notes, but I decided to go on anyway, I thought it could not be a real problem.
We only wrote down events and actors, so no commands, no process managers, no aggregates. Model and actors emerged from events.
We hadn't a real domain expert; just a facilitator (me) and "partial" or "almost" domain experts (the rest of the team).
We had the definition of our model as our main target, we were not searching for a first domain driven design representation to implement later.
I had enough time left to produce a working MVP demo (I think we also won because of that), based on the previously discussed business and revenue model.
Remarks
"Invite the right people", says Alberto in a recent post about event storming, and he's absolutely right. I managed to explain and start the session in no time, with everyone in the team spontaneously interacting, writing down events and moving notes all around the working space (WOW!).
Only 2/7 of our team had a technical background, so I can confirm that event storming has nothing to do with being a developer or similar, you just have to be one of the right people and this means you just have to be willing to contribute and interact with other people (and this also includes posing contradictions and introducing different point of views) in the session and have a basic knowledge of what is in discussion.
We were trying to build up a new model, not discovering an existing one; this made things easier and broadened the number of possible right people (everyone in the team could have his/her say, we were all at the same level of domain knowledge).
Another remarkable point: we did in 40 minutes what took hours to other teams. I saw teams discussing their basic business and revenue model even in the last hours of the competition (coaches were constantly "shaking" the models for validation purposes, but I'm talking about a lower level, I'm talking about the very foundation of the models); they were also using different terms referring to the same concept, so time was wasted in continuous "are we talking about the same thing?" conversations.
Conclusions
After this experiment, I can state that "Lite" event storming can be used as a business model construction tool and, more important, as a rapid shared knowledge buildup methodology, and that we are talking about a social tool, not a technology related one. It probably works better on business concepts and models, or just on new models, but I will definitely check about this if I get the chance.
Don't forget to tell me or Alberto about your experience, if you manage to apply event storming or lite event storming somewhere.