The Marquee Mock Exercise
Hand everyone blank App Store screenshot panels and make them draw the world where the problems are solved.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
A group workshop technique for converging a team on a vision. You print the real App Store / Play Store listing layout with the hero screenshot panels left blank, hand a sheet to every participant, and ask: if we solved all the problems we identified, what would these screenshots say? The four-panel constraint makes it impossible to show everything, forcing each person to choose the big rocks. When the problems have been well framed, two or three panels recur across nearly everyone's sheet — that convergence is the vision.
Origin
Ebi Atawodi ran this in a strategy session at YouTube roughly 18 months before this interview, taking a screenshot of the Google Play Store listing and blanking the panels. It is her low-fidelity, no-designer-required cousin of the classic design-partner vision sketch.
Core principles
- 01A picture tells a thousand words — but a low-fidelity picture you drew yourself tells them too.
- 02The panel constraint is the mechanism: you cannot show everything, so you must pick the things that land the big rocks.
- 03Convergence across independently-filled sheets is evidence that the problem framing worked.
- 04'I don't have a designer' is not an excuse — it is a reason to pick up a pen.
- 05Designers, shown an ugly sketch, are often provoked into making it beautiful.
How to run it
- 1
Frame the problems first
Run the exercise only after the group has done the insights work and agreed on the consolidated problem list. The prompt depends on it: 'if we solved all of these problems…'
Watch out Without a shared, well-told story about the problems, the sheets will diverge and the exercise produces noise.
- 2
Build the blank template
Screenshot your product's real App Store or Play Store listing, overlay blank rounded rectangles for the hero/marquee screenshot panels (four is enough), and print a copy per person.
Pro tip Using the real store layout, not an abstract grid, keeps people honest about what a user would actually see.
- 3
Everyone fills their own sheet independently
Each participant sketches what the marquee screenshots would show and what the captions would say — 'make money', 'express yourself'. They must land the big rocks in four panels.
Pro tip Silence and independence first; discussion after. Talking before drawing collapses the diversity you are trying to measure.
- 4
Compare and find the convergence
Discuss the sheets as a group. Look for the two or three panels that almost everyone independently produced — those are the vision's load-bearing claims.
- 5
Escalate fidelity only after conviction
Take the ugly sketch to a designer. Post-it-note fidelity is enough to get them interested; they will often spin up a lo-fi version, then a polished one.
Pro tip Atawodi's own path: post-it sketch → designer lo-fi → 'actually, I'm just going to make it pretty' → final vision asset.
Watch out Do not wait for design resource before starting. The sketch is the ask.
In the wild
In a YouTube strategy session, Atawodi screenshotted the Google Play Store listing, added four blank rounded rectangles, printed a sheet for each participant, and asked what the marquee screenshots would say if they solved the identified problems.
→ Two or three panels recurred across nearly every participant's sheet — a convergent, visualised vision produced in one session with no design resource.
Atawodi wanted to show a world where anyone could walk into any bodega or mom-and-pop shop anywhere and top up their Uber balance with cash — no credit card required. Her design partner took a pencil and drew it: a kiosk like the ones in Nigeria, a person with cash, a receipt confirming the top-up.
→ The drawing excited people about the possibility — 'I can see this'. The product took four years to build and shipped differently, but the image carried the vision through.
Common mistakes
Using no-designer as an excuse
Atawodi calls this an easy cop-out. Start drawing with your hands, use rectangles, use post-its — the story is what matters, not the fidelity.
Trying to show everything
Filling all panels with every capability defeats the exercise. The forced scarcity is what surfaces which three or four things actually matter.
Running it before the problems are shared
The convergence signal is only meaningful if everyone is drawing against the same, well-told set of problems.
Is it for you?
Best for
A PM or product lead running a strategy offsite who needs a room of PMs, engineers and designers to converge on a visual vision in a single session.
Not ideal for
Products with no user-facing store listing or visual surface (deep infrastructure), or solo vision work where there is no group to measure convergence across.
From the transcript
“I created rounded uh rectangles just blank rectangles four panels and then I printed that out and I gave everyone a sheet”
“it forces people to oh goodness we can't show everything so it's got to be three or four things that land the big rocks that…”
“do not use I don't have a designer to be the excuse for why you don't bring it to life”
“he literally took out a pencil and Drew the future”
From the episode
Crafting a compelling product vision
Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)