In every competitive business landscape, predicting the future often feels like guesswork. But leading companies don’t rely on luck—they use war gaming, a strategic simulation method, to test strategies and anticipate challenges before they arise. Large companies often pay consultancies such as McKinsey, Accenture or BCG to facilitate these war games, but there is no reason medium and small-sized businesses can't do the same.
This post will walk you through how to war game a business strategy to strengthen decision-making, foster alignment, and build a more resilient organisation, while also showing how UX and product teams can apply it to stay ahead of the curve.
What is War Gaming?
Originally developed for military planning, war gaming involves simulating competitive or disruptive scenarios to explore potential outcomes and strategic responses. In a business context, it lets teams model market events—like competitor threats, technological shifts, or regulatory changes—and pressure-test their plans in a controlled, collaborative environment.
Why Use War Gaming in Business?
1. Stress-Test Strategy
See how your approach holds up under pressure in realistic, hypothetical scenarios.
2. Identify Weaknesses Early
Spot vulnerabilities in your plans before they turn into real-world failures.
3. Improve Decision-Making
Enhance your judgment by exposing blind spots and surfacing new insights.
4. Strengthen Team Alignment
Involve cross-functional teams to create shared understanding and clarity around strategy.
Steps to War Game A Business Strategy
1. Define Objectives and Scope
Be specific—are you testing a new market entry, preparing for a product launch, or reacting to a competitor's move?
2. Assemble a Diverse Team
Involve people from marketing, product, sales, operations, finance, and customer service for a well-rounded perspective.
3. Build Realistic Scenarios
Craft believable but challenging situations—new entrants, pricing wars, regulation changes, or shifts in consumer behaviour.
4. Assign Roles and Factions
Let participants play as competitors, customers, regulators, or internal stakeholders to get different viewpoints.
5. Run the Simulation
Present the scenario. Let teams respond and adapt. Encourage bold ideas and healthy friction.
6. Analyze Outcomes
What worked? What didn’t? Compare expected results to what actually happened.
7. Refine the Strategy
Apply what you’ve learned to strengthen your go-to-market or product roadmap.
8. Debrief and Document
Summarize the exercise, capture key learnings, and build a reusable playbook.
My Experience: How War Gaming Changed Our Strategy
I once participated in a war gaming session where we simulated a streaming industry scenario—each team represented a different competitor. We anticipated pricing changes, feature rollouts, and content shifts. over the following 36 months, many of our predictions came true. Some were eerily accurate. But there were some absolute sidewinder's not one had considered but the war gaming allowed the business to have a pivot plan just incase something like this one did. And this is where so many companies come unstuck not thinking through several moves ahead. The best companies always have pivot plans and something tucked up their sleeve.
War Gaming gave our business confidence—not just in our strategy, but in the tactics to execute it. It helped us advocate more persuasively with executives and validate our product roadmap with clarity.
Applying War Gaming to UX and Product Strategy
War gaming isn’t just for executives. UX and product teams can—and should—use it to:
- Anticipate competitor design changes: We’d often monitor competitors like Netflix and could tell when a new feature was coming by watching app store updates or studying design system changes.
- Identify delight gaps: By comparing their "MVP" feature with what a truly delightful version could look like, we could ideate faster.
- Validate with our own users: We’d bring those prototypes into user testing to see if our customers wanted the same thing, or something entirely different.
- Recognise intent: We often asked ourselves, "Is this design change solving a user problem, or hiding a business issue?"
Tips for War Gaming in UX/Product
- Map Competitor Patterns: Track how competitors evolve features and interfaces using screenshots, Figma libraries, or product changelogs.
- Overlay Customer Feedback: Align user interviews and NPS feedback to uncover areas your competitors missed—or nailed.
- Test With Real Users: Before committing to a build, test variations of war-gamed features to validate impact and demand.
- Know When to Copy, Leapfrog, or Ignore: Not every competitor move deserves a response—some are distractions.
Conclusion
War gaming makes strategy tangible. It shifts teams from reactive to proactive, and from guessing to preparing.
Whether you’re a C-suite leader or a UX designer, using war games in your workflow helps you stress-test ideas, align your team, and future-proof your roadmap. The best strategies don’t happen by accident—they’re played out before the first real move is made.
Start war gaming your business strategy today—and give your team the unfair advantage of foresight.
