Building Agile Sprint Spree: an interactive trade show game for PMI
PMI needed a way to make its agile resources unforgettable on a packed show floor. So we built a game people couldn’t stop replaying.
PMI has one of the deepest resource libraries in the project management world — toolkits, standards, playbooks, thought-leadership reports, podcasts, and certifications including the PMI-ACP® for agile practitioners. The hard part was never producing that content. It was getting a professional who’s racing between sessions at a packed industry conference to actually stop, absorb, and remember it.
PMI brought that problem to PMI Global Summit 2025 in Phoenix, Arizona — held not long after Agile Alliance officially joined PMI to champion “the agile movement” and push it beyond software into full enterprise agility. A banner or a stack of brochures wasn’t going to carry that message across a three-day show floor. PMI asked Elation Digital to build something attendees would choose to interact with on their own, held to the same bar as any other activation from a serious B2B trade show marketing agency: compelling enough to pull someone out of the aisle, and substantial enough to actually teach them something once they stopped.
We designed and built Agile Sprint Spree, a large-format vertical interactive wall mounted inside PMI’s dedicated “Agile Arcade” activation zone.
Instead of a quiz or a product demo, we built a fast touch-catching game: a wall-mounted touchscreen fills with floating, cloud-shaped icons, each labeled with a real PMI resource — Toolkit, Report, Playbook, Thought Leadership, Podcast, and PMI Standards among them. Players race a countdown clock, tapping as many icons as they can before time runs out.
The mechanic that made it work is the streak. Consecutive catches build a score multiplier, so a hot run is worth far more than a scattered one — miss a tap or hesitate too long, and the screen flashes “Streak Broken: Multiplier Lost,” resetting the multiplier to zero. That one rule turned a simple catching game into something with real stakes, and it happened to reward the exact behavior PMI’s content teaches: staying alert, adapting fast, and recovering when a plan breaks.
Every icon on screen mapped to a real piece of PMI’s agile portfolio, and the unit sat next to digital signage promoting the PMI-ACP certification — so collecting icons and learning what PMI actually offers were the same action, not two messages competing for attention. The hardware itself had to hold up to three days of nonstop walk-up play on a crowded expo floor, which is its own build requirement: durable touch response, a game loop that resets cleanly between players, and a live score feed piped straight to the leaderboard display next to it.
Next to the game, a second screen ran a live leaderboard, updating after every play. It’s a small addition with an outsized effect: the moment attendees saw their score slide down the rankings, or saw a top score just out of reach, they came back to try again. By the event’s final stretch, the leading score had climbed past 8,000 points, built entirely by players returning to beat their own best run.
That loop — play, check your rank, come back to beat it — is what turns a single interaction into three or four. It’s the same principle behind most of the games we build for conferences: the game itself is the hook, but a leaderboard, a streak mechanic, or a head-to-head format is what keeps people circling back between sessions instead of walking past once.
Agile Sprint Spree never stood apart from PMI’s message. It lived inside the Agile Arcade alongside PMI-ACP certification signage and PMI’s broader agile learning content, built to carry that message across the show floor rather than distract from it.
Agile Sprint Spree became one of the most-replayed branded games we’ve built. Attendees didn’t play once and move on — they circled back between sessions specifically to chase a better score, which meant repeated, voluntary exposure to PMI’s agile resources and certification messaging, delivered as play rather than a pitch.
That’s the outcome we build toward on every activation: something people choose to come back to, that’s doing the client’s job the entire time.