RaiseAsk — Walking into Your Manager's Office with a Number
A career-negotiation simulation in four rounds.
About this simulation
A four-round, intermediate leadership & negotiation simulation set inside Nimbus Systems Pvt. Ltd., a Bengaluru enterprise-software company (740 staff, INR 620 crore revenue, ~78% recurring, 16% operating margin). Playing the Head of Product, you have ONE meeting to break a cross-team deadlock at the quarterly innovation gate.
Two anchor customers (24% of revenue, INR 149 crore — the largest on an INR 88 crore/year contract renewing in 90 days) each demand a different flagship capability; only one ships this quarter. Product champions a customer-requested AI insights module; Engineering insists the data layer must be re-architected first.
Nine shared engineers are the literal point of contention, INR 22 crore of expansion bookings hang on the release slot, last quarter's outage already cost INR 3 crore in SLA credits, and a respected senior PM and engineer have each signalled they may leave (~INR 45 lakh per replacement) if 'their side loses.' The simulation teaches the confidence paradox (Chetan Joshi, IJCM 2025): displayed confidence asserts a legitimate position up to an inflection point, then suppresses listening, hardens the counterpart, and stifles the integrative search innovation needs — an inverted-U, not a dial you simply turn to maximum.
Across four rounds you (1) diagnose each side's underlying INTEREST behind its position and read where each head's confidence sits; (2) calibrate your displayed confidence and choose a Thomas-Kilmann conflict mode (competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating) plus a fallback and opening move; (3) run the live negotiation — moving from positions to interests and structuring an integrative option (phased delivery, a feature flag, trading engineer allocation for a binding next-quarter commitment); and (4) lock a durable, operationalisable deal and repair the relationship so the at-risk PM and engineer stay.
The math rewards calibrated confidence near the inflection point, deliberate mode-matching, surfacing interests, a specific allocation-plus-customer-message agreement, and explicit relationship repair — and punishes the five classic errors: over-confidence that wins the room and triggers attrition, under-confidence that forfeits Product's customer-backed case, position bargaining that trades the same nine engineers, vague 'we'll-collaborate' agreements, and chasing resolution speed at the expense of the other three KPIs.
Final scoring tracks four KPIs read out to the CEO: Agreement Quality, Relationship Strength, Innovation Outcome, and Resolution Time.
Who it is for
An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.
How a session runs
- The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
- Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
- The simulation can be run in English, Español.
- The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.