At some point in your career, you've heard the phrase "Put yourself in your customer's shoes". For a number of us (very early on in our careers), it ended up causing an arbitrary pause where we attempted to do as much before inevitably heading down what ended up being roughly the same path.
Looking back, what we lacked was a framework that allowed us to "walk in our customer's shoes". Enter the Persona - this rather simple (but difficult to consistently execute) framework allows you to distill the essence of your customer(s) in a manner that has real ramifications during the creation and marketing/sales phases of your product or service.
So what exactly is a "Persona"?
Well, simply put, its a description of your customer pool using certain demographic information and aspirations that is a distillation of multiple sources of information.
While there is no fixed template that you need to follow what works best is to understand how much information you might need to base your decision process on.
Most Personas contain the following information :
- Demographic details (Location, Age, Gender, Etc)
- Professional details (Job Title, Years of Experience, Education, Etc)
- Technology Literacy ( Devices Used, Services Used, Etc)
- Pain points & Frustrations (Professional & Personal)
- Goals & Aspirations (Professional & Personal)
- Fictional Name
It's important to note that the more information you have the better, but it should be relevant to the product or service you're attempting to build otherwise you end up collecting either too much or too little information without this rudder to steer you information gathering efforts.
When do you build these Personas?
A question I've been asked often during my lectures or product management sessions. The answer is right from Day 0. If you're building out a product or service from scratch it's important to create this baseline that can then be used as a guidepost to a lot of your decision making. In the event you haven't had the opportunity to do so and already have a product or service in the market it's still worth investing some time to flesh this out as this will reap rewards for you in the future.
If you can, make the process of creating these Personas a team-building exercise. Ensure you have representation from different departments - Business, Product, UX, Operations, Support, Marketing & Sales. They will each bring their experience to bear that will enrich the quality of your Persona, and help with stakeholder management down the road.
Where do I source information from?
There is a goldmine of information somewhere out there, the question is how much time and resources you have available at hand to get to it.
There are a number of ways of collating information :
- Information on existing customers (Analytics for example)
- Secondary market research
- Assumptions (yes you do need to make a few of those)
- Primary market research (Questionnaires, calls, etc)
If you're a young start-up there is a good chance you might not have the capital to take a wide-sweeping information-gathering approach. However, there is a lot of information already out there on your target group. Leverage secondary research so that you have somewhere to start from.
How many Personas should I build?
Given that a Persona isn't a specific individual, rather a representation of a homogeneous set of individuals the next question that arises is how many of these should I create? The more detailed your Persona the greater the chance that you have a larger number of levers to play with, creating a whole new subset with every small change.
For example:
- If you're building a tech-based product should you classify users who use a Tablet separately than users who use a Mobile Phone? Do you go a step further and create sub-sets for Mobile devices as well?
- Should you separate Male from Female?
- Should you create separate personas based on age brackets?
- Should you create separate personas based on education?
- And so on......
The answer to this depends solely on the product or service you're building, and with how much detail you want to understand different paths of access for these Personas.
The simple rule of thumb is that if you think your product or service will be experienced differently by these users sets then invest that effort to create a new persona map.
Start with a base set of Personas and see if you need to break them down further as you uncover more through your productization process.
Now that I have my Personas how should I use them?
Assuming you've spent a significant amount of time building out these detailed Personas, and you've had a chance to show them off at your next leadership meeting it's important you don't put it on a high shelf somewhere.
You only derive value from this exercise when you use it on a day-to-day basis as part of your decision-making process. When there is a decision that needs to be made and you have to "put yourself in your customer's shoes" take the Persona maps out and then use that as a template to figure out what that specific persona might do at that event. If you find that you don't have enough information on the Persona map to give you insight it's probably a sign that you need to add a little more detail to it.
Do Personas evolve?
Yes. Just as you aren't the same person you were a year ago your Personas evolve just as much. Their aspirations, pain points, financial status, professional role, technology literacy, etc, all evolve. This means that you need to update your Personas as often as you can to ensure they are a closer reflection of reality. Try updating them once a year to start with, or as you learn more about that group as information starts building.
Is it worth all this effort?
While doing this once in a workshop environment is a great way to bring up your team to speed quickly on how to build and use Personas (and to ensure a common understanding). The real challenge is doing this consistently, and that only happens when you have a strong leader who understands the benefits of building, maintaining and using this framework through the product lifecycle. In the numerous workshops that I've conducted for start-ups and mature companies on the subject that's the one clear differentiator that really has an impact on the outcome.
I've seen first hand the benefits of using this:
- Building a product that's relevant for your user group.
- Improving stakeholder buy-in
- Marketing messaging that resonates with the target group
- Delivering delighters
- Managing costs
- And much, much more...
So if you're serious about making a difference with how your product is built, and received, start with the Persona!