Adventures in Product Management 2: Personas (User Experience)

When we have a product we must think about who it is for. To do this we need user research. When this user research is done, we can then figure out who our idealised customers are, these are what we call Personas.

So what actually are “Personas”?

Well, According to ProductPlan:

A Persona is a profile of a product’s ideal customers. They are used to help a Product Manager understand key traits, behaviours, goals, responsibilities, and needs of a specific type of user.

Using what we have learnt from last week on Missions and Visions, when creating a product it is important to know who you are building this for, and why you are building it.

Let’s assume we’re building a football boot aimed at conscious consumers. As we do this, we need to think about: what people are looking for in a football boot, more specifically who we want to buy our boot, who we are targeting and who is going to make us rich!

We understand our niche in the market would to be more environmentally friendly, cost-effective and accessible for consumers feet that struggle to be comfortable with the likes of Nike’s and Adidas’ football boots. All good stuff, but how do we validate this assumption that people want this? How do we test that hypothesis? Well, we do that through user research. We go off and talk to anyone we can through surveys, questionnaires. Then we smush all this research together into one large pile that we end up searching through. We use that research to develop market segments. We then personify these segments into people, theoretical people and give them names, get to know them, dream about those people, fall in love with those people, the people we sell our product to! It doesn’t matter that they don’t exist, these are who we build our product for! So how should we go about doing this?

Assuming our football boot is aiming to be great for your wallet, and your performance. What questions should we ask?

1. Are you buying for your self or for someone else? Yes or No.
2. Which is the most important to you? a. The environment? b. The cost of living? c. Fashion? d. Nothing.
3. What barriers do you face when buying football boots?
4. Tell us about you! What is important to you?
5. Tell us what you look for in boots? — cosmetics, colours, etc.

Well, what is the problem with these questions? Well, questions 3, 4 and 5 are questions most customers could lose interest in. Most customers that are asked to do a survey or questionnaire are not going to be bothered about writing an essay or do some soul searching on a Saturday night! Therefore, we need to have a sheer volume of answers or to reward people for answering this, such as a £20 Amazon voucher. This will allow us to accumulate the user research we need to create our personas.

Now, lets assume that we have done our survey. We have settled on three types of people or personas. I have come up with: Weird Foot Wayne, Conscious Consuela and Gifting Gertrude.

Weird Foot Wayne has got feet that don’t fit normal football boots, Conscious Consuela doesn’t like the waste in the football boot industry, and Gifting Gertrude is just happy to be there, no idea what’s going on, just wants to buy a nice gift for someone!

I think it is important to create personas that do not discriminate the customers, when they discover that they fall into a certain persona. A perfect persona should make customers feel happy to be a Gifting Gertrude!

To make things easier to visualise, lets meet the three.

Using Xtensio’s persona templates:

№1 Weird Foot Wayne

Here you can understand exactly who Weird Foot Wayne is! Ask yourself, does he remind you of anyone? Do you have any Wayne’s in your life?

Wayne’s trouble is that he can’t get a boot that allows him to reach his goals. Therefore he can’t go off and play football, with his friends and family carefree.

Why isn’t Wayne there? Why can’t he reach his goals? Wayne enjoys his work too much, he likes what he is currently doing and is very proud of where he is today. He has a sense of pride he doesn't want to let go.

By creating football boots that apply to Wayne’s challenges we can help him fall back in love with football, and give him the ability to reach his goals.

Now lets meet the other two…

№2 Conscious Consuela

Here you can understand exactly who Conscious Consuela is! Ask yourself, does she remind you of anyone? Do you have any Consuela’s in your life?

Consuela’s trouble is that she thinks she should be doing more. As she travels often, eats' lots of different foods, she wants to outweigh the worst. Her reason for this is because she is very competitive, with both herself and others. Therefore she needs to do more!

Why isn’t Consuela there? Why can’t she reach her goals? Perhaps Consuela is getting in her own way. She is constantly travelling, outside of this she works a very stressful career, and is heavily competitive. I think, she needs a product that shows her progress through apps and metrics. This will allow her to set and achieve targets, showing a clear journey of her improvement and progression.

By creating football boots that apply to Consuela’s challenges, we can help her to stay fit and healthy, save the environment (with environmentally crafted boots), and stay competitive with herself and whoever she is playing with.

Last one I promise…

№3 Gifting Gertrude

Here you can understand exactly who Gifting Gertrude is! Ask yourself, does she remind you of anyone? Do you have any Gertrude’s in your life?

Gertrude’s trouble is that she doesn’t know what gifts she should be giving. She doesn’t know what the people want. Is she in her own head?

Why isn’t Gertrude there? Why can’t she reach her goals? Her barrier is that she is conscious of having more money than her siblings. She doesn’t want to cause trouble, by giving the kids expensive tastes. Doesn’t want to waste money either.

By creating football boots that apply to Gertrude’s challenges, we can give her the present she can no longer worry about giving. As it is cost effective, she will not be giving expensive tastes, and allowing her nieces and nephews the opportunity to become the footballers they dream of. Gertrude would definitely be interested further through the use of discounts and schemes to save money. Perhaps a project of handing in old boots, to receive discounts when buying new boots, would really stand out to Gertrude.

With all this in mind. I think it is very clear to see why Persona’s, are so instrumental to the product plan, and development to delight its customers. Therefore proving to be very important to a Product Manager.