Who are they and what do they want?

, or an actionable guide on writing personas.

Learn about your customers before you build products for them.

A few months ago I started reading Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams. It wasn’t the smoothest read. It was the wrong book so my expectations were off, but I also think the content wasn’t structured linearly. It made building a foundation of understanding difficult.

So I bought the correct book: Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience. This was much easier read. Just like the other book, it spends paper convincing the reader why they should do Lean UX, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’m already convinced and just need a how-to. So, over the next few posts, I’ll provide the how-to I would have preferred fo this book.

I’m taking directly from the book, condensing and moving topics to create a linear progression, and adding my own thoughts. I also include the page numbers from the book to make connecting these posts & their book easier. If what you read below is intriguing and you want more, buy the book. Seriously. It’s a must read for product managers.

Here are the steps to doing Lean UX. Bolded items are this post’s content.

1. Create personas.
2. Write a problem statement.
3. Declare assumptions.
4. Write hypotheses.
5. Run design studios.
6. Create MVPs.
7. Test the MVPs.
8. Review the results.
9. Refine the MVP.
10. Launch.

Create Personas (pg. 26)

Before you build anything, determine your target market. It’s a great learning exercise for you as product manager, answers “Who are we doing this for?”, and creates focus for the team. With a persona, the team switches conversations from “The user needs…” to “Nina needs…”. That’s a subtle but huge shift in thinking for the team. It humanizes everything that’s done, and provides context and value for all the work that’s done.

The persona itself is basic. Split a sheet of sheet of paper or spreadsheet into the following 4 quadrants and write down this info into each quadrant:

1. In the top-left is their name & a rough sketch of them (think Dilbert not Mona Lisa).
2. The top-right is info like relationship status, age, # of kids, work habits, values, etc…
3. The bottom-left should be their stated issues & needs relative to your product.
4. The bottom-right is a quick list of possible solutions to their issues & needs.

The bottom-left quadrant of the persona is gold. Customers are literally telling you their issues and needs. Gold.

That’s it. Get this info by getting out of the building (GooB) and talking to customers. Lean UX is mostly talking to customers. Nothing happens without that. Step 7 (Test the MVPs) covers how to do this.

So interview customers & look for patterns in their responses. Use like-responses to build 1 persona. Ideally a single persona will be based off a few different customers’ responses. Do this until you have 3–5 personas.

How do you find your customers? Pay someone to recruit them for you if possible. It’ll save a lot of time. Otherwise:

• send an email asking for volunteers
• ask on social media
• ask support reps to ask customers
• put an email capture box on the website or app
• set-up a booth at a trade show or retail store
• walk around a mall with a clipboard
• check your data for information

Give volunteers Amazon gift cards to entice them. Keep your list of amazing volunteers for future reference.

The next post is about writing the problem statement, which is more like a concept than a sentence. If you’ve done the persona, you’re half done with the problem statement. Congrats!