T-Shaped Personas for +Customer Lifetime Value
The T-shaped person concept has a 30+ year tenure in recruiting and employee development. Now, apply it to your customer strategy to grow richer engagement.
This article embraces a simple goal — keep more customers, and keep them longer. We know customers leave for many reasons. They stay when they love a product, feel like they gain significant value from it, or perceive switching — from it, to another — as too costly or painful.
To help organizations realize that goal, the article introduces a business strategy tool, the T-shaped Persona. The tool helps us target the minimally engaged customer, and assess her awareness of our product’s features. The tool also helps us develop tactics to help our user find features that other users love — with our hope being — she will love them too. As we said above, customers stay when they love a product.
Key Concepts
- A persona is an abstract representation of a typical user or customer. We often focus on the buyer persona and the moments-that-matter for our buyer’s journey. This article focuses on the customer already using our product or service.
- A feature is an important part, quality or ability of a product that makes it distinct or better; it usually contributes to the overall value proposition.
- A product feature matrix maps product(s) on one axis, to features on an intersecting axis. It is typically used to compare competing, similar products, or differentiate a product’s versions from product Gamma to Gamma+, Gamma 2.0 and so on.
- The T-Shaped person is a talent management concept, attributed to McKinsey & Company, that describes the depth or domain expertise of an individual along the vertical stroke of the letter ‘T’, while also describing that same individual’s breadth across varied other disciplines along the ‘T’ horizontal bar.
- A T-Shaped Persona is a new concept. It’s a business strategy tool, similar to the talent concept above, visualized by a ‘T’; it also conveys a breadth and depth. Its differences start with its job — act as a visual guide to inspect a persona’s adoption and use of our product(s). The vertical stroke of the letter ‘T’ signifies depth of product experience, while the ‘T’ horizontal conveys typical persona attributes like geographic, firmographic, occupational, and other traits.
By adding gradients of feature adoption to our user persona, we can better understand different levels of expertise amongst users.
This understanding affords us opportunity to ask different questions:
What is it about this persona that makes them so successful with our product? What can we learn about product-fit? Will our lookalike segments also engage as deeply?
This understanding also affords us opportunities to engage differently.
Anecdotal start
At the dawn of time (for me, professionally-speaking), I spent time in financial services; early days of online banking. It was there that I first came to understand the concept of a “sticky service,” exemplified at that time in a feature called, Bill Pay. The ‘sticky’ nature? When customers enabled bill pay features — they seldom left.
The “sticky service” was a galvanizing concept for business and technology. Dev teams worked with added focus to remove friction from the sign up experience. Assurance functions were created to monitor its health. As we matured, two questions emerged— How can we create more sticky services, and how can we get all of our customers to adopt these features?
The Recipe
Follow along and combine the ingredients below. Just like a cookbook author assumes the chef has basic supplies, I’ll assume you’re ready to engage your customer. Just like a baker needs pans, bowls, a mixer and so on, the organization needs tools for success in digital engagement.
Know the customer
We need more than just a basic buyer or user persona. We need to be able to interact with the customer to change her behavior. At a minimum, we want to be able to build upon current usage data. We also need marketing automation capability including things like journey management, segmentation and activation.
Know the product
You should have a product feature matrix. The instrumentation of our product usage should be organized and made consumable in a way that allows us to correlate our users’ use of features to the same language we use to talk about the product. The fictitious, GreenGrass Health, product feature matrix below is a reasonable example. A quick look via your search engine will reveal hundreds of examples.
Name your product usage levels
Feature list in hand, assess how your users progress through awareness and adoption of those features. Use that information to name the levels of expertise. Recall, these represent depth, or the vertical bar of our T-Shaped Persona. These should be a spectrum or range. Our GreenGrass Health example continues below, and it spans from ‘New’ to ‘Advocate’.
Map names to feature awareness depth
Start with a feature list. Use the data you have about your product features, and attempt to sort it by feature adoption — most advanced to most basic. Your product feature matrix is a good start.
For example, in Table-1 above, GreenGrass Health’s product feature matrix, we show product versions, column by column, showing the improvements from version I to version II. The matrix is a good place to start from as we already know these are features we market, because (hopefully) these are features we know our users care about.
Now, lay out the levels of expertise, left to right to plot your intersecting chart. Assign values to those intersecting points. We use empty circle to denote that the user is aware of the feature; full circle means use of the feature. The view begins to tell a story.
Add the Persona to complete the ‘T’
With awareness of our product’s features plotted out, it’s time to overlay our persona as the horizontal bar of the ‘T’. We’ve outlined two examples, Zooey and Shay. Each persona has different traits and characteristics, and GreenGrass Health needs tactics to be successful with both of these personas.
Meet Zooey, ideal customer
The Zooey persona seems to like the GreenGrass Health app. She seems to engage with its features in steady progression, and the fact is that the distribution shows our Zooey is likely an ideal customer for this product with only 20% participating as only New or Basic.
Meet Shay, churn risk
GreenGrass Health has to think about Shay, next. Shay doesn’t adopt in the same way, and in fact Shay often simply stops with Billing and Payments features, and never goes much further. As a result, Shay is more likely to leave GreenGrass Health. He doesn’t love the product, and doesn’t get much value from it.
Opportunity to engage differently
You’ll observe that each GreenGrass Health has an action plan for Shay. GGH has marked up the T-Shaped Persona for Shay with action details:
- The Basic and Explorer levels are identified as the places where GGH will take action.
- The Call-to-Action that GGH has in mind has a clear outcome in mind — get Shay to adopt Health Records Management, which is now starred on the table above it in the Adept column.
In this case, GGH is working under the hypothesis that Health Records Management will be the most valuable, and most sticky feature, of their app. The hope is that when Shay adopts, it will truly be that feature that will keep him engaged, and prevent his churning away. Through the insight gained, and made visual using the T-Shaped Persona, GGH plans on shifting the Shay persona’s product depth distribution through targeted engagement that will bring Shay to find and use a feature he should love.
Closing
If you’re an executive, technologist, marketer or product owner responsible for creating a better customer experience, there are fantastic outcomes here for you in this practice. Improved brand, improved product stickiness, reduced churn and greater customer lifetime value all contribute to greater revenue. As a secondary benefit, recall the galvanizing comment from my anecdotal start? This customer-product-fit understanding can benefit your internal teams, affording them insights so they can create more compelling products and experiences.
Does your product meet the needs of all your customers, equally? Do you have a sticky service? Do you know which features are more valuable than the next for different, but similar customers? My final counsel — explore these nuances. Do the work to understand your customers, and have a clear view of how your product meets their needs. The T-Shaped Persona is a great tool to help make this visual and actionable.
Thank you
Thank you for reading. As always, much gratitude to those along the way that influenced me and helped nurture my craft.
