The Art of Creating Bullshit User Personas
This article draws on the ideas from the book, ‘Validating Product Ideas’ by Tomer Sharon.
If you have ever worked in a product management or marketing role, there is little doubt that you have been asked this simple question:
Who are the users?
As basic as it sounds, knowing your target audience is one of the hardest things you might have to do. Product managers might come up with a specific answer to this and end up serving a completing different audience that sees some hidden value in their product. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be asking this question. Quite the opposite, actually.
Understanding the demographics and behaviours of your target customers plays a huge part in everything that follows: product ideas, design, and marketing. The importance is best highlighted by how an oversight in recognising your actual users can be a death knell for your product, while the right approach instead can separate you from the competition.
And the best time to ask this question is right at the initial part of the strategy-forming stage. In fact, if you feel that you haven’t asked this yet — be sure that asking right away is absolutely the best time. It might be too late at the execution stage to ask this question, but stopping and looking back is smarter than running ahead blindly.
So, how do we find our users?
Tomer Sharon in Validating Product Ideas calls ‘Interviewing along with persona development’ the best lean user research technique. While you deliberate on the phrase, know that this article only covers, though extremely critical to the entire discovery process, the initial stage of persona development — that of creating Bullshit Personas. The rest of the process is detailed in the book, and I would strongly recommend you to go through it.
What is a Bullshit (BS) Persona?
The idea of building a persona, i.e. an archetypal user of the product, is that it acts to give direction to thoughts and acts as a great communication tool across the product teams. Product managers all around suggest that a persona should always be based on research and never on assumptions, guesses, and beliefs. But forget that initially.
A bullshit persona is a persona that is based on guesses and assumptions (educated or not), instead of actual research. And the incredible strength of building bullshit personas lies in how it makes finding the actual user persona so much easier. A team that has brainstormed its BS personas will be better able to focus its research, validate or invalidate assumptions about product or users, and develop a research-based, actual, and reliable (no bullshit) persona.
How to Bullshit Your Way into a Persona
A couple of important aspects of building a BS persona is one, make it a group activity, and two, be absolutely honest with yourselves. Together with the team, ask the following questions about your audience and identify the aspects you are less confident of or are familiar with.
- How would you describe your target users? What are their primary characteristics?
- Are there different groups of users?
- How are user groups different?
- Is there a particular group that is more important than the other ones?
- Is there a particular group that you want to learn more about? Why?
- Who are (or would be) the early adopters of your product? What are their characteristics?
The best way to approach these is by discussing and listing your assumptions about the answers. It is equally important that you remain cognisant of the fact that these are assumptions and not facts by any means. Approach even the most basic of assumptions as just hypothesis, and work later towards validating them.
An idiosyncrasy that one must remember while following this is that if you feel some of the questions are similar to one another, it is not an error. Asking the same question in different ways is deliberate and acts to exhaust your team’s assumptions about the users from all angles. While performing this exercise, your team members might find themselves answering questions about the user’s goals, tasks, pain points, behaviours, experiences, and attitudes.
The groundwork has been done but we have still not imagined ourselves a bullshit persona. As your team answers the above questions, the task of building the BS persona begins and the earlier effort comes into use. This is how you can go about building the persona:
Step 1: Draw a large rectangle, divide it into four groups, and title each of them: [Persona Name], Demographics, Problems, and Solutions
Step 2: Under the persona name, be a little creative and sketch a face that seems most appropriate. It does not matter if it is not exactly artistic.
Step 3: Then in the second column, brainstorm and list points indicating some demographic data about the persona, such as age, occupation, marital status, kids, education, income, etc.
Step 4: In the third part, brainstorm and list points indicating the key problems you feel the persona has regarding your domain of interest.
Step 5: Lastly, in the fourth part, list down a few ideas for features or products that you feel will solve the persona’s problems you had listed earlier.
And ta-da! You have your bullshit persona. Repeat the same steps to create even more personas, but be aware of overdoing it. A rule of thumb: Any number more than 12 is a little too much bullshitting.
You are now done with the first and one important step of identifying your user personas. But remember that this persona should now act as a guideline through hypothesis’ for any further steps: deciding who to interview, finding the interviewees, and data collection through the interviews. Once you have gone through these steps, you are now ready to transform your BS personas into actual personas.
Good luck!
Hope you found the article informative. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the responses below!
