Get to know our process: Gather
If you missed our last post, meet Unlikely Connections. There’s some useful context over there for this piece.
In this publication’s first post we also talked about the overlap between RevOps and UX or service design. (This was a homework assignment from the authors of another newsletter, Personal Math. One of our favorite resources; highly recommend.)
We mention it because RevOps is the lens we use for the first part of our process. What does this mean? You need to coherently collect and look at all the data sources available to you, not just the ones in your domain.
We applied our “Gather” phase for a design team that was asked to generate new personas for a fintech expanding their product line.
How a persona is typically made
When design teams are asked to generate or update personas, it’s a broad ask. Taking it at face value can put a project at risk in part because most people are aware that they need to use a persona to look customer-centric, but aren’t exactly sure how they’re made or how long it should take. Project execution can quickly become sidelined by expectation management and PR exercises for the design team.
Process-wise, typically a team blends imagination, domain expertise, ideal client profiles, and some level of generative research, then presents the persona(s) back to the team. Getting teams to adopt the work is usually through “road shows.”
How a persona can be made using our “Gather” process
Get the whole picture from the rest of the business first — and take the opportunity to talk to people who you want to use what you will make later.
As we talk about on our site, we included our “gather” phase in a persona project. Here’s how it looks:
- Pull together in a spreadsheet every type of persona documentation you can find, from anywhere in the business. For example, ideal client profile information and marketing segments, and even some spitball notes from the CEO hiding in a Notion document.
- Speak to mid-level leadership from product, marketing, data science, and customer service. We also ask each representative how their teams like to consume information, and how they would integrate new data into their workflows.
- Review design archives of usability studies, presentations, or research that could give clues as to the assumptions the team used.
The short term impact of a “Gather” phase
The short term impact of the “Gather” phase shows up in two ways.
- As in RevOps, you first gather all existing data. This behaviour demonstrates resourcefulness and budget-consciousness.
Design teams, we have experienced, tend to want to jump straight into generating new data when they need to answer a question, which is expensive and harder to defend.
2) Also as in RevOps, you reposition your team as part of one system with the rest of the domain representatives you speak to. Including their beliefs and existing habits as hypotheses for the data gap-filling work takes the repositioning a step further, and drives up the likelihood of universal buy-in.
“Road show,” we believe, implies having to travel — and therefore that others are significantly separate from your team. The fact that a road show comes after the work is all done means domain representatives get whatever updates the team gives, and then are shown something they are expected to adopt once it’s made. It’s something made for them, rather than with them.
The medium term impact of a “Gather” phase
Despite the desire for new personas, there is always a risk that key stakeholders will not accept them, favoring their own expertise or opinions.
Because of the “Gather” phase, when the personas are ready, they are more likely to be immediately and widely adopted. In our experience this includes at the executive level.
While personas are ultimately a tool for other activities that directly relate to revenue generation or cost savings, the “Gather” process still demonstrates awareness of, and participation in, these key business metrics.
- Because you gather so much existing intel first, you can more precisely articulate where gaps in data are that require more work. Your generative research costs are easier to justify.
- If you leverage the gathered intel to create an interim persona framework and redistribute it back out to all teams, you allow the business to continue more coherently with existing revenue generating projects. (In other words — design is not the blocker.)
- You can amplify the persona deliverable return on investment by distributing it in a way that reflects what other teams asked for in the beginning. High uptake means cost savings: you avoid waste from doing ineffective work or compelling someone else to repeat your effort later.
How can a “Gather” phase help you?
Applying a RevOps lens using our “Gather” phase of a project can be a gamechanger for your workflows. You can:
- Get a sense of your whole org’s state of play, which lays groundwork for later adoption of the work
- Surface and recombine existing data or artifacts for interim benefit, preventing blockers
- Concretely expose gaps in data, making a further data-generating expense understandable
A huge thank you to Torian Parker for his support and brilliant editing. ✨
