Thought Exercise: Personas

Agile Strategy

What is it?

Personas are profiles based on customer research or observations in the field that identified potential customers. They serve to bring customers to life for the team so they have customers and customer demographics to reference during conversation.

Why do it?

Personas are artifacts that can be used to inform product decisions, branding style, and marketing approaches.

When to do it?

Create personas at the start of the product development proces or when considering drastically changing a product.

How to do it?

Create believable, credible personas, which encapsulate understand and empathy, and include context and goals.

Customer characteristics: Name, role, brief characteristics, reason for using the existing or new product and their values.

Use: The customer’s manner and frequency of use for the product.

Goals: List the goals this type of customer would want to achieve using your product and prioritize based on importance and frequency.

Current pains: List reasons why trying to achieve these goals is difficult or painful for the customer today.

Needs and desires: List the customers’ needs, wants, hopes, and desires for the new product.

Scenario: Describe a brief activity scenario that provides motivation and context around the customers’ reasons for using your product.

Just be sure to avoid stereotypes or generic, critical category descriptions.

The agile flavor

Hold a workshop that might include people within UNI or within the students’ family who were the persona types that you want to create. If you can’t get family members, validate the details with them when the students go home and have them bring feedback back to class. Have participants brainstorm characteristics of each persona and record them on sticky notes for easy visibility, rearranging, and grouping.