Building a product for everyone is a recipe for bland.

In this post I am going to talk about why you should consider using a single persona to constrain your product in the early stages of development.

But before going further, I’ll try to be clear on what exactly I mean by personas, as there are two key definitions that are often conflated in to one fuzzy concept.

• Marketing personas are usually based on segmentation data and are compiled from research on demographics that cluster similar groups of users together based on demonstrated behaviour. They are used in order to establish the best ways reaching and appealing to target customers.
• Design personas try to capture why people do things, and are based on goals & needs — identifying the driving dimensions that have a direct impact on users’ interaction with the product.

I’m going to be referring to the second type of persona, as that will give us an archetypal user (based on empirical evidence from real user research) that combines the key behavioural and motivational information we need to design the product, including those important early-in-the-experience features.

Taking a per-persona approach to early product development

For consumer companies, I like a product strategy which tackles one persona at a time (e.g. Product Market Fit on a per-persona basis).

Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group

Successful products have built their product a slice at a time in order to achieve their P/m fit, and new products can’t shortcut that process, even if you are entering an existing product category.

Taking a slice-by-slice approach is tried and tested, and for consumer products it works best if it is based on personas — as opposed to vertical market segments (e.g. industries or geographies) for B2B/SaaS products/platforms. It is no coincidence that Spotify ask themselves “who will benefit from this product and how?” right at the start of their famous “think it, build it, ship it, tweak it” approach.

This means that you need incorporate the per-persona approach to product design right from the outset, including for some of the most-used (but often overlooked) features such as landing pages and the onboarding process.

Whilst you may be the super-user of your new product, you are probably too close to the long-term Product Vision to be the sole inspiration for a persona. You need to make these profiles by speaking to your users & customers — Marty Cagan has pointed out why personas are important to Product Managers — and his article’s points apply just as well to startup founders. One of the most applicable pieces of advice is that confusing yourself with your customers is an often-made, but avoidable, mistake.

Remember, Product/market fit is when people who know they want your product are happy with what you’re offering. Just like the B2B product that tackles one industry at a time, a startup consumer product should be thinking about approaching Product/market fit one persona at a time.

Trying to build a product for all of your personas is a recipe for bland. Choose just one persona, and build the first version of your product based on its needs, goals and motivations.

Your product will evolve over time, and this approach means that you can tackle the challenge of making a product that people want, based on clearly defined personas that you can use to further refine your offering based on feedback. This approach neatly aligns with Guy Kawasaki’s belief that great products need to be intelligent. Great products constantly interpret evidence from feedback loops in to the development of their product so that it provides solutions to users’ needs and goals.

Taking a sliced approach reduces risk and, once achieved, means that you know that you are serving the needs of one (and then two, three, four — you get the point) persona rather than hoping that your approach will meet the needs of the market.

Additional work will be needed later on, but this series of ‘fits’, or versions of your product should form the product strategy needed to achieve your vision.

Taking the per-persona approach helps you quickly determine the key motivational differences in each market, and what that means for your product’s offering. If you are entering an existing product segment, this approach will give you clearly defined opportunities to go back to what your product’s differentiatiors are compared to the competition, and an opportunity to analyse and double-down on your competitive dimension.

Rationale for choosing your first persona

If you are an early-stage tech startup following this per-persona approach, then you need to choose your primary persona with the knowledge that your early adopters will have a very different make-up to your early majority — once described aptly as the difference between Passionates vs. nonpassionates.

If you’d like to read more about the topic of early adopters, Product Hunt have published a great post that answers some commonly asked questions about them that should help you frame your approach (and give you some ideas on where to find them!).