User Personas: The Value For Business
“Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, and their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires” Steve Jobs
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Do you know how many people are living on Earth? Almost eight billion! And all these people are different. They speak other languages, eat different food, follow diverse traditions, and have different goals and problems. So entrepreneurs hunt for those goals and problems to use them as opportunities to create a successful business.
Because people have different goals and problems, you can't focus your business on all of them. So you need to know your target. That is where User Personas come to help.
There is a lot of information about creating User Personas, but how to use them effectively for your business? That is what I want to talk about in this article.
User Personas represent the perfect customers that you are targeting. You can have one or several personas for your product that include the following aspects: demographics, interests, behaviors, and product-related characteristics.
User Personas will help your business to:
- Define value proposition
- Build the product strategy and roadmap
- Design customer-centric products
- Create problem statements
- Align teams in the company
- Innovate
Let's discuss these points in detail!
Define Value Proposition
“The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” Richard Branson (Founder of Virgin Group)
No business can exist without creating value. Cool technology, a foolproof financial model, a can't-miss media strategy, etc., are irrelevant if you haven't nailed the two core questions that make up a value proposition:
- Who is your target customers?
- How are you different from your competition?
Defining User Personas contributes directly to creating a value proposition as they answer the first question — who is your target customers? Knowing your target customer helps to build the right strategy focused on the user.
Build The Product Strategy And Roadmap
“Focusing on beating the competition and aiming to build competitive advantages frequently leads to imitative, not innovative approaches to the market.” Chan Kim | Renee Mauborgne (Blue Ocean Strategy)
A lot of companies are obsessed with their competitors. But this way, you will always be behind — while trying to copy your competitors, they are working on the new functionality.
Creating User Personas helps to switch the focus from your competitors to your customers. When creating the roadmap, add User Personas to the list of features so you know what you are doing and for who. Once you have done it, you will see what type of users you prioritized. For example, if your goal is to bring more newbies to your product, but according to your roadmap, you are targeting pro users — you might want to change priorities.
Design Customer-Centric Products
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we are customer obsessed. We start with the customer, and we work backwards.” Jeff Bezos (Chairman And Founder, Amazon)
Designers aim to solve problems and make users' life easier. Usually, designers know the problem they are solving, but most of the time, unfortunately, they have no idea for whom they are solving this problem.
Product managers might have their "picture of the user" in mind, and they can share this "picture" with designers, but it's only an assumption that is hard to be trusted.
Before starting the design, put the User Persona card in front of you, and read the Persona's motivations and pain points again. Try to empathize with your Persona every time you are designing. With this approach, you will hardly ever lose direction.
Create Problem Statements
“We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.” Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup)
Defining a problem is the most critical step in solving any problem. Nothing is as strong a reason for the failure of a project as a lack of understanding of the problem we are solving. A Problem Statement is a tool that helps the team define the problem that needs to be solved and answer why it needs to be solved and who has this problem.
A Problem Statement also helps uncover things the team doesn't know the answers to and helps define assumptions that need validation. Let's discuss it later in my next article and return to our Personas.
As a Problem Statement answers the question of what we are doing, why, and for whom, User Persona helps to define the user we are targeting. Include the User Persona in your Problem Statement document and discuss it with the team. You will see how it will help the team to focus and create a better user experience for chosen Persona.
Align Teams In The Company
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker (Father of modern management theory)
When the company is small and just starting its journey, it's easy to align with the team about who your target customers are. Of course, it might be only an assumption that needs to be validated, but still — it is a shared understanding that leads the team in the same direction.
What happens when the company grows? The more people join the company, the harder it is to maintain this assumption — when there is no evidence behind it, there is always space for doubts. So product managers, designers, developers, and other team members will have different understandings of the users and their problems. It leads to decisions that drive a product in different directions and prioritize wrong features.
Shared across the company, User Personas solve this problem. Create a document with User Personas and share them with everyone in the company. Marketing, Support, Product, Design, Engineering, and other teams will have an evident and trustworthy source of truth about who is their target audience. In addition, it will increase transparency and alignment between the teams.
Innovate
“Success comes from knowing what you don’t know, more than coming from what you do know” Ray Dalio (Founder & Co-Chief Investment Officer, Bridgewater Associates)
Creating User Personas is a good exercise for the team to stay open-minded. It's always easier to say: "I know who our users are," rather than do the research and shake your own beliefs.
While working on User Personas, the team creates hypotheses and assumptions for future validation and questions everything they think they know. This process opens creative thinking and helps to generate more innovative ideas by brainstorming.
The more you talk to and explore your customers, the more trustworthy User Personas will become. It's a marathon, not a sprint. So create your first User Personas and use them as a direction, but never stop generating the data to validate them regularly.