What's your process for refining customer personas?

Simply focusing on the human is not enough. IVP - Ideal Vertical Profile -- This defines 3-4 verticals a company should focus on. It must be based on the specific use cases related to the verticals you believe will gravitate the fastest. One cannot be a horizontal solution until you own a few verticals. The rest will follow. ICP1 = Ideal Company Profile -- This is a clear definition of the right companies in the vertical ICP2 = Ideal Customer Persona -- This is the definition of the 3-5 personas at each company and their specific use case-related pains. These are all "chicken and egg" decisions. One may need to run them in parallel, not simply one after the other.

To expand on Richard Harris' expert insights - between his framing of ICP1 and ICP2, for some verticals, there may be ICP 1.1, 1.2, etc. This will be driven by verticals that have multiple segments if not subsegments that matter in terms of where the use case(s) fit.

You can do this by testing your personas with real customers or prospects, using methods like interviews, focus groups, or usability tests. You can also compare your personas with your existing data and metrics, such as conversion rates, retention rates, or satisfaction scores.

We're talking customer personas here, not marketing personas. Some seem to have missed this, so it all should start and end with customer research. Use your customer research to inform the construction of your customer personas with your cross-functional co-creation team of people living at the edge of the organization. But don't stop there, then give the team one last chance to validate the personas before doing some quick validation research with customers as well.

Regular user interviews provide the qualitative insights I need to keep customer personas feeling fresh. Like the time a customer casually mentioned restructuring their sales team. That tiny anecdote clued me in to refine their persona around new use cases for sales territories, permissions and analytics. Continuous two-way dialogue with customers gives the human context data alone misses. It's how I make sure personas evolve alongside the real people they represent.

Get real with your personas. Not just a title and generic facts about the 'typical' person in that role. Name them, give them a favorite vacation spot, and decide if they have a family... It feels a little silly but you will find that it allows you to truly speak to your target when creating content.

Relevance and resonance. These are the goals you are measuring against when validating personas with the audience they are meant to represent. The key questions are "Do you see yourself in one or more of these personas?" and "Which elements sound the most like you?"

Customer personas are a key aspect of the design thinking process, because they help the groups working on identifying solutions to better understand a customer who is defined and empathize with him/her. They rediscover the fact customers are real humans who are using products / services and their struggles become visible and relatable.

Remember, customer personas are different than marketing personas and help us focus our design efforts on the differences in wants, needs, behaviors, frustrations, etc. of different customer groups in their interactions with the interfaces of the organizations. The better we can orient the organization, its tools and its people to meet the expectations of its customers, the more successful we will be.

Regardless of use case, objective, or the team responsible for developing the customer personas, they shouldn't be treated as static. As new data or feedback arises, update them accordingly, as often as reasonably possible.