How can you create effective user personas for biotechnology products?

Clearly identify which segment of your audience you want to understand better. Are they existing customers, potential customers, or a niche market segment? Determine how these personas will influence product development. Will they help in feature prioritization, guiding the user interface design, or tailoring the user experience? Assess how personas will shape your marketing strategies. This might include content creation, advertising channels, or messaging. Plan to use personas to understand various customer touchpoints and the journey they take from discovering your product to becoming loyal customers. Define how personas will be used to align different teams (like sales, marketing, development) and stakeholders

I like this section. Perhaps one thing it could do better is to highlight that there are infinite ways to look at your total customer base through the lens of segmentation/personas: i.e., you might be interested in people who hold certain positions within a department, AND/OR have a certain level of tenure, AND/OR have a particular technical/educational background, etc. Before even getting started, the point is that a proper business strategy necessarily determines 'where to play' ('who to talk with') and how to win ('how to delight them'). The name of the game is a few steps before 'defining objectives' — you need to understand where and why you focus on certain possible sets of objectives, goals, indicators, etc.

This is still rather general following the opening. I'd like to challenge the author (and other contributors) to think about what 'conducting user research' might be particular/ specific to biotech solutions. I appreciate this is a bit like asking 'how long is a piece of string'... but if we set out a message to our audience in our title and opening, let's deliver right?

Segments help to forecast market interest while Personas help to understand the behaviour of individual customers. Biotechnology companies in my experience benefit more from segmenting their market using a 'jobs to be done' approach. What do your customers want to do? For example, do they need a way to validate a reagent or answer a research question? Are they looking for an inexpensive way to test an Ab or do they need a disease-relevant cell model to confirm the role of the protein in a pathway? Both can be done using a KO cell line but the type of cell line, number of clones and range of edits will be very different. Defining the segments will help you to target the most valuable ones with the right product offer.

User personas are very important to success in business, as they drive many aspects of downstream decision making. I would argue that this needs to be higher up in this article. There are many frameworks one can follow, and some may be better suited for pharmaceutical products, others for agricultural, textiles, etc... Many teams stumble by not being aligned on the framework used. It doesn't help alignment where one scheme is used for a technical buyer and another is used for the decision maker. Take time to get together as a team and decide on which one is best for you. Then move on to subsequent steps, such as user research etc..

I think the role of digital disruption that's part and parcel of successful biotech business models needs to be briefly touched. Perhaps a way this could be done here would be to: ● Dedicate a short section on the importance of building connected, responsive digital solutions (i.e., going beyond 'product' and even 'platform' ways of looking at generated value) that constantly capture user data. ● Highlight that gathering proper, comprehensive insights about your existing customers is gonna be an invaluable way of prioritising your 'objectives' and personas — they might be entirely different people from who you expected they would be; and they might have unexpected shared traits that actually help retain and acquire customers better.