How can personas help you prioritize product features?

Personas are statistical personification of your user base. The beauty of User-Personas is that, it adds qualitative information to the quantitative foundation to provide a comprehensive picture which can be used to assess Product features and values.

In any buying decision, the 2 most imp questions are : 1) will I be able to use this ? 2) will it add value in my day to day life? Personas are imaginary person (or a group of people, robots or machines) which helps in getting logical answers to above questions by categorizing their needs, wants for the services or products they are going to use. User empathy sits at the center of personas identification and it helps you understand the different market and make decisions accordingly. It is a secret sauce for think global (user base and market size), act local (product development).

Personas are simply the type of users with a story and purpose. For example Personas for using LinkedIn's Top voice feature: Persona : John John is an avid reader and technology Enthusiast. Takes active participation in exploring technology trends and share his experience. He will be more than happy to use any feature to share his knowledge. Persona: Vinay Vinay follows of technology news. He likes to analyse various trends but needs some push or motivation to share his findings.

Personas are made-up depictions of your intended audience that assist you in understanding their requirements, objectives, and problems. You can prioritize your product features according to the requirements of your main user groups by matching them with particular personas. Features that meet the needs of power users—for instance, those who prioritize sophisticated functionality—might be given priority over those intended for casual users. In a similar vein, personas can direct prioritizing efforts to optimize the product's value proposition by pointing out which features are necessary versus nice-to-have for various user segments.

I completely agree with the statement. Personas are indeed more than just profiles or segments; they're detailed narratives that humanize the user experience design process. By delving into the goals, motivations, pain points, behaviors, and preferences of individual characters, personas enable teams to empathize with users on a deeper level. This understanding allows for more effective decision-making throughout the product development lifecycle, ensuring that solutions are tailored to address real human needs and frustrations, rather than relying solely on abstract data or statistics.

World has got lot many problems and all of them can't be solved in a day. You need to prioritize the top problems and channelize your resources towards solving the same to extract highest value proposition over a defined period of time. Personas identification helps for the same purpose. It highlights a day in life of a user \ user base and top challenges they are facing in their daily operations and what features are nice to have. This gives you clarity what needs to solved first and what goes in a backlog. Also, using personas needs and wants you can quantify the problem space in terms of book value and sell the vision to your leadership.

I agree with the sentiment expressed. Personas can be invaluable tools in the product development process, particularly for prioritizing features. They provide a user-centric perspective that helps in identifying the most critical problems and needs to address, steering development away from irrelevant or confusing features. Moreover, personas facilitate evaluating feature ideas against user goals and expectations, enabling more informed decision-making. Additionally, using personas as a common language fosters effective communication and alignment within the team and with stakeholders, enhancing collaboration and ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goals.

Using personas in building products is crucial for customizing features based on specific user needs and preferences. For instance, in a social media platform, one type of user might value personalized content and social interaction, influencing the development of features like content discovery. Another user type, prioritizing privacy, could shape the creation of robust privacy controls, enabling users to manage data visibility according to their preferences. Designing features with these diverse user personas in mind enhances inclusivity, meets various user needs, and boosts overall engagement.

The best persona for any product is you by yourself. Even though you may not be an expert user of the product you are building but by being a user empathy driven product manager, you can understand their day in life and put yourself in to their shoe to understand their wants. Creating personas requires both internal and external collaboration. This includes circulating questionnaire, conducting interviews & surveys, coffee chats etc. Couple of key attributes in creating personas includes: 1) Demography 2) Primary role 3) their Immediate stakeholders 4) key challenges, 5) Top KPI's 6) Goals

I fully support the idea that creating personas is an iterative process rooted in thorough user research and validation. Starting with user interviews and surveys is crucial for gathering qualitative and quantitative data that informs the persona creation process. Analyzing this data allows for identifying key characteristics, behaviors, and motivations among user groups, which are then synthesized into personas. Giving personas rich attributes, including names, photos, stories, and detailed descriptions, humanizes the data and makes it more relatable and actionable for the team. However, validation through testing with real users and stakeholders is essential to ensure that the personas accurately represent the target audience.

We come across below points while creating an user persona. 1. Clearly define your goals. 2. Conduct thorough research through surveys, interviews, and market analysis. 3. Segment your target audience based on shared characteristics. 4. Identify key information such as demographics, goals, challenges, and preferences. 5. Develop detailed persona profiles with names, job titles, and relevant details. 6. Prioritize critical information that impacts your product or service. 7. Validate and refine personas with feedback from team members and stakeholders. 8. Integrate personas into workflows to guide decision-making processes. 9. Regularly update personas to reflect changes in your product or target audience, ensuring ongoing relevance.

This process is much the same as creating credible imaginary characters in a screen play, and then orchestrating the outcome that is intended in the storytelling.

User Personas can be an effective ideation & prioritisation tool as it - 1. Defines the qualitative scope of the product in terms of end user behaviour and is an effective way to align all stakeholders on user's expectations and interaction with the product 2. Helps in bringing the empathy required to identify the non-obvious user issues, by qualitatively defining the user. 3. Common expectations, behaviours and traits in different user personas can help in determining the highest priority issue which leads to prioritisation of solutions/features to solve the same. 4. Priority of product features might vary depending on user personas, guiding personalisation of the product

Communication and collaboration with the team are enhanced by incorporating personas into discussions and decision-making processes. Explaining and justifying feature choices and trade-offs to personas helps ensure that decisions are grounded in user insights and needs. Similarly, soliciting and incorporating feedback from personas throughout the development cycle ensures that their voices are heard and their preferences are considered.

Using personas effectively involves integrating them into various aspects of product development, marketing, and customer support. This includes prioritizing features based on user needs, designing interfaces and content tailored to personas, targeting marketing campaigns, and collecting feedback for continuous improvement. By incorporating personas into these areas, businesses can create a more user-centric approach that leads to improved product adoption and customer satisfaction.

Firstly you have to identify and validate for which type of persona you actually want to create the product. Your thrust area should always be sufficed in your mind otherwise the product specs would vary. Secondly, once you understand which personas it is that you wish to have contribution perhaps the habits and characteristics would give dimensions to you on how your product will perform on scale. Additionally I would also recommend not to transform your product wholly to one persona instead add up some commonality to be mapped with other consumers. Finally, your product is ready to surface for market bang! Monitor performance on both scale with persona & commonality this will give you a reality check ?. All the best!

Pour utiliser les personas efficacement, commencez par une recherche approfondie des utilisateurs pour créer des profils détaillés représentant différents segments d'utilisateurs. Ensuite, intégrez ces personas dans toutes les phases du développement de produits, de la conception à la commercialisation. Utilisez-les pour guider les décisions concernant les fonctionnalités, l'expérience utilisateur et la stratégie de communication. Assurez-vous de mettre à jour régulièrement les personas pour refléter les évolutions du marché et des besoins des utilisateurs. En impliquant toute l'équipe dans ce processus, vous assurez une compréhension partagée des utilisateurs cibles et maximisez ainsi la pertinence du produit.

One of the most important aspect of any product be it food, medicine, textile, home hardware, machinery or software is the persona of the user group. Some products can be for a wide range of personas whereas others can be for niche persona. At the same time it could also be for a personal or professional use. When it is for personal use, one of the important aspect would be the variety of persona and the difficulty of controlled training. Availability of psychological studies would help a lot in such cases during product development. A product to be used in a professional environment is comparativeltly easier since different personas can still be trained in a more controlled environment.

Using personas effectively in product development requires basing them on real data, validating with users, and keeping them realistic yet consistent. Regular review and sharing with the team ensures they stay relevant. By prioritizing user needs, personas guide feature development, leading to positive user experiences.

Les bonnes pratiques pour les personas incluent une recherche exhaustive des utilisateurs, la validation des données par des méthodes variées, la création de personas réalistes avec des histoires personnelles, la segmentation des groupes d'utilisateurs, l'implication de l'équipe dans le processus, la mise à jour régulière des personas et leur utilisation à toutes les étapes du cycle de vie du produit, de la conception à la commercialisation. Cela garantit une représentation précise des utilisateurs cibles et guide les décisions pour créer un produit répondant efficacement à leurs besoins et préférences.

Remember that personas are not just for direct users of your product. For example, a children's product will have parent personas. If you're in B2B, you may have a buyer persona. Those other personas may never use your product directly, but understanding and meeting their needs can be just as important to your product's success. You have to know which personas you need to develop, not just those of your direct users.

In traditional requirements specifications models, it would be valuable to leverage personas or the users behind the personas to create detailed use case diagrams related to each feature being conceptualized, then developed. This should ideally be conducted in a live interactive manner with users, as it would likely reveal new product features during the interaction.