Musings on Product Journey

Customer Persona

So here comes the next excerpt from our discussion

We are back to our regular place – My house’s balcony – helping Agyaat in his product journey

Agyaat was ready with the product segmentation

Me: It looks really detailed to me Agyaat. What do you think Gyan

Gyan: Looking at the industry in which we want to step in, I think we should focus on the behavioral segmentation.

(Gyan was holding the Agyaat’s segmentation page in his hand)

Going by this segmentation, our focus should be on people, who are fit and health conscious. But then what about the people who are not fit today but want to reduce weight or want to take up fitness lifestyle

Agyaat: I thought about that but couldn’t really understand how to merge them with the fit segment

Gyan: That’s the point, you have to define your segment in such a way that you caters to the behavior. Whether they are fit or not today gives their current state, it has nothing to do with their behavior. Going by the behavior we are focused on people, who are looking forward to the healthier life.

Agyaat: Great! So anyone who is looking forward to a healthy lifestyle would be our target but what next

Gyaan: Let’s look at the next piece of the puzzle ‘the Persona’

Agyaat: Persona – What’s that

Gyan: Persona is the fictional character who would bring your customer alive to help you build the product. We should have a very clear persona in our mind of our customer – Persona is the imaginary person who imbibe all the needs, goals and behavior pattern of the potential customers. To put it simply, you need to create a fictional character out of the segment that you have chosen. Building Persona will help you in different parts of your product journey – starting from the product selection to Ux design to Marketing etc. Persona will help you in understanding your customer and in keeping your focus on user throughout the journey. Add it to the previous paragraph

Agyaat: That’s really insightful how to create personas and is it an industry wide norm

Gyaan: Most of the successful product companies spend good amount of time in creating these personas and consider them while taking any decision during the product journey. Netflix spend lot of time in creating the personas of their users to find out their pain points, challenges, day in their life etc. Harley does it while creating bikes. Oracle does it while creating their solutions for banks. There are majorly three important features to consider while making winning personas

?Precise but Exhaustive: One of the major problem that product designers face while creating the persona is how to keep user persona precise. Keeping excess data will only dilute the essence of persona. You have to be very cautious while choosing the details to be put on the persona. Keep only those details which will help your team in defining features of the product

? Research: In my experience, I have seen lot of products failing because the product team ended up creating personas basis their understanding of the customer. What they missed is the fact that they are creating the product for the segment of users who may or may not be like them. So to create a winning personas of your product users, you need to carry out extensive research. My personal opinion is that one should spend time on doing the primary research as secondary research very rarely unearth the need..

? Organize: With large volumes of data pouring in through research you will face a problem of plenty. Winning personas are the ones which are well organized. Create a format for the persona and park the information you receive from research under listed heads.  Create a fictional user and write his day to day story

Agyaat: How do you think, I should approach the whole persona thing

Me: I think interviews could be one of the approach

Gyan: Yes start with interviewing 10 to 50 relevant participants. Interviewing them face to face will help you in probing them well and will help you in creating the winning persona

For successful interviews

·     Ask open ended questions

·     Ask about their past experiences

·     Try to unearth the pain areas

·     Give them scenarios and ask which one they prefer

·     Keep asking why until you get down to need

After you are done with decent no. of interviews it boils down to creating the persona. To do that we should ask ourselves: who, what, where, when, why, and how?

·     What does a day in the life of a user look like

·     What are his or her pain points?

·     What do they love about our product?

·     How can we make it better for them while answering the business needs, as well?

One more thing which we should do is name them. This is my common observations across the organizations who were able to create the successful products is that they had a name for their personas. Every time a team decided to add new feature to the product, they question themselves whether Roy (Roy – fictional name for persona) would like it. By the time the product is ready for the market Roy becomes a living individual at least with in the team.

Agyaat: Great! this will help product team in developing a one point focus but is there any structure which product teams should follow while creating personas

Gyan: I would say that don’t restrict yourself to any structure and try to create one yourself, I could help you with few important attributes that are usually a part of winning personas

·     Fictional name

·     Photo

·     Demographic: age, gender, income, location, education,

·     Descriptive title

·     Role or job description

·     Quote

·     A day-in-the-life narrative

·     Goals and challenges

Agyaat: My conviction in personas is increasing with every passing minute. I think it would be a great premise to target customers

Gyan: You are jumping the gun buddy. We will target customers later in the journey. For now work on personas and come up with the winning persona for your product

Agyaat: Are we stopping here…it’s so interesting to be with both of you that I look forward to it whole week  

(Gyan stood up as it was already late evening and he had plans with the family today…but we will continue our journey to build a winning product…