Slides from a presentation on how using personas can help product managers and product owners to build great digital products and services.

1. USING PERSONAS
TO BUILD GREAT
PRODUCTS
08 February 2017
from

2. Introductions
§ Pedro Azevedo
from
§ Mark Krishan Gray

3. Contents
§ What are personas?
§ Different types of persona
§ What we’ve learnt
§ Common challenges of using personas
§ How you can overcome some of these challenges
§ Q&A (30 minutes)
from

4. What are personas?
from
§ A representation of a customer or
user that can be used within an
organization when the customer is
not present
§ Their power lies in their ability to
help you develop empathy for
them, so you can build products
and services that meet their
needs and solve their problems

5. Different types
of persona
from

6. Marketing personas
from
§ An overview of who your user is
§ Not focused on a specific problem
§ Aim to support marketing efforts

7. User/Design personas
from
§ Focused on goals, pains and
behaviors
§ Target a specific problem
§ Are the output of user research

8. Proto-personas
from
§ The result of secondary research and
educated guesses
§ Not validated with user data
§ Good starting point before doing
further research

9. What we’ve learnt
from
§ Teams typically use organization
wide personas
§ Personas tend to be developed by a
central function or an external party
§ Most personas take the shape of
marketing personas

10. Common challenges of
using personas
from
1. Using the wrong type of persona
2. Personas not built around a specific problem
3. Personas built based on no data
4. Personas that never change
5. Outsourcing
6. Personas that are too similar

11. Using the wrong type
of persona
from
§ Anchoring decisions on data that
is not relevant
§ Creates confusion within teams
and stakeholders, impacting
communication and decision-
making

12. Personas not built around
a specific problem
from
§ Having a scope that’s too wide tends
to generate unfocused solutions
§ You should understand the context,
and then narrow the scope

13. Personas based
on no data
from
§ If there’s no proof, then it’s an
assumption
§ Different people with different
opinions and with no supporting
data… how do you make decisions?

14. Personas that
never change
from
§ Changes in context impact users
§ Static personas are a sign of
unresponsiveness

15. Outsourcing
from
§ To build products that users love,
empathy is key
§ If it’s your user, or your customer,
then you need to own it!

16. Personas that are
too similar
from
§ People use products and services in
different ways and have different
problems to solve
§ If personas are too similar, are you
addressing a single need? Or are
you ignoring part of your market?

17. Overcoming some of
these challenges
from
§ Tips
- Identify the problem that needs to be solved
- Observe and interview customers/users to get a better
understanding of the problem
- Develop personas that accurately represent your
customers/users
- Refine the personas with your team, based on the insights from
your research
- Ensure your personas are dynamic and change if you collect
new insights

18. Identify the problem
from
§ The identified problem is generally based
on limited data and assumptions
§ The first step is to collect the information
that you already have, as a starting point.
§ What is the problem, or the
manifestation of the problem, and who
can you talk to if you need to learn
more?

19. Observe & Interview
from
§ Learn from behaviors and attitudes of your
users
§ Take the time to observe your users
§ Interview your users to generate more
insights

20. Develop personas
from
§ Condense your insights
§ ~8-10 people presenting similar
behaviors and attitudes could
represent a persona
§ Focus your personas on a specific
problem

21. Refine personas
from
§ As you develop and test your
solutions, you will keep generating
more insights
§ Those insights should serve as
fodder to update your personas

22. Make them dynamic
from
§ Be aware of context
§ Question how changes may impact
your users
§ Update your personas to reflect this

23. from
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