Several years ago, I received some fantastic Product Management training from Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing. In addition to Steve’s insightful personal anecdotes about working in and guiding product development and marketing, the training included the advice that “Personas” – or carefully chosen example users – should be used to guide the product requirements, development and marketing.
Something about the concept of personas resonated with me, so I did a good bit of research on personas, including reading “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” a very persuasive book by Alan Cooper in which he first introduces the concept of personas for product development. After several months of research, my sense that personas could be a very valuable tool for influencing the overall goodness of the product under development was stronger than when I’d started.
Let me interrupt this recollection to tell you something about myself. I’ve been in software design and development for 20 years. Over the course of my career, I have sometimes found myself in the frustrating situation of knowing the product I was working on was being mis-built. That is, that the developers and management were making technical and implementation decisions that simply wouldn’t work for the intended user base. Maybe it was my years in technical support, maybe the fact that I am the child of business owners – I don’t know, but somehow, on these occasions I knew that our values and judgments were off. Sometimes I knew better choices. More often I just knew that we didn’t know enough.
This mis-building of product is never intentional, as everyone always wants their product to succeed. Just getting a project approved takes a tremendous amount of work. First, there is the market research, executive presentations, evangelizing, and board meetings. Then there is the research and writing of lengthy requirements, followed by the writing and debating of lengthy specification documents. Until, finally, we get the chance to actually build the product. In the end, it is the developers and their management who really decide what gets built, how and when. Yet, we developers are usually the ones with the least exposure to the user and the market.
Companies try various means to expose us developers to the needs of the user including corporate trips to user sites, user visits to headquarters, highly detailed requirements, lengthy specifications, use-cases, scenarios, etc. However, none of these accomplish what the persona promises to do.
The persona promises us:
- A realistic description of “the right” user and his needs, skills and desires.
- An awareness of the environment in which our product will be used
- The ability to empathize with the user
Thus guiding a team of developers to make good, consistent, long term and common decisions while implementing the product.
I finally got the opportunity to give personas a try. You can read about my experience in detail in the August '07 issue of the Pragmatic Marketer. Until that’s available, I’ll summarize the experience here by saying: personas
brought a sea change at every level. Product
decision making improved immediately throughout the organization.
In particular:
- Developers felt empowered.
- Product Management and Development were finally on the same page.
- Product Managers were required to do far less internal evangelizing.
- Developers documented less and coded more.
- First-pass implementations met the users’ needs while matching their skills.
- Marketing improved their customer and prospect communications
It’s now been a few years since I was first introduced to the concept of personas and I remain very impressed with the immediate and long-term impact of good personas.
Since the concept of personas, their value and their impact is not yet widely established, I have started this blog to help get the word out.
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