A few days ago, I gave a talk on Personas and Agile Programming. My audience was a mixed group: Programmers - Agile & not, implementation folks, support people and a couple of company VPs. The talk was a bit less 2-way than I would have preferred, but that tends to happen when VPs are in the room. Overall, the group was very receptive and they appreciated the inclusive nature of Personas.
The company has one solid, legacy, product line. They've begun creating new products for users in domains very near their area of expertise, but not within their expertise. Put another way, they have perceived a pain, or maybe just an opportunity. However, they don't know their user or the conditions that will drive a purchase.
"Should we build a Persona?", they asked. Yes! Absolutely! Of course!
Here's how to proceed when you have access - even just peripherally - to your future users and buyers:
- Build a straw-man Persona. I don't love ad-hoc Personas, but they're a perfect starting place. Each lead should put to paper their biases, guesses, best thoughts on who will be using and who will buying the new product. Then swap the papers.
- Learn from the other user and buyer experts within your company. You've looked at the other guys straw-man persona. Talk to someone in Support. Talk to Sales. Once you've seen that your view of the users and buyers is different from other experts' views, talk out the differences. What have you learned? How would your new product differ if the user or buyer were like her straw-man? Can you build a new straw-man persona? If so, do it.
- Visit the users and buyers you do have access to. Since the users and buyers of your current product are your leads to the users and buyers to the new product, grab those leads. Go visiting. You don't have to say much or anything about your new product line. Just take a look around while you're there. Do you see anyone who looks like your persona? Did your imagined persona work in an environment like this? I bet s/he probably doesn't. For some reason, we all idealize, generalize, overlook. Now you can make very important improvements to your straw-man persona.
Are you done? Sadly, no. But you do have a somewhat refined ad-hoc persona. Not as good as real, robust persona based on market research and deep knowledge of your user or buyer, the straw-man ad-hoc persona is very useful. S/he will ensure everyone on the team moves in the same direction - making your team more cohesive and efficient - and everyone on the team will immediately recognize when true user and buyer information shows up that grows or alters the persona.
Creating, refining and working with ad-hoc or straw-man Persona takes guts. It requires the management to admit to themselves that there are some things they just don't know.
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