In today’s Boston Globe, Bob Ryan makes clear the value of the persona for development and marketing purposes in his article titled A Striking Difference in Outlook.
Well, actually he’s writtten about the differing points of view, skills and experiences of baseball fans and professional baseball players. According to Bob Ryan, the two groups of people will never understand each other, and he makes a great case based on the odd obsessions and lack of contextual knowledge held by even the most knowledgeable fan versus the years of sacrifice, skills, and the never ending procession of games played by an ordinary (yet extraordinary compared to the fan) major league ballplayer.
What if we re-read this article but replaced fan with user and professional player with professional developer? I think we’d see a familiar picture. Doesn’t the user try to tell you, the professional developer, how to get it right? Doesn’t he criticize the strangest things? The user doesn’t understand the time pressures, the technological limitations, the poor management decisions, the ever-changing resources and the constant demands for more ....
If the professional ballplayer wanted to understand his fan-base, he would do well to develop a fan persona. Similarly, if the professional developer wants to understand his user-base, he’ll do well to develop a user/buyer persona. Having a compassionate, consistent, realistic and relate-able grasp of the people we sell to and build for, but just don’t naturally understand, is an important start toward making a meaningful connection. Or maybe we should just hire userwriters, the software equivalent of sportswriters, to help explain to our user-base what we do, why and how good we are? Oh right, we have that - they're our technical writers. :-)
Let’s go Red Sox!!
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