I’m working on creating a Persona Workshop to help Developers, Product Managers, and Marketing folks:
- Learn about Personas
- Develop some sense of how to (and how not to) identify/ create good Personas
- Understand how to (and how not to) communicate and use their Personas to aid communication and understanding throughout their company in support of:
- Product development
- Product marketing
- Sales
- Services
- Roadmap and planning
- New business opportunities
I’d love to hear from all of you about your persona experiences, both good and bad. I’ll get the conversation going with a couple of horror stories I’ve heard:
Don’t tell your developers the Personas are quantitatively derived. Personas absolutely must be based on quantitative and qualitative research, but they are still highly subjective. A good, useful, Persona reflects your company’s values, your competitors, your roadmap and the real reasons your users choose (or will choose) your products. So, if your developers say, “What’s the P-value of your hypothesis?” you know you’ve overstepped the scientific bounds of your research.
Don’t make a career out of communicating your Personas’ personalities. Baseball cards with a picture and some Persona facts – Good! A blog “written” by each of your Personas – Bad! If you spend hours each day (or even each week) finding new and creative ways to communicate your Persona’s nuances, your Persona is likely highly flawed because it is failing in its purpose to empower others to understand the character, needs and skills of the users and buyers. (Also, your management is likely to find better use for a head count.)
Don’t name your persona after someone within the company. (This one actually happened to me.) We did our persona research and found some great and surprising information. The personas lead to obvious resolutions to a number of sticky problems and other intractable were suddenly manageable. We just needed to name our personas. In a mistake I won’t repeat, I sought input from a couple of senior managers. One manager was extremely helpful and we used the names he provided. The other manager suggested we use the (rather unique) name of his new Director of Development. A bit of bias? A desire to seize control? Just foolishness? I don’t know, but it was a political hassle that had to be overcome.
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