At this point, personas and persona creation is a pretty widely adopted norm in product development. Rarely do I ask someone if they have seen or used a persona and am met with blank stares. The advent of user stories has drawn attention to the need to have personas. How else can you fill in the <blank> “As a <blank>, I can. . . so that. . .” People begin to think that building a person is a check-the-box exercise that we have to do to be a good agile team. This couldn’t be further from reality. This mindset to persona development typically leads us right back into the assumption trap. Personas are valuable, they are necessary, and they are also hard work when you do them correctly.
GOOD REASONS TO BUILD A PERSONA
PERSONA #1 “George”, he’s a 48 year old accountant who drives a Prius…
As a Product Owner, you should know why you are undertaking the work to build a persona. You should have a point of view on the questions you need to have answered and how those answers might influence the the direction of your product. Of course, you could just go to your marketing, sales, or advertising team and ask them for personas. They quite possibly have them. The likely result is you will look it over and have no idea how that will influence direction you take your product. Knowing that you have a persona “George” who is a 48-year-old accountant who is married, has 2 kids, drives a Prius, is self-conscious about his balding, and enjoys playing badminton on the weekends may give you absolutely no idea on how to drive the direction of your tax SAAS application. As a product owner, you need personas that create context for the decisions you must make about your product. If you know that “George” hates his job because he has to keep carrying tax files to the basement of his 4-story building, well, maybe you can do something with that! What I’m really saying here is that you, the Product Owner, need to be involved in the persona creation process. It’s ok to start with something you might get from another team/person, but it will likely require that you invest time in enhancing it to fit your needs. You might find that you need to start from scratch and build it yourself.
HOW TO BUILD A PERSONA
We like to talk about the inputs to the persona creation process in 3 parts.
Part 1: Qualitative Data -- Qualitative research is not about numbers and statistics but instead, a window into the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of your customer. It’s a conversation with your users designed to give you clues on underlying motivations: why customers do the things they do, why they remain loyal, what makes them switch, and what are their biggest pain points.
Part 2: Quantitative Data -- Quantitative data are data about numeric variables (e.g., how many; how much; or how often). Quantitative data can be verified, and subject to statistical analysis.
Part 3: Instinct -- Everyone has their own assumptions based on their experiences or observations of others. And since personas are based on humans, no matter the problem we’re trying to solve, we all have some instinct on where to start. However, the more time we have spent thinking about a problem or the more experience we have in a domain, the more certain we are about our instinct.
In a perfect world, we’d go about collecting the data and creating the persona, starting with the qualitative data, then the quantitative, then instinct. We don’t live in a perfect world! We are often sucked in by our own assumptions and assertions and interpret those as facts when creating a persona. BE CAREFUL, while our instincts are valuable tools to get started with persona development, they are often wrong and definitely insufficient on their own.
Ronald Coase, a British economist, who famously said, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”
Quantitative data is always helpful, but it has a trap of its own. A noted British economist Ronald Coase is quoted as saying “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” If you lead with your instincts and then follow that with quantitative data, you will likely just look for data that confirms your assumptions rather than challenges them! Qualitative data is the secret sauce. It tells you what the numbers don’t. We suggest starting with that, relying on that, and letting that be your guiding force in persona development. At Hard Yards, we came up with this mnemonic to help remember where product owners need to focus. In other words, your instincts are only half as good as you think they are, you can add in quantitative data, but you are exponentially better if you do the qualitative research.
