How I create User Persona under 5 minutes!
Creating useful and effective user personas quickly - Part 4 in "How I build a Product Portfolio"
TL;DR
User persona can be simple and effective in helping you to ideate, prioritize and market/sale, if you focus on:
A single meaningful Ideal Outcome (main goal) for the persona.
A set of Problems ranked based on the pain and impact it’s causing them, and preventing them from reaching that outcome.
A set of Traps ranked based on how much it impacts their desire to use or stay with any given solution.
A set of Alternatives ranked based on how likely they are to use to help them get the outcome.
This simple set of information will help you not only design a impactful solution, but also help you to prioritize differentiation features vs. table stake features and your overall roadmap to address the greatest pain first, while avoiding any traps that would slow down your adoption or reduce your retention.
Now on to the show.
Recap:
In the last episode (Click here), I have created a set of Buyer Personas to help me better quantify the need and alternatives I need to consider to create a differentiated offer. Now with the buyers in mind, I can start to build my User Personas to not only understand buyers’ needs, but also what the users will need
.
The users:
Based on my initial breakdown of the customer (Click here), I identified the following possible users.
CIO of a small start-up
Product Manager for a newly launched product
Tech Manager, who manages a software team
Customer Support Manager
Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, or Sales Manager
Marketing Manager or CMO
Operations Managers
CEO, COO, or CPO of a start-up
And they share the following key characteristics:
Their revenue growth (for their product or company) have stalled or is uneven (up and down with no consistent upward trends)
Using this information, I dug through my interview notes as well as personal experience from years of work experience, to organize them in to individual User Personas that can help me to start better quantify my product.
The process:
I reviewed my notes and identified unique Ideal Outcomes and organized my personas around those. I kept the personas organized this way to reduce confusion and complexity later, knowing that real individuals may be part of more than one User Personas.
Once I identified the key Ideal Outcomes, I found the problems, as in what problems users face when trying to achieve the ideal outcome, related to each of those ideal outcomes, and ranked them based on the level of pain then impact from the most painful and impactful to the least.
I then reviewed the conversation on what other solutions they’ve tried and why they stopped using them or found them unsatisfactory. The list of other solutions became the Alternatives, ranked based on most likely or commonly used, to least. And based on their complaints and concerns, I listed them as Traps, ranked from the most egregious (Heck No!) to the least (This is annoying…).
The result:
Using the simple and quick process, I created the following User Personas:
Olly, the Overwhelmed Manager
Ideal Outcome: Have more time to spend with my family
Problems:
I’m frequently asked to make complex priority calls, but they are time consuming and difficult.
I’m getting my requirements pushed back from teams for clarification; I’m constantly pushing back on requirements because they are unclear.
I’m getting results that’s different from what I had in my requirements; I’m getting complaints that what my team delivered isn’t what was asked.
I have a hard time turning what I do every day into tangible business results
Traps:
I don’t want to wait for weeks or months to solve the problems I have right now.
I don’t want something super complicated or hard to follow.
I don’t want theories, I need real world actionable advice.
Alternatives:
Books
Online classes
Friends or community
Formal Training
Gwen, the Growth-challenged Manager
Ideal Outcome: Grow my product (adoption, revenue, etc.)
Problems:
I have trouble getting past my current adopters to reach new ones
I can’t prioritize existing customer vs. new target customers
I can’t find any resources that gives practical how-to advice
Traps:
I don’t want to wait for weeks or months to solve the problems I have right now.
I don’t want something super complicated or hard to follow.
Alternatives:
Books
Online classes
Friends or community
Formal Training
Next steps:
While there are more potential users out there, like individual sales managers, marketing specialists and so on, the Ideal outcome are similar enough that I decided to not create separate persona for now.
My goal is to have enough information to help me make the minimum decisions I need to move to the next step.
Now that I have my list of alternatives from my buyers and users. I’m ready to start my competitive analysis, so I can determine what my differentiation needs to be to stand out in the market!
If you want to learn more about how to simplify your day-to-day and build continuous growth products. Reach out to me at john.wu@simplifying.work. We’re running an introductory offer (Free to the first 5 customers in Nov. 2023) to help you diagnose what is holding you back from growing your product, and if you’re leaving money on the table.