The power of Personas in the business of software

A Persona in product management/marketing is a humanized representation of groups of customers, buyers or users that share a common (business) problem. Persona-based techniques are a versatile and extremely powerful tool for a variety of aspects in product design, management and marketing. On the other end, when Personas are oversimplified, based on wishful thinking as opposed to continuous research, or just made in a vacuum, they become misleading and really dangerous for your product projects.

This article aims to provide product managers, owners and marketers with a proven, field tested methodology that renders the power of Personas in the business of software. If you are skeptical about Personas and think that a smiley pretty face on a card doesn't cut it, you should definitely really read on!

In the business of software we almost often strive to answer questions like:

How do we design and build a set of usable and powerful features that add real measurable value to our product?

How do I design a product for usability?

How do we describe what our software does, so that people get interested to give it a try and eventually buy it?

But then my question is: “who?”

For whom are we Who is going to use the product? Who should we target? Who is more likely to listen?

Here lies the problem. We are enamored of our great product and expect that people will buy it, because it is great? I mean, how would anybody not like such an innovative functionality?

So we try to put together a profile like this:

Male, 25–40 years old, mechanical design engineer, works with several other engineers in a mechanical design team, they all use MCADX as computer aided design tool and use Excel for product data management (bill of materials).

But who is that guy? How would you figure out what innovative new product or feature he might use to get more work done?

The reality is that those profiles aren’t very discussable, actionable or testable. They circulate pointless arguments in corporate conference rooms, with lots of really brilliant minds, where the loudest or most powerful guy’s opinion wins, and we end up with products nobody particularly likes.

How can we design for usability or power of use if we don't know who is going to use the product?

How can we craft content of our website if we don’t know the audience we need to communicate to?

The worst thing that may happen when we discuss the priorities of a given set of features is to make political decisions, where everyone gets a little piece of what they want That is the perfect recipe for products that are not good enough for anybody. That is, a product disaster

In 1995 I was working with the three founders of Sagent Technologies, pioneers in the field of what is now called “Business Intelligence” software. During discussions with them regarding interaction design for their product, I found myself continually engaged in a circular dialogue. I would ask them for a specific example of how someone would use their program. The answer would invariably follow this characteristic pattern: “Well, someone could create a crosstab of sales information…but it could be a chart, or if it were marketing data they could present it as a table. They could do anything!” It was almost impossible for those brilliant, logical programmers to conceive of a single use of their product when it was obviously capable of so many uses. In frustration I demanded to be introduced to their customers.

Alan Cooper • May 15, 2008, author of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Logic is dangerous

Allan Cooper adds: “If, responding to the directive design for the user, you follow logic, you tend to canvass the user community, collect their requests for functions, and then provide them a product containing all of those functions. I call this “the sum of all desired features.” There is abundant empirical proof that this solution is only marginally effective at best. The problem is that while logic is a powerful and effective programming tool, it is a pathetically weak and inappropriate interaction design tool.”

So what is a Persona?

The persona is a vivid description of your target customer, be they buyer or user or both. Use of personas helps you avoid speculative decisions about what to build and whether it’s working. They anchor everything you do (marketing, development) in a vivid, testable description.

It’s a tool, or a technique that helps designing, building and marketing products. In a nutshell, it helps the business of software in its entirety. That simple.

SalesPeople are dangerous

Most of the times we try to get to know our customers asking sales. After all, they meet with customers all the time. That’s a mistake. Sale people talk with customer with a goal in mind: hitting the numbers. They see one customer at a time. If you ask, they will say that every customer is different. When you build your product, you need to build a common set of features for a market of customers, not one at a time. Sometimes sales will say All customers ask this. I cannot sell because of that feature. Remember, sales poeple tend to weight customer pain with the last one that cried. They tend to remember the last deal. Then we grapple and build that feature, exeepct that we later realize that nobody wanted it, sales didn;t really pick up and we lost time and There is nothing wrong about that. Our company sells products, so we need sales, and their job is a very hard one. Their input is often useful, but it must not be the only voice we hear. Never. It would be otherwise a recipe for disaster/

Customer are dangerous

…And we need the deep knowledge that giving users everything that they ask for, exactly how they ask for it, is our fastest path to unusable bloatware (@richmironov)

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