How to use personas in creating a compelling product experience
In this article, we delve into a critical aspect that sets the foundation for building successful products: personas. As a product manager, you know that understanding your users is key to crafting experiences that resonate, solve their problems, and drive business growth. Personas are the powerful tools that enable us to empathize with our target audience, gaining deep insights into their needs, preferences, and behaviors.
Why is this important? Let me share an example.
Imagine you are building a CRM application (Customer relationship management) and the primary audience is the sales team. There are many personas involved in a sales team ranging from SDR, Account reps, Sales leaders, sales operations etc.
Let’s pick two personas in a typical sales team. (There are umpteen variations of sales orgs but most typically follow this model)
- SDR or Sales Development Representative (or sometimes called BDR)
- AE or Account Executives (or Sales Rep, or relationship manager or account manager)
Apart from the skill sets and experiences, their goals are different. An SDR’s main goal is to make appointments. They cold call a prospect and do enough convincing to create a meeting of the prospect with the AE, who will actually make the sale. SDRs typically have a target of making 50 calls per day. So speed is extremely critical for them. The product UI design would have to allow for just enough information required for them to make a successful cold call. Once they complete a call, the product should allow them to get to the next call without them having to figure out who ti call next.
An AE on the other hand are relationship builders. They may typically have 10-30 accounts to manage. When they have a meeting with a customer, they want to have a complete picture about them – how long have they been a customer, what products have they purchased, what are the new opportunities for expansion, how many service tickets are open and for how long, what’s the adoption of the users and so on. When designing the product requirements, it is important to maximize customer information so that the AEs have all the required info at their “finger tips”. Arming AEs with 360 view of the customer makes them a better sales rep and allows for a better customer experience, in addition to help increase sales.
As you can see, both personas are sales people but with vastly different objectives which then provides the basis of building the right products.
The exact methodology of defining personas is a bit outside the scope of this article. At a high level, when defining personas, we typically tend to focus on the job descriptions such as title, key responsibilities etc. But to design better products that will be adopted by these personas, you have to go much deeper.
For example, consider these traits in a persona –
- What is success to them?
- Are they motivated, will they go extra mile?
- Average education level
- Average tenure in job
- Technical skills
- Decision authority
Let’s use some examples on why the above traits matter.
Education or Skill level – Imagine your feature requires a user to create a report of sales. You could title the report as one of the following
- Sales by year, grouped by product and quarter
- How much sales did we do this year, broken down by quarter and for each product ?
Which title would you select? If your persona is tech savvy like a sales analyst, then the first title is sufficient, otherwise less tech savvy users would better relate to the second one.
Tenure – Many roles in marketing have an average tenure of 2 years. For example a digital marketing manager typically tends to stay in a company for two years. The implications are that when they leave, the institutional knowledge is lost. Also, the new person has to ramp up. As a product manager, designing for this roles means that you allow a much faster ramp time. As a product manager, you can use this insight to build a product in such a way that the company is able to derive value regardless of the user or their internal tribal knowledge.
Which traits are importance depends on the specific application of your product, the industry etc. Having a deeper understanding of your persona and then designing your product around them will provide a more compelling experience and higher adoption. Don’t expect any user to learn your product, rather make the product in the language that resonates with the user considering their personal traits and aspirations.
