Introduction
User personas an incredibly useful tool to help product managers understand their product’s audience (customers, users, etc.). When you understand who your product targets and how and why they would use your product, you are then in an excellent position to make decisions on things like:
- Is my product adding value to my customers?
- Is my product solving the problems my customers face?
- Where should I take the product next?
What should my User Persona have?
At minimum, I recommend your user personas have the following laid out:
- Name
- By naming your persona, you and your team can quickly reference what kind(s) of customers a particular discussion pertains to.
- Age, Nationality, Location, Occupation, etc.
- Essentially, things you can use to identify a specific demographic
- This is the objective identity of your persona
- Goals
- What motivates users that fit into this persona?
- Painpoints
- What gets in the way of users in this persona from achieving their goals?
- What have they tried to overcome their painpoints and achieve their goals?
- This helps you to understand what solutions (potentially competitors) they’ve pursued, if any.
- It can also give a clue to how urgent the painpoints are to them at a given time.
- What would their ideal solution be?
- If time and money wasn’t a limiting factor, what would their ideal solution look like?
Beyond that outline, other things you may want to lay out are:
- What technology/applications do they use in general?
- What influences their decisions and actions?
- Are there key personality traits users in this persona exhibit?
- Do particular brands/names speak to them?
Conclusion
And there you have it — user personas in its purest, most effective form. As you build out your own personas, consider documenting them via some form of visual. A user persona’s essentially a snapshot of a key market segment of your product; so, documenting and presenting it in a way both visually pleasing and consumable can go a long way in your research efforts.