How do we create user personas?

This is a detailed deep dive into the world of building personas and all the hard work behind it.

Why do we create user persona in product management?

Creating personas in product management is a valuable process that helps you better understand your target users and tailor your product development efforts to their needs.

User persona are an effective tool to understand, communicate, and act on user needs. It is an effective tool to ensure that you achieve whatever product goals you set for yourself.

Following is a series of ten steps to help you create user personas.

1. Define your product goals.
2. Gather data about your product and market
3. Segment your audience
4. Create proto-personas
5. Conduct in-depth interviews
6. Identify patterns and themes
7. Create detailed personas
8. Prioritize personas
9. Use the Persona for decision-making
10. Create a feedback loop around user personas for future refinements

Building Persona

Define your product goals: A clear definition helps the product team understand the purpose and intended outcomes of the product development exercise. With the goals in place, it would be easier to work on the target audience, understand their pain points and solve them through your product development exercise.

Typical examples of reasonable product goals are defined below:

1. Increase the number of registered users by 20% within six months (Adoption).
2. Achieve a 15% increase in MAU by the end of the year (Engagement).
3. Double the number of mobile transactions happening via the app in 6 months (Mobile)

Once you have an obvious goal, you can start the exploratory process of gathering data to achieve this goal.

Gather Data: In the above example #1, if we were to increase the number of registered users by 20% in the next six months. We need to gather some data. Why? Because data will become the basis of our user base segmentation and subsequent creation of Persona. Data will become the basis of our decision on how we plan to get the job done.

Internal Data Examples:

• What is the current user base and the respective channels of customer acquisition?
• What is the current growth rate of the current user base?
• In the existing acquisition channels, which ones are better performing?
• Cohort analysis of the existing acquisition channels to decipher where we are getting the new users — mobiles vs desktop, the geographical distribution of new users, organic vs paid, referral vs organic, Google Ads vs Facebook Ads, etc.
• User feedback data for the last 6–12 months

External Data Examples:

• Competitors growth rate if that is publicly available
• Total addressable market (TAM), Serviceable Available Market (SAM), Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)
• Market Growth Rate
• Geographic, demographics, psychographic, and behavioural distribution of your user base
• Competitor’s SWOT analysis
• Publicly available user feedback

General marketing segmentation can be done with geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioral distribution of your user data. However, the other data sets mentioned above can complement the market segmentation data, add richness to your segments, and help you build a better Persona.

Segment your audience: Using all the data gathered in step 2, you should segment your audience into different segments. You are trying to create small, relatively homogenous groups out of a sizeable heterogeneous market. These small, relatively homogenous groups of potential users of your product are individual segments.

Examples of such segments are:

Urban Elders: Age 55+, Live in downtown neighbourhoods of cities, most likely renting their houses. Quite connected to their communities and involved in art culture events locally.

Empty Nests: Age 65+, Children are grown up and not living with them, financially well off, active socially and support their causes.

Young Birds: Age 20–30, unmarried, earn above average salary, quite good at spending what they earn and enjoy many social activities.

[I have not specified the income range or exact geographical distribution, but you get the idea.]

We build these segments using sophisticated statistical techniques, including clustering and adding more nuances.

Once you build your segments from your more extensive set of target audiences, we will embark on a journey of creating proto-personas.

Create proto-personas: Personas are semi-fictional characters representing one segment. They are semi-fictional because the surface is fictional, but whatever it represents in terms of demographics, location of work or stay, lifestyle, habits and behaviours are all based on real people.

A proto-persona is a prototype of a persona. It is the skeleton of a body. At this stage, we know the segment's average age, average financial situation, some of their choices and other details. We don’t know their challenges, motivations and how they deal with them.

But, creating proto-personas gives us the tool to understand the segments' aggregated statistics from a much more humane angle. After all, we are building products for normal human beings, and we need to understand them and their problem if we intend to solve them with some amount of flair.

Conduct in-depth interviews: Conducting interviews of a small sample size in each segment is a natural step to understanding and refining our proto-persona into personas.

We will discuss the questions you should ask your interviewees to understand them. The template for these interviews is shared below, a visual representation of a persona template.

Identify patterns and themes: Each segment is supposed to represent a homogenous distribution of target users. Consequently, just one persona helps us relate to that whole segment.

So, this segment would have some particular patterns and themes regarding motivation, method of communication, challenges, behavioural insights and others. These patterns help us document and understand the user's needs.

Create detailed personas: Using the above data, interviews, patterns and themes, we finally put colour to the proto-persona and create a detailed persona. This detailed Persona is now ready to be represented by the product team to communicate internally and finally match the product goals with user needs.

Prioritize personas:

Using detailed personas, data on the market size of each segment, the pricing power of each segment, and finally, the revenue potential and strategic direction of the company, you can decide to prioritize one persona over another for the product launch. This prioritization of persona will help with the marketing launch, post-launch analytics, and product adoption.

Ideas on how to prioritize personas

Use the Persona for decision making:

Now, if you organize the personas with other market data, you can then help not just your product team but also various other teams such as sales, marketing, customer support, etc.

Example: If you are targeting an empty nest persona (look above for details), you would have an idea that these elderly individuals can be acquired by a certain mechanism than young independent adults; their needs in terms of customer support will also be quite different.

So, you would be helping your customer service team to create a handbook for handling elderly customers, slightly different training examples, a bit modified FAQ list, etc.

Feedback loop for Persona:

When you do your product launch, and then you start getting feedback about your product, you can use some of this customer data and feedback to update your persona.

This feedback loop for your persona has two distinct advantages.

1) It allows you to become better at building a persona, and gives you and your team a boost of confidence when you are doing in a second or third time.

2) The new persona with modified details can be used for further enhancements of the products in the future.

Use this persona for your product development.

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