Skip to main content

Profiles and Personas

One way to document your understanding of customers is to compose profiles or personas. A profile describes the situation, problems, and general personality traits of one type of user or buyer in the market for your product. A persona differs from a profile in its level of specificity.

Personas are a bit like what some people speculated "Deep Throat" (the secret informant in Woodward and Bernstein's account of Watergate, All the President's Men) was: a composite of various sources. (We now know that Deep Throat was a single person, Mark Felt). According to the composite character theory, Woodward and Bernstein concocted the character Deep Throat to represent a combination of many sources that gave Woodward guidance and information in their investigation of Watergate.

Personas are similar in that they represent all of the people in a market segment as a single person. That single person has very specific characteristics that many of the people in the segment do not have, but that nonetheless serve as representative examples of the types of situations and problems they face.

Thus profiles more comprehensively and accurately describe the range of people in a market segment, but a set of personas provides a more concrete picture of the types of people in the segment.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dancer Test

Are you left-brained or right-brained? Supposedly, your brain lateralization determines how you view this animation. Some people see her rotating clockwise. Others see her rotating counter-clockwise. Some see her unpredictably changing the direction of her rotation. Supposedly, people who see clockwise rotation are right brained. People who see counter-clockwise rotation are left brained. I originally came across this animation here .

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the  four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions .  Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions.  They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...