What is a user persona?

User personas are a fictional representation of your users that help your teams understand who they’re building for.

A good user persona is realistic, easy to visualize, and tied into your day-to-day decisions and processes.

Each one is like a composite sketch of what you know about many individual customers, what jobs they want to get done and what problems they’re having along the way.

How to create a user persona

There are a ton of great resources online on building user personas. It’s up to you to decide how you want to approach it, depending on the time, data and resources you have on hand.

As you can see here, you can pull in a lot of different sources of input to help you define each persona. You don’t have to stick to any single “methodology” (there isn’t one).

Lean Personas (UXPin)
Not every company needs to build complex personas, says Jerry Cao of UXPin. This guide to lean personas from UXPin is super handy if you need to validate quickly to get your product out the door.

Data-Driven Personas (ConversionXL)
Want to put user persona development through a more rigorous process? This guide from ConversionXL shows you how to segment users based on data, survey results and includes both data analysis examples and advice from experienced marketers.

Marketing Personas (Buffer)
Buffer’s advice for developing marketing personas includes studying online traffic, including social media data, Google analytics and qualitative surveys.

Buyer Personas (Hubspot)
This guide from Hubspot includes a handful of ways to customize buyer personas for sales and marketing teams. It also includes the concept of a “negative persona” – a representation of who you don’t want as a customer.

Bonus: For a handy list of questions to ask during interviews, head to Usability.gov, which designs for not a couple thousand, or a couple million, but the entire population of the United Kingdom. They know a thing or two

User personas help you be user-centric

I’ve seen many teams bring in pricey consultants to help develop user personas and then leave it in some obscure folder in Google Drive. Don’t let this happen to you! User personas help you be user-centric, if you put them to work.

Build a business case for product ideas

User personas can help you nail the business case for a product idea. Bringing in user personas allows you to ground those ideas within the bigger context of your business. What kind of users is this idea meant to help and how valuable does that make it?

A user persona gives you a centerpiece around which to focus your discussions. For example, you can see that the following idea is specifically meant to benefit “Larry Landlord.” Not just anyone.

That’s useful context as you validate the idea further and decide whether to move it forward in the workflow.

Understand what user personas need

There’s a really cool feature in ProdPad that you can use to pull up a list of customer feedback by user persona. This gives you an aggregate view of what your customers want from you, where they’re struggling, what kind of functionality they’d like, and so on.

This is monumentally important for product managers. Why? Because sorting through individual feedback gives you a limited perspective on what you think is important to customers. A handful of standout comments can pretty effectively cloud your judgment.

In contrast, reviewing a list of feedback by persona helps you make decisions that benefit an entire segment of users.

To learn more about how to do this, read about our Contact Profiles feature.

Communicate personas to your teams

User personas aren’t just for you and your product team to hang onto. They have really valuable context that everyone else working with you could use too!

If you’re throwing specs over to your development team, user personas give them the context they need to make judgment calls during build. Personas also help marketing teams understand their audience better so they can set up more effective messaging and targeting.

The key thing to remember is that the user personas you develop become the basic set of assumptions used across your business. Everyone else depends on you, the product manager, to keep their assumptions in check. If your persona evolves, you owe it to your business to update the persona so they can update their assumptions too.

So what’s next?

User personas should be relatable enough that they can be brought up all the time in daily conversations. But to help make them feel really real, you should bring them into product planning as soon as you can.

In ProdPad, you can develop product ideas with user personas, user stories and all the context you want.

The post How To Work With User Personas When You’re A Product Manager appeared first on ProdPad.

Share customer insight

Your marketing team holds important customer insight that can be invaluable in understanding both particular product needs and the big picture of your target users.  Alongside the specific prospect feedback you collect from your sales team, your marketers – specifically any colleagues focused on customer or product marketing – have additional information to share from competitive research to customer interviews.

There are a number of ways in which ProdPad allows them to do so easily – from adding customer feedback and new ideas, to commenting on existing suggestions and even directly on user persona pages. Product Managers can call in marketing opinion at any time using @mentions, and marketers can follow ideas of interest to stay involved in their development.

Support the business case 

Once you’ve found a promising idea, there’s still more work to do before you can start to prioritize. Every idea canvas should have a validated business case to help you evaluate whether the new product or change will merit the resources required.  For certain product developments, marketing will be able to help form commercial objectives, such as awareness or new registration numbers. Accessible collaboration tools are key at this stage where defining – and ultimately delivering on – success criteria is dependent on the involvement of team members company-wide. 

Plan coordinated product launches

Although we don’t believe in fixing specific dates to your roadmap, communication is still key to coordinating product and commercial strategies. As your new products move closer and closer to implementation, the marketing team will have plenty of work to do from press to sales materials. When roadmapping you may wish to attach broad timeframes to ‘current’ and ‘near-term’ products and features so that your marketing team can start to plan out launches for these new releases. As ideas make their way into development, make sure that your marketing team is following their progress. With the help of systems integrations and email notifications, there are no unexpected surprises.

Bring consistency to product messaging

Finally, new and updated products can be supported with marketing-approved resources, all centralized in a single location – your ProdPad product pages. Materials can be uploaded so they can be accessed by your entire team, helping product managers to keep product management in one place, and marketing teams to rest assured only on-message content is being shared externally.

If you’d like to find out more about how marketers and product managers can work together using ProdPad, get in touch with us here

Catch up on how to involve your executive team in product management decisions here, and stay tuned next week for how ProdPad can help you to keep compliance and legal happy. 

The post Product Planning with Product Marketing Teams appeared first on ProdPad.

Peace of mind

From now on, you can type away happily, knowing your every last word is being caught and saved, whether you’re updating a new feature request, fleshing out your product strategy, or adding some flair to your product roadmap.

Simply put, you won’t lose your work again.

Quicker to edit

An extra bonus for you is that this also makes it faster and easier for you to work. You no longer need to click to get into ‘edit mode’ and the click to save your work. It’s all done in one smooth movement. Click what you want to edit, type away, and as you go, we’ll save every last bit. We’ll even helpfully tell you when everything’s being saved, so you’re never left unsure.

Full coverage

This is more than just one little autosave box we’re talking about. We’ve rolled out these helpful changes through our app, whether you’re triaging new ideas, updating your product canvas, adding user feedback, user personas, or your roadmap.

Check it out in the following pages:

• Ideas Management: Idea title, description, business case, user stories and user acceptance test criteria, functional specs and any additional notes
• Product Canvas: Product name, description, key KPIs, and product vision
• User Personas: Persona name, description, behaviors, goals, and frustrations/limitations
• User Feedback: Any feedback snippet from users
• Product Roadmap: Roadmap card titles and descriptions

If you’re not already on ProdPad, you can start your free trial today!

It’s the little things that make a product delightful to use, and this one is our latest to help you work smoothly and delightfully. We hope it helps! If you have other suggestions on how we can make ProdPad even better to use, get in touch any time at feedback@prodpad.com.

The post Autosave to the rescue! appeared first on ProdPad.