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.

Good question

1. An effective product team makes product discussions accessible to everyone else at the company

One day, a deeply annoyed Elon Musk sent all of SpaceX a memo titled “Acronyms Suck.” It was an executive order to stop using acronyms in the workplace because it was hindering basic communication among employees. 

“Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important.

Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance.”

He was right. When you start to speak in your own language, in team speak, others can’t meaningfully participate in the conversation. 

The product mindset requires everyone at the company to be able to discuss the product in terms everyone can understand.

A truly effective product team communicates with sales, support, marketing, development, QA, and so on, in a way that is meaningful to each of those teams.

We do two things to keep our product conversation open to everyone on the team:

1. We give everyone access to our product backlog. Everyone can drop in ideas, suggestions, and comment on existing ideas. (We review and respond on an ongoing basis.)
2. We don’t accept ideas without a short 1-2 sentence business case, a high-level argument for moving that idea forward. This filters out frivolous ideas. 

This process forces everyone to think about their suggestions in terms of business value rather than personal preferences:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What value would it provide if it were solved?

Essentially, if you want something done to the product, you have to defend it in terms everyone understands. If you’re suggesting something that doesn’t move the needle, then is it worth suggesting? Is it worth taking up several people’s time to work on?

These kinds of questions are now baked into our company culture.

2. Effective product teams use high-level product and business goals to drive their team-level work

Call them what you want – OKRs, KPIs, objectives – but effective product teams assign high-level product goals that everyone else can contribute to.

Any of these are tangible enough to work:

• Increase trial-to-paid conversions by 15%
• Reduce new user churn by 3%
• Increase trials to 500 per month

When we decided to increase our trial-to-paid conversions, each of us took off to complete our own set of tasks.

Our CPO went into our analytics to dig up user behavior during the trial period.

That told us which actions our most successful users were taking before they became paid customers.

Our Head of Growth designed an email drip that would convince new customers to take those actions right away.

Our Head of Customer Success created a set of masterclass videos to visually teach new users how to take those first actions.

Meanwhile, we got together as a team to redesign our entire onboarding experience.

The actual nature of the objectives will differ per product team, as they are usually tied to the product itself. (For SaaS metrics, get this cheat sheet from Chartmogul.)

But the principle remains the same – if you want to keep everyone aligned around your product, set goals that are tightly wrapped around your product.

3. Effective teams give company-wide access to customer feedback and support tickets

Slack gets all my love for this one.

We’ve set up a Slack channel to send us incoming Zendesk tickets so that all of us are in on them.

In companies where customer support is considered a separate function, everyone else misses out on the stream of raw customer feedback, comments, and questions.

As far as I’m concerned, this is as good as gold.

Our Head of Customer Success also ropes all of us into doing customer support when she needs us. Rather than pinging us separately, asking how to answer, and answering the ticket herself), she assigns us the tickets that we’re better positioned to answer.

We also use our own Slack-ProdPad integration to send all our customer feedback into our backlog. Rather than make an informal comment over lunch like “X customer just told me she hates our new phased rollout,” we collect them in ProdPad.

Here, they become a formal part of our product process. So long as we put our notes back into ProdPad, they will be seen, and tagged, and they will be considered when the time comes to address that issue.

The alternative is that the customer feedback we field while we’re on the road meeting customers, at conferences, and so on just disappears into thin air.

4. Effective teams invest in making users feel badass

People use products that make them feel badass, and they invest time and energy in products that make them feel badass.

That’s developer evangelist Kathy Sierra’s message to product teams and companies: make your users feel awesome, badass, and good at what they do.

Sometimes, this means thinking beyond the product itself.

We take our cues from companies like Unbounce, a company whose marketing strategy is to create and give away the most useful digital marketing knowledge possible. Their resources are so well produced, thorough, and genuinely useful that they hardly qualify as marketing in the traditional sense. 

I see it as effectively a companion product to its landing page tool – a growing library of webinars, courses, e-books, and posts that help users become really confident marketers.

This collaboration of marketing and product, which don’t always cooperate as they should, is a clear victory for the company.

Where are customers struggling? What do they want to learn more about? What would make them more confident at work or in life?

There’s your sweet spot.

Similarly, our own marketing revolves around helping our users become better product managers.

For example, when we saw one of our blogs, How to Build a Product Roadmap Everyone Understands, start to attract significant traffic, we doubled down the topic. Now, our free, in-depth e-course on the same topic has become the go-to resource for building a simple and agile product roadmap.

Is it marketing? Is it customer success? Based on my experience, just say no to labels and do whatever makes your users feel smart and ready to take on the world.

5. Effective product teams put the final decision and/or veto power in the hands of a single product manager.  

Sure, there are risks to giving one person the power to decide what stays or goes but the alternative is death by committee – and it’s hard to recover from a culture like that.

Product decisions made by committee result in compromise, and compromise is how Windows 8 happened.

Leave the back-and-forth shuffling and the mealy-mouthed product decisions to a less imaginative product company. It takes a single bold product leader who has the power to insist to catapult products into first place. There is one caveat: before making that final call, Product Managers should ask their colleagues what they think. 

One of our customers Ajay Dawar, VP of Product Management & Design at Everstring, does this in a really interesting way.

First, he talks to the CEO and exec team about what they believe the product direction should be. Then, he poses the following question to each team leader:

“Over the next 90 days, what’s the most important thing for us to do?”

Based on those discussions, he curates a set of ideas from an otherwise long product backlog for them to stack rank. Stank ranking effectively forces his colleagues to assign their priorities a numbered list – no ties allowed.

A committee might be tempted to say: “Can we squeeze in both?” But he has the full support of the company to make the final decision.

Speaking of final decisions, the other caveat is this: No decision has to be final. Any good product team is always testing, learning, and iterating based on the results.

Every product decision should be subject to change.

The post Product Teams: What Highly Effective Ones Are Doing Differently appeared first on ProdPad.

Learn what a product manager actually does

You’re probably thinking you can tackle most PM responsibilities yourself, and that’s completely fair. You may not need a full-time product manager, but you may still have to share those responsibilities between several team members. After all, being part of a startup means that you and your team will be doubling on roles.

Does your product have a vision? Do you have a direction? Do you even know what you’re building and for whom? A product manager can answer all these important questions and ensures that rather than just throwing a bunch of features together, you’re actually solving a problem.

Talk to your team

Part of a product’s life cycle and management is to gather ideas and feedback. At first, you may not have defined your success metrics, or even have enough customers to make an educated decision about what changes to make, or even where your product fits in the market so you are able to make those strategic changes. By gathering feedback from your team, you’ll not only be able to gather some great ideas and influence openness within your own team, but you’ll be able to understand how and where your team stands on important decisions. Most importantly, you’ll understand how your team is working, which will allow you to analyse and apply any needed changes to improve productivity, and deliver better products.

Prepare to grow

The most important thing to keep in mind, is that hiring a product manager indicates product maturity. If you’re at a point where you simply cannot handle all the tasks by yourself or by splitting it between your existing team members, you’ve reached a point in which your product has grown and needs a bit more love and dedication around the edges. This is good news! You’re no longer just a bunch of features put together – you’re solving a real world problem.

As your product matures, the PM’s role will become increasingly time-consuming. So as the team grows, some entrepreneurs will hand over the product reigns to an experienced product manager so that the product can continue to grow and mature properly. Some entrepreneurs find that they’d rather work more closely with the product itself, and so hand over the reigns to the CEO role so that they can focus on what they started, and on what they love: the product.

How do you balance your time working at a startup? Share your tips and tricks in the comments. If you’re a product manager looking to save time and work in an organized, efficient way then sign up for a free trial of ProdPad today!

The post Does Your Startup Need A Dedicated Product Manager? appeared first on ProdPad.

The Pushy Sales Manager

Your sales team works incredibly hard to sell your solution on the front line. But that tenacity often makes its way into internal politics. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – your sales people are your customers’ champions too – but sometimes we come across an extraordinarily pushy salesperson.

This difficult co-worker is relentless in their insistence for the features their latest target needs to close a sale and will either resort to aggressive communication or work around you to get it. You may find an incredibly creative version of your roadmap shared with prospects or concrete promises for developments you’ve never agreed to.

So what do you do?

Putting up like-for-like resistance to these colleagues can often make it worse. This kind of negotiation is what they do for a living, and they will probably beat you. Instead, work to get this sales person on your side.

This means involving them early in roadmapping, and making them equal participants in your planned course of action. Be open to sales input and listen to what is important for new revenue, but control when this influence is exerted. Often, just one supporter at a senior level on the sales team will get you far – and you can refer others to them should further disputes arise.

The Obstructive CTO

On the other side of the coin is the obstructive CTO. A CTO and a Product Manager have a very close working relationship, but not always the clearest one. The line between roadmap resourcing and development planning can become a little blurred. Relationships can turn sour when you find yourself working with a CTO who feels product management is stepping on their toes, and is – as a result – obstructive of your attempts to deliver new products.

This obstructive CTO might pull out the technical card to undermine your projects or even understanding of the development undertaking. Or they might mismanage resources in line with their own sense of priority. Whereas the commercial team might push for features based on their immediate sellability, a certain type of CTO might do quite the opposite and fixate on the technical ease of different approaches above the product vision.

So what do you do?

Don’t forget that the CTO’s input into different approaches is valid, and can help you make pragmatic calls. But should you find that this crosses the line from input to overriding important product decisions, you need to address the issue face on. Speak frankly with your CTO about the best ways for you to work together and ask for input on how you can best work with to his team’s rhythms too.

Help your CTO to understand that they too will better be able to meet targets and responsibilities if you work in tandem, and that you share his goals. If you really can’t see eye to eye you may have to have a conversation with senior management about defining boundaries and responsibilities. This discord could well be the product of a lack of clarity from higher up.

Playing our part

Despite these possible bumps in the road with difficult coworkers, product people need to understand that it’s a major part of their job to navigate the needs of colleagues in various different teams. As well as developing techniques to cope with office politics, it’s equally important not to mistake partisan interests for being obstructive. An oversensitive product manager is equally culpable among this mix of tricky characters.

And remember, being the owner of a product means you’re responsible for its successful delivery, not that you always know best. Strive always to defuse working relationships and see them for the mutually beneficial partnerships that they are.

Tell us: Have you ever had difficult coworkers? What role were they, and how did you learn to cope? Let us know in the comments!

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Understanding customers is about understanding people

One of the most valuable but perhaps most abstract changes that psychology brings to product is a different way of thinking about your users. At this year’s Mind the Product conference, Interaction and Experience Research Director for Intel – Genevieve Bell – shared with us an understanding of human behavior that could transform a product manager’s typical approach to their users. She highlighted that while we’re tempted to believe that changes in technology reflect changes in us as human beings, what makes us human in fact changes very slowly.

An appreciation of this bigger picture can make us better product managers. Genevieve herself – an anthropologist – is an example of Intel’s appreciation for a different outlook on understanding customers. And she’s not the only one; from psychology-led design consultancy Behaviour, to psychology graduate and founder of Fitbit Tim Roberts, many more with human behavior in their blood are turning their training to building and making products.

Don Norman even calls for changes to design education to better equip designers for the social experiences they are creating:

“In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully under-educated for the task.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every product manager needs to rush off back to school to get their psychology degree. But perhaps reading a book or article here or there, re-educating your team to consider the humanness of your customers, could give you the perspective you need to take your products from average to awesome.

Building sticky products is about habit forming

Getting into the heads of your users can be applied much more directly than a general approach to product, however. One of the industry’s leading thought leaders on the intersection between technology, business and psychology – Nir Eyal – also spoke to us at this year’s Mind the Product on the power of habit forming in your technology products.

“The hook is an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to your solution, with enough frequency to form habits.”

How Facebook, Twitter and other major technologies have exploded into our lives in the past few years is no pure coincidence. In theory, all product managers can use the science of habit forming to figure out how to trigger desired behavior in their users. Of course, that’s no simple task, but a little part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens can help to give us a head start. This stimulates the stress of desire, and it is these cravings that move us to action. Moving users to strive for rewards from your product, which might take the form of social, resource, mastery, or investment-based rewards can help you encourage them to come back again and again.

An example of this habits-based approach comes from Behaviour, who worked with psychologists at University College London to build behavioral insight into the design of an app for breast cancer charity CoppaFeel. Elements such as taking a pledge when starting the app to encourage a long-term commitment, and data on how many other users have ‘copped a feel’ for social proof, were developed to encourage young women to form a habit.

Perhaps an element of your product could be reimagined to encourage more habit-based behavior in the hunt for one of these basic human rewards.

Good products treat customers as humans at every step

As businesses we are sometimes guilty of investing all of our empathy for customers into the initial development of our products or marketing, but forgetting that these people face the same challenges when they’re using our products too. Kathy Sierra delivered a very strong message at Mind the Product, urging product people not to trade personas for stock photo images of their users after the sale.

When we’re trying to build great products it’s not just about motivating users, but keeping them on track in face of lagging willpower. So how can we overcome this derailment of our users? An important psychological concept to be mindful of when assessing your entire customer experience is cognitive leaks. Don’t suck away your users cognitive power when they’re trying to use your product; instead limit choice, provide clear instructions and support and offer clean feedback so your users’ brains can rest assured you’ve got it covered.

Don’t forget that your users never stop being the very human people that they are, and account for that at every stage of their customer journey.

The post The Psychology Behind Building Products: Psych-Savvy Product Management For Truly Human Technology appeared first on ProdPad.

A term popularized by startup writer Eric Ries, a minimum viable product (MVP) is “a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. The final, complete set of features is only designed and developed after considering feedback from the product’s initial user” – according to techopedia.

At the heart of it, the MVP philosophy about doing the least amount of work you can in order to learn the most of something.

When you release a new product, there are a whole lot of potential risks. What if people don’t see the value of your product? What if they just don’t love it? What if it’s not scalable? And what if it’s not financially viable? Or what if it’s not sufficiently differentiated from your competition? Or your market isn’t as big as you thought? Developing a minimal viable product is about reducing that risk so that you can maximize your success. When you push out an MVP as soon as is reasonable, you reduce your overheads, get faster feedback and all the while you’re able to measure your progress.

So how do you do it? How do you know when you’ve reached your MVP, when to stop building, and when to just get your product out there?

Taking a development term like this perhaps makes it seem more complicated a concept than it really is. Instead, you can probably take a look back to your grade 9 approach to science. In this introduction to the scientific method, all you were asked to do was to define a simple hypothesis and test it.

And much like your 9^th grade science experiment, when developing your MVP this can be broken down into a few simple steps:

• Declare your assumptions or business risks
• Organize them into a testable hypothesis
• Answer the question: what’s the smallest thing I can do or make to test this hypothesis
• Do it! (it’s your MVP)

The last thing to figure out is what to do with the data that comes back from your 9^th grade experiment. This is where the MVP philosophy is also about being bold. If your results show you that your hypothesis carries too much risk, you either change direction, or completely pivot, and try again.

A great example of this is Groupon. Before becoming the business we all know today, the Groupon team had created a social media platform focused on bringing people together around a cause, called The Point. When members showed a tendency to focus on saving money, The Point’s founders tested a simple MVP to test the hypothesis that group buying offered a better product/market fit. This took the form of a wordpress blog with PDF coupons. The success of this experiment is well-documented history of one of the fastest growing companies of all time.

Building an MVP isn’t about knocking out something quick and dirty or cutting corners. It’s not about deciding part way through development that you’ve about had enough and you want to give it a shot in the market. It’s about getting down to the very basics of the scientific method, and finding something to test.  The MVP approach to building products is much more than a specific method of development. It’s a mode of business that believes it pays off to invest in learning.

So if you have to, dig out those old excercise books and get back to the basics of experimentation, and you’ll be surprised by what your science teacher really taught you.

If you’d like to find out more on best practice processes, read our 7 pillars of product management

And if you’d like to discover how ProdPad can help you with awesome product management, sign up for a free trial here

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You’re struggling to manage expectations with your roadmap

Perhaps our number one challenge (at least according to this survey way back in 2009) is roadmapping. In my chats with product managers, what is specifically challenging about a roadmap is not simply deciding what to build when, but how to communicate this out to your team and customers. If you often find yourself backtracking when artificial deadlines come around, you likely need to reconsider many preconceived ideas about roadmaps to better manage expectations.

What can you do?

• Banish dates from your roadmap, and instead be firm on your commitment to current, near-term or long-term developments.
• If you can find a proxy that everyone is comfortable with, you can set vague time brackets for these allocations to help with communications.
• Make your roadmaps as open and visible as possible so that your colleagues and customers feel that they are integrated in the product loop
• Treat your roadmap as a fluid, changeable document. Use a format that is appropriate for demonstrating changes and making updates in light of new decisions. Share these processes visually with your team.

It’s hard to focus on your strategic product direction amidst day-to-day demands

Many product managers see their most important objectives slipping further and further away as the day is taken over by urgent, but less important tasks. Perhaps roadmap features are getting pushed back in favour of quick fixes, or the distraction of endless emails and meetings means you can’t find the time to concentrate on strategy.

What can you do?

• Break down big strategic goals into manageable tasks – whether this be to interview a customer or source intelligence from a colleague – and integrate these into your daily routine.
• Keep your product vision at the fore of your mind by making it physically visible. Print it out and stick it around the office.
• Consider the business case for every decision, no matter how small. Develop a system whereby if you commit resources to a product change, you’ve measured whether the impact will outweigh the effort.

Aligning your company on product direction is threatened by different teams’ biases

A product manager should be 100% focused on the needs of their target customer. But there are many different people in your organisation who are key in how to get there. Sales, Marketing, Customer Support and every other customer-facing role has invaluable insight into what customers want and what is key to success in gaining new ones. Trouble is, every team is biased towards their own objectives and world-view, making it difficult to align each one on product direction.

What can you do?

• Be the link that brings different teams together to collaborate on product discussions. When everyone is able to see the big picture – and the different viewpoints that come with it – part of your mediation work is done for you.
• Make sure that all employee input is securely captured and traced. This way if a particular departmental concern can’t be satisfied by one project or development, you can point to how it is being actioned elsewhere.

Your executive level doesn’t always agree with your product decisions

The role of your executive team in the minutiae of product decisions depends heavily on your business, its size, and the individuals involved. But regardless of how interested your executives are in day-to-day product management, these are the people you ultimately have to convince of your vision and decisions to get there. So when they aren’t behind you, this is a product manager’s most crippling challenge.

What can you do?

• Follow a rigorous and repeatable process to qualify new ideas, whether they come from a customer support rep or the CEO. You must be equipped with reasoned arguments for or against any product decision, and train your executive team to expect the same for their brainwaves too.
• Make sure your product decisions are grounded in business value. If you’re finding yourself battling your senior team to push back on or push through a suggestion, are you sure you’re taking the right approach? Every product change should reflect a real value to the business – be it customer retention or competitive survival – and you should be collecting the evidence to prove it.
• Again, be open and transparent on roadmapping. Once aligned with your executive team at the highest level of product strategy, the smaller decisions should be easier to support against this framework.

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If you’d like more best practice, read our 7 pillars of good product management

And if you’d like to see how ProdPad can help to make your life easier, sign up for a 14 day free trial today

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