Despite being used by product managers, corporate innovators, designers etc - the vast majority of personas are unhelpful.
4 reasons why 90% of personas suck
1) They don’t have a clear objective
I’ve lost count of the amount of times that i’ve seen personas being created in workshops and meetings for them to NEVER be used again.
The excuse that ‘it’s just for inspiration’ doesn’t fly as you’ll see in my next point.
2) They’re based on guesswork
People tend to create personas because they think they should. This means they’re normally based on guesswork rather than solid customer research.
What really matters is customer needs and ‘jobs to be done’ i.e. what customers are trying to get done or achieve.
3) They’re based on demographics and likes/dislikes rather than customer needs
As you can see from the example below, using demographics and ‘likes and dislikes’ can be a very reductive and an unhelpful way of viewing customers.
4) No follow through into implementation
There’s normally a huge disconnect from an insight team, product/innovation team and marketing team in how and why personas should be used.
Most of the time a persona is created at the beginning of the product development process and by the end of the project, the marketing team is unable to target the precise customer persona anyway!
What to do instead?
Think about customer needs and jobs to be done.
Jobs-to-be-done is a statement that describes, with precision, what a group of people are trying to achieve or accomplish in a given situation
Why customer needs and jobs to be done?
Remember customers don’t care about your product, they care about the ‘job’ it performs for them which improves their life. Even for charities.
I’ve found that in survey results people will say they took part in your charity event ‘because it’s a good/personal cause’. However, in my experience this STILL happens when the vast majority of supporters have never given or supported the cause before. This means that the product met their needs rather than it solely being about the cause or charity brand. E.g. a virtual event gave them the incentive they needed to do more exercise in September.
The three different types of jobs-to-be-done:
A job can be functional, emotional or social. See some examples below:
A Functional job could be ‘helping women with breast cancer’.
An Emotional job related to charity fundraising could be ‘Remembering my wife who passed away’.
A Social job is how they’re perceived by others so could be ‘I want my friends to see how passionate I am about this cause’.
Getting to grips with what these ‘jobs’ are through qualitative research and working out what’s holding them back from achieving them (known as pains) could reveal some lucrative areas for innovation and could be a LOT more useful than personas!
If you’re interested in improving existing products or developing new products grounded in customer needs.You can book a free discovery call with me here.
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