Developing your personas

Let’s dig into to how to create your personas.

There are two phases to developing personas. The first phase is to develop proto-personas. This is where you define the users that you think are out there. They’re called proto-personas because although you’ll use real data to build assumptions about these users, you have yet to confirm whether your assumptions are correct.

Once you’ve documented who these users are and built a full profile of them, you’ll move on to validating your personas. During this second phase, you’ll interview real customers who fit your proto-persona profiles and ask them strategic questions to confirm or update your assumptions.

How To Run Your Persona Workshop

To get started, set aside 2-3 hours to go through the persona workshop template we provide at the end of this sprint. It's best if this is done with 3 people in your company so there is a mix of ideas and conversations around who you think the users are. If you're a solo founder without any employees, you certainly can do this alone but we recommend bringing in an advisor so your assumptions don't happen in a vacuum. 

When we host persona workshops with our clients, we are generally brought in when the company is at a later stage so our group might look like this:

1. Head of Sales

2. Senior Account Executive

3. Customer Success Manager or Head of CSM

4. CMO or VP of Marketing 

5. Content Marketer and/or Growth Marketer 

6. Product Manager or Head of Product 

7. Product Owner 

We know you aren’t there yet in filling these roles, but we’re sharing it for later on, as your personas will evolve along with your company and product growth. We recommend revisiting your personas yearly to make sure your assumptions are still valid. 

What You’ll Need

• Time (2-3 hours)

• Notecards or post-its

• A whiteboard (or use Miro for virtual workshops)

• Our persona workshop template (linked to at the end of this sprint)

Workshop flow

To start the workshop, you and your participants will each get 4-6 notecards (depending on the number of personas you want to define). You should each take about 10 minutes to think of your target users then write down their company and title on one side of the card.

As the leader of the workshop, you will then ask everyone to share their set of users and write them up on the whiteboard. It’s likely that there is overlap so you’ll want to group similar titles and companies together so you end up with a consolidated group of 4-6 titles / companies.

Now is the fun part. As a group, you will go through each persona and write down your ideas for their:

1. Goals & Objectives - Why do they work at their company? Why do they care about their profession? What matters in their job? What are they hoping to achieve in their career?

2. Pain Points - What is frustrating about their job? What makes their day to day annoying? What pain points do they have as it relates to your product or what your company solves?

3. A day in the life - What does their day look like? Are they in a ton of meetings or do they do a lot of IC work? Take us through what you imagine that day is like in detail.

4. Use Cases & Benefits - Why do they need your product? What is their use case(s)? What benefits do they get from using your product?

This usually elicits great discussions and enthusiasm so make sure to ask different questions to the group to get the creative juices flowing.

Then to end, you will be personifying each persona by giving them a fictitious name, age, geographic location, and company that they work for.

All of this information will be consolidated and edited to eventually end up in your persona deck to look like this: