Validating your personas
You’ve defined your users. Now it’s time to talk to your users and validate whether your assumptions are correct.
While defining the personas is a key first step, we need to follow through in this process by actually talking to our users and confirming we didn’t make too much up. If you're early stage enough, chances are you’re filling the CRO role in addition to being the founder/CEO. This means you already know who you should talk with to see whether your persona assumptions are correct.
When you were first exploring your company idea, you probably reached out to a wide range of potential customers in your network and beyond to see if your product assumptions were correct. We recommend including some of these same people in your persona validation outreach because they are likely already familiar with your product, even if they don’t currently use it. Then also include any real customers you have, even if you’re unsure whether they fit the persona profiles.
Ideally, you’ll reach out to 20 people to schedule calls, with the goal of having conversations with at least 10 of them. Here is a sample email on how to position this ask correctly:
Copy this:
Hi <Name>,
It’s <your name>, from <company>. As you may already know, we’re building <product> to solve the challenge of <problem>. I’m reaching out to see if I can get 30 minutes with you to better understand how you think about this problem and how it impacts your day to day. Can you let me know a few time you’re free next week to chat?
Would greatly appreciate any insights you have.
Thanks!
<your name>
Persona Validation Questions
Here are some questions that will help you validate your personas. You can pick and choose a few of these questions from each section to help you drive the conversation (we’ve also included the full set of questions in a Google Doc you can copy at the end of this sprint). We recommend recording each of these conversations so you aren’t too distracted trying to catch their answers as they are speaking with you.
We like to start by asking simple background questions to get the conversation. Things such as:
Where do you live?
What’s your professional background?
How many years of experience do you have?
Then we want to move the conversation into understanding their goals and objectives by asking:
What’s your main objective when you get to work each day?
What are your professional goals or aspirations?
It’s helpful to have them paint a picture of what a typical day is like for them by asking:
Walk us through a day in your life at your company. What are your responsibilities?
What do you love about your job?
How has your role evolved?
Then we want to make sure we dive into understanding some of their frustrations:
What are some of the pain points in your day-to-day?
What frustrates you the most about your job?
We want to learn about use cases for your product:
How do you use our product?
What did you use before using our product?
Who was involved in the buying process for our product?
We end by understanding the benefits they get from using a product like yours:
What are the biggest benefits of using our product?
What do you love about our product?
What feature or product would you most love to see us come out with next?
Make sure to capture your customers’ answers in a document that you can share with your persona working group and your wider company. Getting real insight from real users is incredibly valuable and you’ll be surprised at how many people will want to learn from the information you’ve gathered. Remember, your personas will benefit almost every person in your company.
Also, don’t forget to go back to your persona deck and make any updates to the information based on what you’ve learned from your real customers.
