How can personas help me be strategic?

Just to quickly review some persona basics, there are typically three persona types including user, buyer and technical. If you were to begin to document a persona, and I would recommend keeping it simple to start, start by identifying some basic attributes that will begin to draw a picture of who they are. This will typically include an average age, gender, summary of computing skills, applicable market segment and most importantly a name. Most will include a typical title for this persona however I am reluctant to do so unless titles in the market segment are well defined and consistent. Can I stress how important the name is over a title? Feel free to include any other demographic attributes that will help people frame a common perspective on the persona. The second step is to build out some details on what their background is, what a typical day for them looks like and how they interact with your product. The latter point will only be relevant to user personas, but you will want to identify problems that your technical and economic buyers are dealing with.

Constructing the ideal set of personas will be time consuming effort, but it can be built up and out over time. However it is something you will want to tackle sooner rather than later and may want to think about outsourcing the activity to eliminate your own perceptions from the process.

So is persona development a strategic activity?

In a previous post (Harvard Business Publishing on Strategy), that I wrote back in January and refer to continuously, it states that for your strategy to be complete it must be aligned with your vision, mission and value network. Within the context of this post, I want to key-in on the value network. Your value network is defined by the relationships between you and your suppliers, customers, employees, and investors that will combine to either create or capture value.

So how do we tie this back to strategy?

Easy. Much in the same way we test our individual activities against whether they are roadmap supporting (by asking “why?”), we can test our activities and data points against which persona will receive value (by asking “for who?”). Without personas, in the context of your value network your strategy will be undefined in the same way as it would be if you are not able to articulate your vision.

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