Many product managers try to build a product for the largest audience thinking that it will help them grow their user base rapidly and show significant growth to their business stakeholders. 

In my opinion, this is the fastest way to failure and to deplete your precious resources specially at the initial rounds of investment. And here where the idea of persona comes to the rescue. There are many posts on the internet about creating personas, mostly published by marketers who have marketing as their first interest when they create a persona.

In this post, I’m going to tackle this subject from a product development point of view, and will walk you step by step until you create a fully fledged persona.

First of all, you will need to push yourself and brainstorm to create at least one persona even if you have not gone out and spoken to your “potential” customers. Coming up with a persona at the very early stage has the following benefits:

• It will help highlight the things that you don’t know yet so that when you go out and do customer discovery, you have a clear understanding of what you want to know and how you will incorporate it after learning
• It will motivate you. You will get a feeling “hey, I really want to go out and learn about this persona not just go through this exercise of talking to them because I heard this is part of the process of creating personas”
• It will help get your team on the same page and start building on this initial persona and improving it sooner than later as part of the iterative process

Personas should be humanized and each persona should have its own name. My preference is to use [name] the [the role] like in Mary the mom.

The next thing you need to do is creating a Screening Question. This is how you are going to go out and when you do find a subject that represents your persona, the simple factual question that you ask them to make sure they are a valid subject. For example: How many times on average do you shop for clothes for your baby each month? [> 1]

Now we come to the actual description of the persona. But before I give an example about the description, I should mention that some product management gurus prefer to have an image – a real image taken by a mobile phone – to represent the persona, the more we humanize the persona the better. I personally don’t see the image is very important but you still can use it.

Here is a full example of a persona:

Title:
Mary the mom

Screening Question:
How many times on average do you shop for clothes for your baby each month? [>1]

Description:
Mary is a 27 years old mother with 2 children, the youngest is a 3 months old boy. When she got married she was working as a school teacher and she never thought she will quit her job and be a full time home mom. But when she delivered her first baby, she was happy she made the decision to quit to take care of her newborn. And now with her second baby, she advises every mom to take the plunge and quit their job because growing kids is very demanding and requires a lot of attention, education and time.

Mary prefers to use her free time in educating herself and learning more about the psychology of kids at different ages. She thinks of shopping for kids clothes a waste of time and would rather save it to do what she likes.
Mary is frustrated by the town mall because she can’t find suitable clothes for her children most of the time, so she has to head to the city center for more styles and sizes.

She used to hang out with her colleagues and friends after work but now she doesn’t have enough time to socialize and maintain her relations. She is planning to leverage her teaching experience and what she learnt from growing her kids to start a nursery business when her kids pass the elementary school.

The italic part of description is related to our business idea and highlights the tension points that we need to look at in more details and address in our solution.

You might have many personas in mind and confused which one to start with. I would advise to start with anyone and evolve it as you talk to your potential customers and do more exploration. Personas go hand in hand with agile development and, similar to software iterations, they should be revised as we learn more and introduce product releases.

Specially for B2C products, it is strongly advisable to start with only one persona to design and develop your minimum viable product.