In my previous posts I talked about brainstorming to create a vivid and alive description about Product Personas that helps us imagine the persona in real life and what they do, think, feel and see to operationalize them in the context of product development.
We also discussed creating Problem Scenarios and alternative pairs to make sure we are creating a better alternative (value proposition) that addresses an existing and real-life problem, need or desire that our persona has.

This post marks the start of a series that demonstrates a tested lean and agile process to create a successful software product and leverages on previous posts. So let’s get our hands dirty and start with a real life product: A conversational travel assistant!

Project Description

Let’s first define our project which we will iterate over throughout the coming posts. It is just a brief that covers the bolded points and helps our collaborators get a very good idea about the product we intend to build.

For [tourists] who [travel to new destinations or would like to further explore known destinations], [TravInfo] is a [conversational travel assistant] that [provides users with pre-travel advice on their place of interest and keeps sending them updates on the go as they visit places]. Unlike [TripAdvisor and tourists blogs], our product [provides information with minimal effort from the user and without spending hours reading up on the destination to compile knowledge about its attractions and interesting places].

Persona Details

We can  brainstorm multiple personas for this product such as Roland the junior manager, Lara the hitchhiker, Mary the salesperson and Leo the school student.
I will pick up Roland the Junior manager to accompany us throughout our journey.

Screening Question

How many new destinations do you travel to each year? [> 0]

Roland the Junior Manager

Roland has been recently promoted to the first management position in his career. He started as a software developer and climbed up the career ladder until he got appointed as a development team lead.
Roland used to work on software development until late hours and now he has trouble giving up his habit and starting work early to run his scrum team daily meeting.
Roland hooked up with his girlfriend 2 years ago and since then they are trying to explore as many new places as they can whether at home or abroad.
Since they are both busy professionals, Roland takes on the task of researching and selecting the next destination. However, he has difficulty finding the time to do that. He usually starts work at 8 am and when he finishes around 7 pm, he is already tired and needs some space to relax and get ready for the next day.
Over the weekend, he likes to socialize and catch up with friends for a drink or a basketball match. He also uses his free time to advance his knowledge and career.
He finds that researching the next travel destination is painful as it requires continuous reading and taking notes from different websites and blogs.

Roland takes frequent short breaks at work and uses them to post on social media and read the online feed of his community on Facebook and Twitter.

Operationalizing the Persona with Thinks, Sees, Feels, Does

This section gives us a structured way of thinking about the persona in the context of our product

• Thinks: Describes what the persona thinks about the problem, desire or need.
• Sees: How the persona connects to the world and learns about things and products
• Feels: What the persona feels towards the problem they have
• Does: What the persona does to address the problem, desire or need.

Let’s see how Roland thinks, sees, feels and does the problem of researching travel destinations:

• Thinks: Roland thinks that researching new destinations and attractions is painful and time consuming, and should be simpler and more efficient.He also thinks it will be a good idea to share his research snippets, as he explores, with his girlfriend to get her feedback and score destinations accordingly.
  Roland prefer to use the many hours he spends researching new places to do things he enjoys.
• Sees: Roland is tech-savvy and always up-to-date with technology and new applications. He spends about an hour reading through news feeds from different websites
• Feels: Roland loves travel and exploring new places with his girlfriend. But he is often frustrated by the effort he needs to plan the next destination. His girlfriend also hates that and not interested in helping.
• Does: Roland usually conducts his travel research over multiple sessions, about 2 hours each. Depending on his location, he either uses his PC or mobile for that.
  He uses cloud notes app to collect notes on various places and attractions while he is researching, and he visits them later to score and discuss destinations with his girlfriend.
  Sometimes he discusses the findings with his girlfriend over the phone and sometimes using a chat app.

Problem Scenarios, Alternative and Value Proposition

We explored problem scenarios and current alternatives in depth in the previous post. The only new addition is Value Proposition which is basically the alternatives that we provide to our persona by using our product, and are better than the existing (current) alternatives.