AMA: IBM Product Management , Jacqueline Porter on Personas

Personas are a constructed representation of your customer or user. I have found that when there are so many competing signals based on personas each function is using a slightly different interpretation of the persona and their primary pains, goals, and understanding of their purpose. In order to create a shared understanding, I usually take time to document and then share/solicit feedback on these personas from various stakeholders. Once the definition of the persona is codified it becomes eas ...Read More

I recall working on a product where I was building for a developer and for a security engineer. I was interviewing customers and learned that within in the same company different functions have vastly different goals and needs related to feature set I was building related to pipeline component enforcement. Developers wanted these jobs to be very easy to exclude to avoid slowing them down, whereas security needed them to be enforceable and mandatory. It was the same feature and capability, but in ...Read More

There are three steps I generally use to evaluate the success of a persona in the product:  define the outcome or point in time when a user first experiences value  instrument that user first value experience in product  validate with user research  Defining the outcome is about understanding the "aha" moment for the user in the product. This is the first point where they realize the value of your offering and get the pitch. Example: for a data product easily viewing the data with clear action I ...Read More

Recruiting the right users starts with a strong discussion guide, research outcomes, and jobs of interest. Once those are clear, building out a screener that accurately measures their fit and having strong disqualifiers ensures you are capturing the most relevant users to your project. Lastly, ensure your total N is large enough to account for some variability and also generalizable findings.  Start with a discussion guide with clear goals  Create a screener that optimizes for this purpose  Recr ...Read More

JTBDs is the framework for why a customer would choose to use a product. By focusing on "jobs" the product is inherently connected to the task at hand. Personas a conceptualized user. By combining JTBDs and Personas, you will get a 360 degree view of your users, their problems, and how your product can optimize for that segment. The first step to prioritize is building JTBDs personas, which maps the common template "When [Situation], I want to [Motivation/Outcome], so that I can [Functional/Emot ...Read More