What kind of persona research do you do for mature products?

One of the advantages you have as a Product Manager for a mature product is you will have a well defined set of users and personas. The other advantage you have with a mature product is that you will have a lot of users and usage. This gives you a great opportunity to learn from an established customer base. Having a mature product does not mean you stop doing research and understanding customer pain points. I’d focus on the following:

1. Establish a customer advisory board (CAB) - A CAB is a great way for you to share discovery efforts you have and innovations you are working on for early feedback. You may find CAB members will sign up to be early adopters or beta users. The other great thing that will happen in a CAB is your customers will start talking amongst themselves and this is an amazing opportunity for you to learn as they will likely express things they love, unique ways they are using the product, how they solve different problems and what areas give them the most pain.

2. Customer Support and Feedback Channels: Engaging with customer support teams and analyzing customer feedback channels, such as helpdesk tickets, support chats, or online forums, can provide insights into common user pain points, feature requests, and areas needing improvement. Customer support interactions can reveal firsthand user experiences and provide valuable input for prioritizing enhancements.

3. Competitive Analysis: Conducting research on competing products and monitoring industry trends can provide valuable insights into user expectations, emerging features, and areas of differentiation. Analyzing competitor offerings and user feedback on those products can inform product managers about potential gaps or opportunities to enhance their mature product.

It’s common to assume that mature products have a static, well-defined persona. However, product teams should aim to continuously challenge and pressure-test that assumption.

Specifically:

• We should continuously validate whether our long-held assumptions about user demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points remain valid. Markets inevitably change, and user preferences evolve. Is our ideal customer who loved and raved about our product two years ago still the same one who’s doing so today?

• Relatedly, we should always be on the lookout for new personas that need to be accounted for in our planning and development process. Remember, there are job roles today that didn’t exist two years ago. Are there new types of users with expectations and needs we haven’t previously accounted for but now need to consider?

Persona research for any product tends to be a mixture of broad market research and more targeted UX research via surveys, CSAT, in-person events etc.

Usually for mature products, I would approach persona research in the following ways:

1. Validating that the ICP that was originally set for the product, still aligns with the majority of current customers.

2. Periodic UX research interviews to get qualitative feedback from the ICP candidates to compliment the quantitative feedback gathered by other means

3. Broad market research (using 3rd party research where available and applicable) of personas that use similar or competitor products. If a gap is identified, then following up with UX research targeting the newly identified persona to understand what it would take for them to adopt the product / unlock that market segment. This is important for growth of mature products.

A mature product has already found product/market fit, so there is not normally new personas per se. However, market research should identify competitors and the personas they are engaging to determine if there is a different persona, or a changing need not yet identified.

Since a mature product generally has a healthy user-base, engaging with your current community will help you understand their needs and what other options they may be considering, or discover how competitors are trying to win them over.