Once you’ve interviewed and/ or surveyed your customers, prospects, and churned customers - it’s time to put the personas into a digestible format. I recommend Google slides (or PPT, if that’s your jam) and hosting them on a central resource so all teams can use them. For example, at last night’s PMM meetup, Shyna Zhang, Director of Enterprise Strategy at Marketo, talked about how they whiteboarded the personas in a common space for product and engineering to always be able to reference, making it part of their daily decision making process.
The personas should include:
A brief synopsis of who they are - i.e. “Marketing leader of 5-10 person teams, usually in the B2B space. Checks analytics every day and is obsessed with getting the maximum ROI” (B2B - make sure to use firmagraphic information. B2C demo information is more relevant)
What motivates them to buy your product or a product like yours
What their decision making power usually is (i.e. do they have the final call? Are they part of a team that decides?)
Quotes from actual interviews
Their real challenges and frustrations
Optional: What they love / hate about your product
Important: A catchy name to define each persona segment that people will remember (i.e. “Jack of all trades” or “Silver spoon” were ones we used for a prior project)
The last bullet might seem random, but it’s critical to getting the personas used throughout your organization. If you do good work, and the personas have value, it won’t be long until you hear your CEO referring to one of the personas during an all hands meeting (true story!)