The following is a guest post by Niraj Rajput, cofounder and Head of Engineering at Chisel Labs
This blog post will discuss the best way to develop a product for two separate personas.
We’ll talk about how to provide value and meet their needs so they both feel satisfied with your product.
By doing this, you’ll be able to increase sales and grow your business.
What is a persona?
Benefits of a persona
Different types of personas
Step-by-step guide to create the same product for two separate personas
Conclusion
What is a persona?
Personas are fictional characters that represent a target audience, which can be individuals or organizations.
A persona is based on extensive research and analysis of the user’s behavior, activities, motivations, and goals. They aim at representing real users.
Thus, personas give a face to your target audience. They provide details about the persona’s background and goals for using your product or service.
Then you can ask yourself “if this were my customer, how would I serve them?”
Personas are a powerful tool for product managers. They provide a common, consistent understanding of the customer and help users make better decisions about their products.
Thus, it is important to develop personas before you start designing your product or service.
Benefits of developing a persona
One of the most important benefits of developing personas is that it helps the team working on product development to better understand who they are actually building for.
Personas are also extremely critical for determining what features to implement, build and measure in order to increase conversion rates.
There are many benefits to using personas in your development process.
First, you can understand how specific people will respond to certain options or features.
Second, because you have a better understanding of their needs this allows for faster growth as well. Since developers know exactly what they need from the users so that they don’t experience any hiccups along the way when developing new products.
Third, this also helps with marketing efforts by having more targeted campaigns with higher rates of returns. Other approaches might not be able to achieve this due to generalization amongst groups.
Last, these efforts also result in better products with higher satisfaction.
Different types of personas
The first type of persona is the typical user of the product. This type is usually made up of one to two people who are the most common users for your target audience.
The second type is called an “ideal” persona and its goal is not just to represent what real users do, but rather show how they could use a product to their full potential.
These two separate personas try to envision the direction that technology will take in order for it to be apt at satisfying future needs instead of present ones.
The ideal scenario isn’t always realistic so this should only serve as inspiration when developing new features or other aspects on your website/app.
Some companies tend to create emotional personas which aim more towards
capturing feelings than behaviors (i.e., ‘feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information). The most important thing to keep in mind is that the final goal should always be to capture and represent your users as accurately as possible.
There are different types of personas including demographic, psychographic, task-based, and more. But for this blog post, we will only focus on two: market segmentation and user research-based personas.
Market segmentation persona: Market segmentation persona focuses more on demographics such as age, gender, and so on. It tends to view people who have similar characteristics with a can-do attitude towards technology (i.e., ’25-year-old female tech-savvy blogger’)
User research-based persona: This type of persona takes into consideration likes/dislikes along with some other personal preferences which make up a persona. It tends to focus on the user’s behavior and opinions towards a specific topic/product (i.e., ‘Tech-savvy 25-year old blogger who loves design’ or ’25-year-old female who is interested in fashion).
Step-by-step guide to create the same product for two separate personas
Step one:
Identify the type of persona you are creating and what context they will be in when using your product.
Your first step is to define your user’s situation – who they are, their background information like age, gender, marital status, and why they would engage with our product at all?
You must make sure that you understand these things about them so we can write content for them effectively later on.
Step two:
The second step is to segment your audience.
Segmenting helps you to find the patterns within your user base that will help you figure out what their needs are and how they behave differently than other users on the platform.
This is an extremely important step in developing personas because it allows us to create realistic profiles of people who use our product, instead of a generalization that doesn’t represent all types of users.
Step three:
The third step is creating a profile for each type of persona we identified earlier in the segmentation process.
For this stage, we need to research these different segments so we can have enough information about them before moving on to writing content for them specifically later on down the line.
To do this effectively, it’s best if you have a CXO, Head of Marketing, and CMO on board with the project as they will have insight into how your company is targeting each type of persona. We may need to tweak our personas from step two based on what we find out in this research phase.
Step four:
Once you’ve gone through all three previous steps correctly, it’s time to start developing content for each specific persona.
This will require good knowledge about who these people are and their needs so that we can create relevant blog posts and useful information for them which solves any problems or pain points they might be experiencing when using the product (or lack thereof).
The most important thing here is consistency; make sure there aren’t different voices between each post even if you’re blogging about different topics.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is very important to develop the same product for two separate personas as it will lead you to create a better experience and more engagement.
In addition, this process can help your team understand how these users feel about different topics which makes them communicate with each other on those specific issues.
Niraj is co-founder and Head of Engineering at Chisel Labs, a premiere agile product management software company that brings together roadmapping, team alignment, and customer connection. Niraj is passionate about building scalable infrastructure and systems and he also happens to be a huge fan of Cricket!
Tim Rotolo