When I was a kid, I hated rollercoasters. They were objects of sheer terror. Occasionally, my father would get me to ride on one; I would spend the entire trip scared out of my mind, clutching the bar, and desperate to get out of there as soon as I could.
As a teenager, my step-sister talked me into going on Thunder Road at Carowinds. I really didn't want to, but she was several years older than me and I wanted to impress her. But then something strange happened. I loved it. I mean, absolutely loved it. It was so terrifying that it was exhilarating! I rode it over and over again. I was totally hooked.
My relationship with user personas has been similarly rocky. When I was first introduced to them - more years ago than I care to admit - I thought they were amazing. I was early in my journey of looking at products as experiences rather than a technical set of features, and I expected them to solve so many problems. Later, I grew to resent them, as useless artifacts that were meaningless. Now? I think I'm starting to like them again for some use cases, but that's still something that I'm exploring.
Going up the rollercoaster
The intention behind user personas was good. They gave us a language to discuss customers, and even gave us a "person" to empathize with. We felt like we were really defining our users for the first time, with features designed for specific personas and marketing campaigns customized for them.
At the time, I was working for a VERY small software company - we usually had around 20-25 total employees at any given time - so everyone wore a lot of hats and figured out how to do things as we went. User personas were one of our first real steps toward product-led (instead of feature-led) development, and we loved them!
What goes up, must come down...
But then we reached the top of the hill of the rollercoaster. You know... That scary moment where you just hang for what feels like an eternity, staring down into the abyss and knowing that any second now, the bottom is going to fall out of the world.
To be fair, my falling out with user personas was nowhere near as dramatic as that last paragraph sounded. Instead, it was gradual. At first, I found myself using them less and less. The value I expected to get from them just wasn't there. I had thought they would make communication with other departments easier, but not many people were actually interested. We stopped updating them, and no one noticed. Eventually they just seemed like a waste of effort for very little return.
Specifically, user personas had the following problems:
Properly made user personas take a lot of time to create initially, and then they need to be updated periodically. Coming, as I did, from a world where I had never once had a large enough team to do all the things we wanted to do, spending our precious time on user personas wasn't worth it.
Most of my experience has been in B2B, particularly in the enterprise space. B2C tends to rely on large numbers of self-service customers, which means that the users are at a distance, somewhat monolithic, and very unknowable. However, in B2B / enterprise, there are far fewer customers and we tend to use a very high-touch service model. This means that it can be fairly easy for the product managers to get to know the end users. We didn't need user personas to make the average user an empathetic figure; we could reference real users by name with their very real, non-theoretical problems.
Most importantly, every time we worked on user personas, we committed the cardinal sin. In our arrogance, we assumed we knew the customers and essentially just wrote down our guesses and "knowledge." We never once actually interviewed a customer in the creation of a user persona. No wonder we didn't find them useful.
So, given all that, where am I now? If you are looking for a conclusion that wraps everything up here, you are going to be disappointed because life is an ongoing series of experiments and I'm still in the middle of this one. Not all of my blog posts are going to conclude nicely, I'm afraid.
I think I'm back on an upswing with user personas and willing to give them another chance. My current guess is that the key to making successful ones is marrying them to Jobs To Be Done. In fact, I recommend checking out this excellent article from Nielsen Norman Group about the topic, though fair warning - I haven't written personas like this before so I can't personally vouch for them.
All in all, they are worth a fresh look and maybe even another ride around on the rollercoaster.
Disclaimer: I'm still not convinced that they are useful in a B2B/enterprise setting, but maybe my prior experiences weren't typical. And obviously, I'm going to recommend that you should actually interview customers and not just make assumptions about them!
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