Tool: User Persona Cards
Almost every PM will say they are the voice of the customer or user. To properly speak up on behalf of the user, PMs must speak with customers (or their proxies) and look at behavioral metrics. In most PM roles, one of the early requests made of a PM is to interview customers.
If you just interview customers, than you keep the knowledge in your head or in your notes. But, if you document and share your information the entire team can learn, and you can provide evidence that you have done the leg work to speak up for users.
Persona Cards
One of the easiest and most straightforward ways to document your efforts is to create user persona cards after every interview. Some companies (like Amazon) have a standard format you should use. I recall vividly the first director I worked for at Amazon insisting I should speak with at least one customer a week! At the time I thought it was overkill, but for some products it is crucial.
User ‘Conversation’ Practice
When I work with startups, establishing a “user interview” or “user conversation” practice is fundamental. As a product leader, I must lead sharing of the information about users widely within the organization. While we call them interviews, it works better if it feels more like a conversation. After your first 5 or so, they are easy. You will feel comfortable doing them at any company after that.
When I was working as Head of Product for one company for the first 6 weeks of the year, I conducted about 10 interviews per week.
Not Just Current Users
Make sure you interview current and potential customers. Also, salespeople, customer success agents, and customers who stopped using the product (if you can). Make sure to cast a wide net so that you don’t get tunnel vision or just confirm your initial biases.
A note on salespeople, they are more helpful than you might expect. To sell, a salesperson must empathize and listen to customers every day. They are sometimes bigger advocates for customers than PMs. Understand they might be biased to ‘whales’ but they have invaluable insights nonetheless.
I love the site userinterviews.com for tips and tools if you have to build the practice completely from scratch.
Common Attributes
Your persona cards should be personalized to the product in question. Some common attributes to include are:
goals
quotes
background
title
motivations
frustrations (challenges and pain points)
channels,
frustrations,
technology
skills
demographics
Questions/Convo Starters I Like
Tell me how you perform X task/job
What do you love about it
What do you hate about it
If I could wave a magic wand and give you anything you wanted to do X, what would it be.
That last question often uncovers some pretty interesting observations. It is a creative way to get the average person to think of moonshots.
Resources
There are tons of resources on user interviews and persona cards. A quick Google search will net you hundreds of helpful results.
1. User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them
This article goes through the basics of user interviews:
Pre-Work
Set a goal
Prepare questions
Write dialog-provoking interview questions.
Avoid leading, closed, or vague questions.
Prepare more questions than you believe you will have time to ask.
Anticipate different responses
Construct follow-up questions based on goals
Make User feel comfortable
Create rapport
2. How to Create Persona Cards
UXpressia provides a template you can leverage
Research
Segment
Decide on Layout
demographic info
background
goals
motivations
frustrations
Why build a persona card?
Why interview rather than just survey
Finding people
Preparing for the Interview
4. Personas
What is a persona?
Key elements of personas
How to guide
develop hypothesis
conduct interviews
backup with data
create persona
5. 12 Essential Questions To Ask When Building Buyer Personas
This article has a nice checklist of the finer details.
Don’t just choose current customers
Conversations more than interviews
Don’t ask yes or no questions
Listen
Send a reminder
Keep the call to 20-30 mins
Remove all distractions
Bonus: they list 12 questions to ask.
6. Quick Design Templates
