Building A Persona Only Matters If You Actually Observe People
Most people build a persona as a foundation for planning.
Persona is the Latin root of the English word personal. (Most Western languages trace back to Latin.)
“Building a persona” in the planning process means concretely imagining an individual who would want the product or service that the plan offers.
This work is worth doing in almost every case.
Once you start thinking concretely, you notice things in advance, like “actually there aren’t many people who fit this” or “the price doesn’t match this pattern of target customer.”
But if you don’t run this exercise correctly, you fall into a trap.
There is only one pattern for how you fall into it.
That is:
“Thinking you understand the persona when you actually don’t.”
That is the single, very simple point.
A simple way to prevent this is to get close to the persona.
You can consider interviews, questionnaires, and various other methods, but what I recommend is close observation.
Spend time together for a while with someone who is a typical example of the target persona.
When I was developing a certain product related to nursing care, I had several realizations.
First, the general public knows almost nothing about the actual conditions of a specialized job like nursing care work.
Also, methods like questionnaires can capture surface-level circumstances, but they don’t reveal what is truly important for the business in a deeper sense.
For example, to make a business viable, you need to close contracts.
A contract being signed means that someone stamps a seal or signs their name.
“What is the process leading up to that?” “Who is involved in the decision?” “Where do opinions get consolidated, and who makes the final call?” And surrounded by this kind of environment, what dilemmas do nursing care workers carry?
A questionnaire that can capture information down to this level is not something you can easily create.
There is also their daily life.
Their schedule, what they carry on them, the distances they travel, the tools they use, what’s on their shelves, things they can only get by buying, things they type on a computer, things they write by hand.
Overwhelming realizations often emerge from this kind of observation.
And that easily and fundamentally demolishes the conference-room-style conclusions that come out of a formal “persona analysis.”
Building a persona is important.
But don’t forget that this only means you’ve finished preparing for “observation” — you are still in the middle of the process.
The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please get the book.
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/09/1212/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.