To create the right personas for your organization, you must have input from two sources: customers and employees. Stakeholder interviews are the process we use for gathering information from the latter.
As an outside firm, it is obvious to us (because we have to first learn all the issues) that stakeholder interviews are a necessary first step in any persona creation process. If you are an employee about to create personas, you might think your day-to-day interactions with co-workers have told you enough about why personas could be useful. That is a bad assumption. Instead, use stakeholder interviews as an opportunity to actually discuss the issues with your co-workers. Schedule a 15- to 30-minute (or longer) meeting with key stakeholders and dig in to their opinions, experiences, assumptions, expectations, biases, and measurements for a successful persona creation project.
Why? Because personas are an innovation tool that can only work well if you understand clearly who is trying to be creative, what problems they have that need creative resolution, and why they need impetus to help focus their innovations. Your personas must be crafted to help specific people within your organization solve specific problems. Randomly generated profiles of customers are not enough.
If you are creating user personas, talk to developers, designers, product managers, product marketers, market researchers, and any directors or upper-level management who have a stake in the product’s success. If you are creating buyer personas, talk to sales people, sales support, marketing managers, marketing communications managers, product marketing managers, product managers, web site managers, market researchers, and any directors or upper-level management who have a stake in the campaign’s success. Invest 15 or 30 minutes with each of these co-workers to understand their challenges before you claim to be able to help them with those challenges. Your personas will be more useful and successful tools as a result.
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