Persona’s and defining your customer with what you have.

How to define your users and customers, create a business case and spend time and money on research or find the most experienced and customer-centric staff and use their shared knowledge to create proto-personas. Entry to persona creation can be large and expensive why fight against that barrier if you don’t have to? Just like any project the MVP approach can also be taken with personas. The first step is always getting others to understand that it can be done. And that they can be continually improved and validated over time.

As per normal getting stakeholders across the business in a room at the same time can be difficult, but thankfully for us, we had some amazing engaged and helpful people who are always willing to help. What I have found over time is those who are customer-facing and engage regularly with customers, are more than happy to talk about them, and share their experiences.

The next challenge in creating proto-personas just like any persona is gathering the data and starting to define the perspective. And when you have a room full of people who have never used or created personas before this adds another level to the challenge and fun to it (I love running workshops they can be fantastic seeing people engage in the process). Once getting everyone past the initial step of writing down the types of customers they have come across and getting items up on the wall everything proceeded smoothly, and they all started to understand the power of their collective experiences and how they all experienced similar customers and behaviours.

After 2 sessions ( yes they came back for another round) we completed a set of proto-personas that gave us a shared understanding of the types of customers their motivations and behaviours. Without having to spend large sums of money we were able to start teaching the business about personas and how they can be valuable. The first step is always the hardest.