Personas: How Many Are Enough?
Personas provide a great way to focus your efforts on a specific type of customer. Which is why I was taken aback when a colleague proudly told me that he had provided 37 personas to his team.
Focus. That's the point.
Personas are descriptions of archetypical customers - they represent the common attributes of a large number of people. They can provide reference points for everyone involved in the planning and development process. Well-developed personas enable a software developer to say "Harry wouldn't be able to use that feature" or an marketer to say "Elaine needs to be able to justify purchasing the product to her manager." Personas should be a constant reminder of who the target customers are.
For this to happen, Product Management has to create personas that are vivid and few.
Vivid personas provide insight into the customer's problems and motivations; they can begin to convey the kind of gut-level connection that you get when you visit a customer in person. A persona that includes quotes and workplace photos, for example, is more memorable than a dry description, and it will be a lot easier to recall during an intense planning session. However, a concise persona is also more memorable than a multipage portrait that describes the customer's gym habits and family dog.
How few are enough?
A politician once said that it's easy to talk for an hour, but really hard to talk for five minutes. Likewise, it's remarkably easy to come up with 37 personas, and much harder to focus on a half dozen. But nobody can keep 37 personas in their head. And it's really an indication that product management hasn't made an effort to really understand the market.
Here's how to end up with 37 personas: Start by listing the industries or market segments that you're addressing, maybe 5. Then add the roles that are commonly found, such as office worker, executive, system administrator, purchaser. Now you've got a matrix with 15 or 20 slots. Then say that you add another dimension, such as novice, intermediate or advanced user. Suddenly you have a three-dimensional matrix with dozens of customer types.
There's a difference between a list of "types" and a distilled set of "archetypes."
Archetypes are what you get when you examine the commonalities between many different types, and boil them down into a few characterizations that are each representative of several different types. In other words, an archetypical persona includes important and relevant things about a number of different people. The trick is figuring out what's most "important" and "relevant."
On the surface, it may appear that two customers in, say, legal services and construction management have little in common. But perhaps they have similar job descriptions and a similar set of problems in the area of financial planning and accounting, and perhaps these problems are especially relevant to the product you're creating. By combining some of the characteristics of each customer, you can create a generalized description of a customer whose needs fit both of these customers in ways that matter. You may focus on the details of one or the other to "flesh out" the persona, but the fundamental needs of the persona will match both customers fairly closely.
If this composite character is, in fact, a high marketing priority for your project, then you've defined a target customer. (If it's not, then put the basic description in a "low priority" or "we're not addressing this customer" bin, and don't flesh it out.) The persona of the target customer then becomes a Very Important Reference.
How many of these references is enough? Three or four personas are very easy to focus on, and that's a good thing, and it's worth doing a lot of refinement to get to this point. But sometimes your market is just too big: at Microsoft, we had 12 personas for the Office suite…but that was only 12 personas for the entire Office suite. It was a lot, but then we had tens of millions of customers. More would have been too many to track effectively, and fewer would have made the exercise meaningless.
So here's my answer: One persona is almost certainly too few for a commercial product/service, while more than a dozen (especially 37!) is too many. Four to six seems like a sweet spot. The trick is to make sure that the most important problems, needs and buying patterns are represented. Once you've done that, it's just a matter of writing them well and keeping them in front of the team at every opportunity.
Focus. That's the point.
Personas are descriptions of archetypical customers - they represent the common attributes of a large number of people. They can provide reference points for everyone involved in the planning and development process. Well-developed personas enable a software developer to say "Harry wouldn't be able to use that feature" or an marketer to say "Elaine needs to be able to justify purchasing the product to her manager." Personas should be a constant reminder of who the target customers are.
For this to happen, Product Management has to create personas that are vivid and few.
Vivid personas provide insight into the customer's problems and motivations; they can begin to convey the kind of gut-level connection that you get when you visit a customer in person. A persona that includes quotes and workplace photos, for example, is more memorable than a dry description, and it will be a lot easier to recall during an intense planning session. However, a concise persona is also more memorable than a multipage portrait that describes the customer's gym habits and family dog.
How few are enough?
A politician once said that it's easy to talk for an hour, but really hard to talk for five minutes. Likewise, it's remarkably easy to come up with 37 personas, and much harder to focus on a half dozen. But nobody can keep 37 personas in their head. And it's really an indication that product management hasn't made an effort to really understand the market.
Here's how to end up with 37 personas: Start by listing the industries or market segments that you're addressing, maybe 5. Then add the roles that are commonly found, such as office worker, executive, system administrator, purchaser. Now you've got a matrix with 15 or 20 slots. Then say that you add another dimension, such as novice, intermediate or advanced user. Suddenly you have a three-dimensional matrix with dozens of customer types.
There's a difference between a list of "types" and a distilled set of "archetypes."
Archetypes are what you get when you examine the commonalities between many different types, and boil them down into a few characterizations that are each representative of several different types. In other words, an archetypical persona includes important and relevant things about a number of different people. The trick is figuring out what's most "important" and "relevant."
On the surface, it may appear that two customers in, say, legal services and construction management have little in common. But perhaps they have similar job descriptions and a similar set of problems in the area of financial planning and accounting, and perhaps these problems are especially relevant to the product you're creating. By combining some of the characteristics of each customer, you can create a generalized description of a customer whose needs fit both of these customers in ways that matter. You may focus on the details of one or the other to "flesh out" the persona, but the fundamental needs of the persona will match both customers fairly closely.
If this composite character is, in fact, a high marketing priority for your project, then you've defined a target customer. (If it's not, then put the basic description in a "low priority" or "we're not addressing this customer" bin, and don't flesh it out.) The persona of the target customer then becomes a Very Important Reference.
How many of these references is enough? Three or four personas are very easy to focus on, and that's a good thing, and it's worth doing a lot of refinement to get to this point. But sometimes your market is just too big: at Microsoft, we had 12 personas for the Office suite…but that was only 12 personas for the entire Office suite. It was a lot, but then we had tens of millions of customers. More would have been too many to track effectively, and fewer would have made the exercise meaningless.
So here's my answer: One persona is almost certainly too few for a commercial product/service, while more than a dozen (especially 37!) is too many. Four to six seems like a sweet spot. The trick is to make sure that the most important problems, needs and buying patterns are represented. Once you've done that, it's just a matter of writing them well and keeping them in front of the team at every opportunity.