How well do you understand your users and customers? 

For me, this skill didn’t come naturally. It took years – and a lot of trial and error – before I truly grasped the value of putting myself in my users’ shoes. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned about persona analysis, why it’s crucial for product success, and how you can do it effectively.

Let’s dive in.

What is a ‘persona’ in product management?

A persona is a detailed, semi-fictional representation of a typical user or customer.

Personas represent your product’s users and/or customers. This means that if you want your product to be successful, it needs to be designed to address their needs or pains.

Because the personas of your product are a key to its success it’s straightforward why you need to invest your time in ‘getting into their head’ and knowing them. Once you can comfortably put yourself in their shoes, you will have a clear understanding of the pains they feel and what they need to succeed.

Fortunately, the personas a company serves don’t change often. For you, it means that as long as you’re employed in the same company and unless you’re the first PM in this company – there is a good chance that someone already did the personas analysis and you may only need to improve on that.

Other scenarios that may require you to do a personas analysis from scratch are when you are tasked with designing a new product, or when you take an existing product to a new market. None of those is frequent as well. Hence, a full personas analysis is not something you’ll do often.

What is important to know about your personas?

The process of gathering all of our learnings about a persona in one place and summarizing it is called the ‘personas analysis’.

Searching online or asking GenAI about what is required for a proper persona analysis will likely result in a list like this:

• Demographics 
• Behavioral Patterns 
• Goals and Needs 
• Pain Points 
• Motivations & values
• Personal Background 
• Technology Proficiency

While it is true that it’s good to know all of this, not all of these attributes are equal in their importance. For instance, for most cases I know, understanding the personal background of a persona doesn’t significantly contribute to the success of your product.

Demographics is another example of a set of attributes which I don’t stall much on. You generally already know the age group of your persona, you know whether you are developing a product for males, females or both and you know where they are in the world. No need to research that for most of the time.

Some resources you’ll find on the web will show you examples of flashy and sexy personas analysis where you’ll see well designed PDFs which include an image and many data points.

You can find a very visual example of this towards the end of this post:

https://uxpressia.com/blog/how-to-create-persona-guide-examples

While it’s looking great, it has little practical value, as most of the data points there don’t tell you much. It’s just a beautiful, yet mostly empty, shell.

In fact, if you find yourself spending time producing something like that – then most of the chances are that you are not investing your time wisely.

Thus, instead of putting your time there, I believe it’d be much wiser to put your time on gathering the data points that do matter. Here are the data points that I think you should focus on gathering when doing a persona analysis:

• • Goals and Needs 
  • Pain Points 
  • Motivations & values
  • Technology Proficiency
  • Jobs to be done

If you compare this list to the previous one you’ll see that I dropped demographics, personal background and behavioral patterns. Instead, I added the jobs to be done.

‘Jobs to done’ (JTBD as an acronym) is a framework that is very helpful when doing personas analysis. You can read about it more here.

Let’s talk about it for a second.

The JTBD framework

The idea behind this framework is that properly identifying the core jobs that the persona needs to accomplish on an ongoing basis (either because it’s part of the persona’s job, because it’s a hobby or a routine life challenge) – is key for tailoring your product and its features to their needs.

At the heart of this framework are the ‘core jobs’, and personas are ‘hiring’ a product (ideally yours) to complete these core jobs.

For example, if we examine the service Simply (formerly JoyTunes), then the persona is someone who would like to learn how to play new musical instruments. Here are examples of the core jobs for this persona:

• Learn to play a new instrument
• Get into a ‘practice cadence’ with their musical instruments

Thus, a person interested in learning to play a new musical instrument may ‘hire’ Simply for this task.

If you are wondering about the usage of the verb ‘hire’ instead of simply ‘use’ or ‘buy’ then I can tell you that I was wondering about it too. At first I thought that this is another gimmick as part of introducing a new framework and having a marketing need to introduce a new terminology as well.

However, after I gave it a bit more thought, it started to actually make sense and I could see the wisdom in this.

Here is how I see it:

When a user is ‘hiring’ your product to perform a task – they make a conscious choice to choose your product instead of other products. The fact that this is ‘hiring’ and not ‘buying’ hints that:

1. Tomorrow, their choice might be different. You need to win their heart each time, from the start.
2. They have a strong intent to use your product. You don’t hire services you don’t really use, while you can buy things that you won’t use (my house is full of junk I bought, but never used, or used only once).

Each core job has a desired outcome. In our example, here are the persona’s desired outcomes of their core jobs:

• Acquire new creative skills
• Fulfill passion for music
• Consistent improvement

The framework goes beyond core jobs to include ‘consumption jobs,’ ‘related jobs’, and ‘emotional/social jobs’.

I won’t delve into those here and you are welcome to read about those in the link I shared. I will just say that those types of jobs cover the full lifecycle of the persona’s needs around their core jobs, including alternative approaches that the persona could have taken instead or, in addition to, focusing on the core jobs.

Sometimes it’s useful to be familiar with those, because it can bring you ideas on how to extend your product beyond its core offering.

But this is out of the scope for now.

Personas analysis is a process

Just before we dive into the process on how to effectively do a personas analysis – we need to understand that personas analysis is an ongoing process. Each time you interview a customer or receive feedback from your users, you may learn something new. You can then add this learning to your analysis.

Don’t expect it to be a one-time, concentrated effort, because it doesn’t work like that.

To make it more simple to grasp – let’s imagine 3 levels of familiarity with our target persona:

1. Level 1 – Basic understanding – At this level, you have a basic understanding of the persona. You understand their core jobs and their obvious goals. You also get familiarity with the pains they share with you openly.
2. Level 2 – Advanced understanding – in that level you are getting familiar with all of the routines the persona is involved with and may touch your product. You are also exposed to pains that are not declared explicitly and you know how to read what they say between the lines. You pretty much extracted everything that you could by speaking to and reading about this persona.
3. Level 3 – Intimate understanding – when you reach level you can really get ‘into the head’ of your target persona. You fully grasp what they value and what makes them tick, even if they never spoke about it explicitly or even implicitly. On that level you understand their secret agenda, and know what attributes of a given product can win their heart, or break a deal, even though it was never stated.

With a one-time effort, where you are starting ‘fresh’ with new personas you didn’t work with before, or know very little about – you can get to the basic understanding of the persona, quite fast. 

Within a year of working with or around the persona – you can get an advanced understanding of it.

However, getting to an intimate knowledge of your persona will most likely take you more than a year, since you need to get a lot of exposure to this persona, and see how they respond to all kinds of questions, how they interact with your product and how they react in sales calls and/or various marketing messages.

For example, I spent quite a few years in digital media, and it took me some time to fully comprehend the persona of the digital editor, and how they behave and value things differently, based on the size (tier) of the publication they belong to. One interesting finding, for example, was the importance of the brand of their publication in their eyes, and how it differed based on publication’s tier. Digital editors who belong on the top tier, could reject a very attractive deal if they suspect it may hurt the brand of their publication.

This is just one example, of course, but it helps understanding why understanding the small nuisances is important.

How to do an effective personas analysis

Now that we know what’s important and what’s not, let’s go over my recommended methodology & outputs for this process.

And I will get straight to the bottom line here. I recommend managing your findings in a simple table with this structure:

Here is a short explanation for each of the rows:

• Goals & KPIs – write here, in short bullets, your findings as for what this persona is trying to achieve and how this persona is being measured. How does this persona know that he/she has done a good job or accomplished what he/she needed to do?
• Pain points – what is preventing or making it hard on the persona for achieving its goals or accomplishing its jobs?
• Motivation & values – what is being valued by this persona and what it appreciates? What makes it tick? Given two possible solutions to the pains – what would it based its decision mechanics on?
• Technology proficiency – how complex technology-wise can the solution be?
• JTBD & desired outcomes – what are they based on what we discussed before.

Here is an example of this table filled for the tier 1 digital editor persona:

Once you have completed this you have your personas analysis ready.

Naturally, you should add more to it as you become more familiar with the persona.

How to use this analysis

You should always go back to this analysis when you wish to evaluate new ideas and features. Try to get into the persona’s head and ask yourself: how would my feature (or product) be received by this person?

Each time you write a new user story in your specs (PRDs) which serve this persona – you should quickly revisit this analysis as well. Does it resonate with this persona? Does it solve or help with real pain?

If you consistently:

1. Update this analysis as you learn more
2. Check your hypotheses, features and new product ideas against this analysis

You’ll significantly increase the chances of your releases to be successful.

Of course, I remind you, that this analysis is only part of your research or discovery. There are other aspects you need to consider when working on new features or products – such as: costs, potential impact, alignment with strategy and roadmap and more.

Summary

Doing a proper personas analysis is another aspect of the job that product managers need to master. As I noted before, it’s not a process you’ll need to do often, but when you do, it’s important to do it right.

That shouldn’t scare you. Conducting a proper persona analysis isn’t that complex if you follow the guidelines I provided.

Just recall that this is a process, and not a one time thing – so keep updating it when you learn something new about your users or customers.

Good luck!

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