When developing personas, you may not need as much primary research as you think. Call your HR department and see if they have a hiring profile for the title of your persona. Thanks go to Mike for that great tip!

Personas continue to be a hot topic in our training classes and in the blogosphere. Kristin Zhivago fears we might be hiding behind personas instead of getting to know actual customers.

Kristin is right as usual; nothing can replace the value of interviewing a real person. And you can see a lot more in an onsite interview than you can hear in a phone interview.

I'm frequently asked about surveys and phone calls and telemarketing and a dozen other methods for not visiting clients. Why is it so hard for product managers and marketers (not all of course, but many) to visit customers and non-customers?

Personas are a powerful tool to convey market information in context for marketing and development. But those who create personas must be grounded in the market. Interview some people before you begin.

Michael has some interesting additional thoughts.

Has this happened to you? A company reached the business decision (due to financial & legal pressures) to replace a third-party engine in their product line with a similar but entirely different engine from another provider. 

Read this case study on how personas provided focus to this project on Bonnie Rind's Product Persona blog.

Recently the folks at 37signals started an opinion storm over the subject of personas by saying:

We don’t use personas. We use ourselves.

When writing about Buyer and User Personas, I wrote:

In developing products and creating market messages, product management must have clarity on the ideal user and buyer. The industry has adopted the term "persona" to refer to the ideal profiles of our customers.

The issue of course is that it’s better to program to a real person when you can but as vendors, we are usually programming for people who are not us. The problem with most approaches to programming is that they assume you have access to an onsite customer. But if you’re a vendor, you need to create a profile, a biography, of the ideal customer to show that we’re not programming to ourselves.

As 37signals points out, this is not a creative writing exercise. Instead the persona should be a profile grounded in market research. That’s how we know Robin the typical product manager is 32 years old, has a Dell D610 running Windows XP and Office 2003, and is always connected to the internet. This profile is based on our qualitative research with product managers as well as our quantitative research from our annual product manager survey.

Want to add some color to our research? Take Pragmatic Marketing's Product Management and Marketing Benchmark Survey for 2007.

UPDATE: Read a great post Building a Data-Backed Persona at Boxes and Arrows and Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas at User Interface Engineering.

Sarah was born in 1989, the same year as Hayden Panettiere (the cheerleader from Heroes) and Daniel Radcliffe (who plays Harry Potter). Sarah was six when Toy Story came out and nine years old when the first Harry Potter book was published. Sarah has always had a cell phone. She's always had access to the internet.

And Sarah is entering college this week.

Imagine being a college professor today. One who went to college in the 60s or 70s is teaching students who think of Vietnam as a prime vacation spot, not a war. Could you connect with Sarah?

For a decade, Beloit College has produced the Mindset List, describing the reality of an 18-year-old for their much older professors:

The "Class of 2011" refers to students entering college this year. They are generally 18 which suggests they were born in 1989. The list identifies the experiences and event horizons of students as they commence higher education.

So, for the incoming freshmen, the Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union.

Creating a persona is not a creative writing exercise although it certainly helps to be creative. Instead, persona development is grounded in research. We at Pragmatic Marketing know product managers: we visit dozens of them weekly; we survey hundreds in our annual survey; I can review their technical stats in my website logs.

When was your persona born? What were the popular names that year? Create a persona based on market research and then use NameVoyager for picking statistically relevant names. It shows the popularity of names in the U.S. for the last 100 years.

Do you know your customers? Are they fictional characters? Or are they archetypes grounded in research? Personas give us a programming and marketing target. Let's make sure that everyone in the company has clarity on our customer.

We have a new puppy in the house. Her name is Bailey. I’ve gotten a few books on dog training and they all talk about thinking of things in the context of how the dog sees it. We must think and act the way the dog would in nature. Sounds a lot like personas, doesn’t it? Our marketing and development and sales should be about communicating clearly with the personas. Problem is, I don’t know very much about dogs in nature. I’ve never actually seen a mom with her litter of pups—or a wolf with pups for that matter. I guess I’ll have to start watching the shows on The Discovery Channel.

So if you’re a product manager, you need to understand your audience and the domain. How are you doing this? You should be visiting clients frequently to update your domain knowledge.

The training books also make the point that dogs have clear roles. In this case dogs are pack animals who follow an alpha dog. Uh-oh, I don’t know much but I’m pretty sure that I need to establish myself as the alpha dog. And I don’t really know how to do that either so I’m just being harsh. Is that the same?

Raising a puppy has me thinking about roles in development, particularly agile. In my experience, developers want clarity in roles and clear processes. Developers definitely want to hear the voice of the customer before they start building things. Unfortunately the product manager, who hasn’t established credibility yet, is trying to become the alpha dog by being harsh: trying to control the schedule and the specs and the prototypes. Regardless of your development method, the product manager should be the person who illuminates the market to the development team. In Scrum, your role is referred to as the Product Owner, not the Scrum Lord.

I'll be talking about product management's role in an agile environment in August; click here to sign up for the free webinar.

I believe that the Agile Manifesto is a response to bad management, particularly bad product management. Any of the agile approaches to development are focused on delivering products that work. And the key to delivering products that customers want to buy is for product management to understand the market better than anyone else.

Personas, actors, meetings, discussion, voice of the customer? These are all methods that we use to show developers and engineers that they are not the customers of our products. Bonnie Rind explores this further in Do Techies Really Know How Their Product Is Used?

Buyers and Users are often different. Remember "buying" versus "using" criteria? To provide clarity, we develop persona documents, profiles of the archetypical  customer.

We've been talking--and teaching--about personas for quite a while so I'm really pleased when others add their voices to the conversation. I've been enjoying Adele Revella's blog on Buyer Personas and now Bonnie Rind gives us more of a post-sales take on the subject with Product Personas.

Anyone have some personas to share? I'll be glad to post them in this blog.

In User Centered Design and Bridging The Canyon of Pain, Scott Sehlhorst comments,

There is such a thing as too much choice. For new users, too much choice (or control) is too much. For experienced users, too little choice is a problem. Ease of use usually comes from reduced control - but users don't stay "new" for long. There's a "canyon of pain" to quote Kathy Sierra in that transition from "new" to "experienced." We call them "competent" users and we have to help them cross the canyon of pain.

Windows greatest strength is that almost everything can be modified, adjusted, customized. That gives it great appeal to power users and those who BUY technology. But in that strength lives a great weakness: because it has so many power features, Windows interferes with new users, those who USE technology.

When defining personas, be sure to define those who are novice, proficient, and expert. What different choices you will make!