What is the best car? What is the best movie? The answer: it depends. "Best" depends completely on the type of person involved. Personas define the ideal profile of a potential buyer or user. A soccer mom or dad, a high-school student, and a construction worker all have different needs and would choose a different car as "best."

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.

Personas are short descriptions or biographies of fictitious, stereotypical customers. A persona definition provides clarity on your target for programming and for communication.

Michelle

Using an example from the Pragmatic Marketing Requirements That Work seminar, Michelle is a high-school senior. She has her own computer, uses AOL for dialup, and is a power user of Instant Messenger. She occasionally uses Microsoft? Works for school projects. Is Michelle very much like your developers? Not likely. One key area where Michelle differs is that she uses a dialup connection to AOL; the typical developer has broadband, always connected and fast. When Michelle enters college, she too will have broadband but until then, we have to program to a user with a slow connection who is not always connected.

This brief description implies many constraint and performance requirements. The persona profile gives guidance about how to make the best decision when a developer must make a judgment call (which occurs frequently).

Many programmers mistake themselves as ideal programming targets. For that matter, so do many executives, sales people, and marketing people. Employees of your company are rarely good representatives of your customers. On embracing personas, one company realized that their developers of Java tools were not representative of their users of Java tools. While both sets of developers were using Java, the vendor programmers were vastly more advanced than the customer programmers.

A typical product usually has three to five types of users, people who regularly use or maintain the product. You must create a persona definition for each type including a name, age, sex, technology environment, education, and job scenario. We often add personal information such as "It was a good day because?" to provide additional context.

Robin, the Product Manager

What is the profile of a product manager? Based on thousands of customer experiences and armed with web stats from pragmaticmarketing.com, we've created "Robin, the product manager."

Robin is a product manager for an enterprise B2B vendor with a direct sales force. She manages all aspects of product management for three products. She is 35 years old with a college degree and some MBA classes. She earns $85,000 a year and is eligible for an $8,000 bonus based on company profit, product revenue, and personal quarterly goals. Robin is a power user of Microsoft? Office XP. She runs Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. She has a reasonably new laptop running 1024 x 768 resolution. Using Microsoft? Outlook, Robin sends and receives about 100 emails each day; she attends a dozen internal meetings each week. A good day is when no one from sales wants her to drop everything she's doing to help them with a deal.

With this profile, a vendor targeting product management has some very clear requirements. They can program to a high screen resolution; they must accommodate a computer not always connected to the Internet; they can see that Robin is technically savvy and is likely to prefer a product based on the "tree" metaphor (in contrast to Michelle, who does not understand hierarchal filing). The power of the profile is that it also gives permission to ignore buyers that do not fit the profile. The vendor can safely ignore Netscape? and the other browsers; they can ignore Windows? NT, Macintosh OSX and Linux. This is not a judgment of technology; these environments are simply statistically irrelevant among product managers. Every product does NOT have to accommodate every possible environment. Instead, products should support and leverage the most likely environment to delight our persona.

Persona documents are not a new idea for many development teams but personas are a new concept for marketing and product management professionals. In recent years, the success of using personas in focusing development effort has resulted in the use of personas in marketing communications.

Buyer personas extend the idea to profiling the various buying influences in a sale. A typical sale includes a decision maker or economic buyer plus multiple technology reviewers. Some purchases might also include user buyers on the evaluation team.

Personas Jon and Cheryl

Consider a Sales Force Automation (SFA) sale: the users are Jon, the account rep (someone who sells) and Cheryl, the director of a sales region (someone who manages sales people). These two personas will use the product on a daily basis. But Jon and Cheryl have different product requirements and different listening needs. Both want to simplify status reporting. Cheryl is interested in consolidating all territory data; Jon is opposed to it. Neither Jon nor Cheryl will make the final buying decision but are likely to influence the decision maker. The decision maker (or economic buyer) is the VP of Sales. In addition, the product must pass the technical evaluation for compliance, security, and technical fit, requiring yet another persona definition for the IT buyer.

You can see that market segments quickly become critical here. A persona's technology profile is likely to be completely different by market segment. The standard computing platform in a telco is different than that in a bank. If we wish to succeed in becoming a successful vendor, we must build a product that creates loyal users by satisfying the needs of account reps and their management. But we must also meet the buying requirements of the decision maker and technology reviewers, or we'll never get to the user personas.

The titles and profiles of these personas are also likely to vary between market segments. In this example, the sales rep may be the same for each segment but the technical reviewer profile changes greatly depending on the size of the implementation. Define the personas for your primary market segment and then create variations based on additional segments if the persona differs greatly.

One vendor identified four typical personas for a generic market segment but ultimately found 26 buyer personas once market segments were taken in account. The IT buyer in a large car dealership is incredibly different than that of a small body shop. The large dealership has two or three fulltime employees who manage the servers and the desktop computers; in the small body shop, the IT staff is likely to be the owner or the owner's nephew.

Likewise, products designed in the U.S. assume a certain technology infrastructure that cannot be assumed in other countries. Rather than sell what we have to anyone we can, we should design products to fit perfectly into each persona's environment.

Personas provide clarity about who we are trying reach through our communications and whom to satisfy with our product development. Successful products focus on the needs of Michelle, Robin, Jon, and Cheryl instead of "somebody somewhere" or "everybody everywhere."

Steve Johnson is an expert in technology product management. He works for Pragmatic Marketing as an instructor for the top-rated courses Practical Product Management and Requirements That Work. Steve is also a frequent presenter for various technology marketing forums throughout the United States and Europe, author of many articles on technology product management.