Tips for Critiquing and Improving Customer Personas

Do you think personas are useless? They're actually a skyrocket for ARR Let me show you: User personas are the 💩 They are my go-to catalyst for increased ARR and decreased churn. Yes, they are fictitious. But they are based on your actual users. Their real value shines when they're part of a larger toolkit: → Journey Maps → Habit Moments → Use Cases → Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) Understanding HOW and WHERE they show up in your product is crucial. In combination with these, user personas transform from caricatures to the most impactful design artifacts you can leverage. Start with bringing them to life: 📍Journey Maps → Not just a series of actions; they're stories → Trace your user's steps; walk in their shoes → Find critical insights into their experience → End-to-End pain points visualized Build a journey for each persona. Awesome, sounds great! But, wait, what do I journey? Great Question - Digital Activation Stages Sign-Up // Set-Up // Aha // Habit Focus on where your users are the most engaged. We call them: 📍Habit Moments → Key features that keep users coming back → Drivers for retention → Contribute to product stickiness → Increases Customer Lifetime Value Our goal is to drive users into habit loops for strong retention. The more naturally users integrate your product into their routine, the lower your churn. Create a blueprint for user retention and satisfaction by mapping these habit moments. Ok, cool. But what if I don't know the habit moments? Find your personas in the data through: 📍Use Cases → Most used interactions by personas → Shows natural frequency of scenarios Collaborate with your Data Team and go through the journeys and use cases. Together, find the use cases in the data to pinpoint habit moments. Habit moments should show you a flattened retention curve over time. This is how you know you're on the right track. Perfect. With habit moments locked in, let's find out why the users hired your product. 📍JTBD → Focuses on the 'Why' of user interaction → Helps identity solutions over features Personas focus on the WHO, while JTBD focuses on the WHY behind user actions. This combination gives a fuller picture of both the user and their motivations. 👇 Let's put it together How to get impact from personas: 💡 Create and/or collect your user personas 💡 Identify the primary use cases for each 💡 Collab with data - find habit moments 💡 Journey map their primary habits 💡 Identify the JTBD in each journey map 💡 Ideate solutions over features 💡 Partner with PM to align roadmap with habits TADA! You just used personas as a secret weapon. 💥 --- How have you successfully used personas in your work? #ProductDesign #ProductStrategy #Personas

Markets change. Customers evolve.  What appealed to your ideal customer last year may not work today. This truth demands that e-commerce businesses continually revisit their buyer personas to stay ahead of shifting preferences.  Fail to update, and you'll waste time and money marketing to an outdated fiction of who your best customer is.  Succeed, however, and your efforts compound as you build increasingly tailored, relevant experiences. The exercise is simple: - At set intervals, interview your current best customers.  - Identify shifts in their pain points and priorities.  - Shape updated personas around these insights. Repeat with clarity and consistency, and you pull away from the pack.  Your tailored messaging resonates in a crowded marketplace of teams still marketing to ghosts. What worked yesterday wins no prizes today. 

Buyer Personas: They're one of those marketing exercises that can be really helpful... or really useless. But gather the right details, and this simple document can help turn you and your team into customer mind-readers. Here's what I include when building my one-page customer cheat-sheet. ✅ A DAY-IN-THE-LIFE JOB DESCRIPTION: You need enough detail re: what these people do all day at work to pass "the cocktail party test." As in, if you were stuck at a cocktail party with this person, could you make relevant, informed small-talk about their professional life for ~15 minutes? Until you get there (which requires getting beyond a mere surface-level understanding of what they do) you're missing a key ingredient in the trust equation that all great sales and marketing people know how to balance. ✅ EMOTIVE, PERSONAL PAINPOINTS: You can know a lot about a prospect and still miss your chance the connect with them. Great sales and marketing people stand out because of their ability to hit people where it hurts. They know how to hunt for the emotional "ruin your day" pain-points that prospects are willing to spend time and money to fix. A good buyer persona document captures these pain-points for each person involved in your buying process - and isn't afraid to use emotive words like concerned, anxious, uncertain, stressed, or exhausted (shoutout to Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey for the C.A.U.S.E. framework) to accurately describe what it feels like to be in their customer's shoes. ✅ PRODUCT FEATURES THEY CARE ABOUT: Effective selling isn't about dazzling prospects; it's about providing simple proof - that your product addresses their key pain points, and that the economics makes sense. Take a stance in your persona document to highlight what matters most to each person. This keeps your pitching to its "minimum effective dose" - a concept from the pharmaceutical industry that a lot of software companies out there would be wise to adopt. ✅ PRODUCT FEATURES THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT: A huge improvement opportunity in your sales process: Stop talking about the stuff they don't care about. Figure out what isn't relevant. Write it down. Be explicit. Then avoid it. Spend time on the other stuff. Simple. ✅ SUCCESS STORIES: Tailor customer stories to resonate with each persona's unique pain points. A nervous CFO sanity-checking a company-wide budget needs a different case study than a Treasurer automating a tricky cash-flow forecasting. Short, relevant stories matched to your personas prove you care and keep you away from product-focused feature-preaching. --- ➡ P.S. If this resonates, there's a link to the buyer persona template I use with my companies in the comments.

While it's easier than ever to find people who match your title & firmographic requirements, that's not going to get you very far. You need to deeply understand your ICPs. You need to do more than create a pithy, alliterative name for each persona with a list of firmographic and role details. In order to stand out when you get in front of "Sales Sally", "Compliance Colin", "Marketing Marco", etc you need to understand their work lives, behaviors, and problems. I've admittedly never had the perfect framework for this, but this month Allyson Letteri wrote a guest post for MKT1 on product messaging and I loved her framework: When developing personas, include these 5 factors: 🤕 Pains: The pain points and challenges that your ideal customer needs to solve 🧗♀️ Gains: The desirable outcomes and results that your ideal customer seeks 🦋 Shifts: The changes that lead someone to consider a new solution 🔳 Blockers: The objections and obstacles that hold someone back from buying 🥕 Motivators: The factors and influencers that give someone the confidence to buy More on this framework and Allyson Letteri guide to messaging in our latest MKT1 newsletter. ⬇ The link, it's down there in the comments