Basics of Personas in Product Management Explained

The role of a product manager involves collaborating with several teams such as tech, design and marketing to create an amazing product and experience for your users. Throughout this entire product development journey, you have to keep your user insight, and creating personas can help you achieve this. A well-developed and realistic persona ensures that you always take the user into account while making decisions about the product.

Let’s watch the video for more details about personas and how they help you as a product manager.

Designed by Alan Cooper in the 1980's, a persona is a representation of a particular user segment for the product you are developing and is based on the user research done by you. It’s a product artifact that helps you capture the user’s motivations, frustrations and needs.

Personas are useful in the following ways:

• They help you comprehend the psychology of the user so that you can decide on the most suitable design and functionalities for your product

• They aid you in communicating and explaining to various stakeholders how the user experience should be crafted

• They keep you focused on your target users so that you don’t lose track of whom the product is being developed for

• They help you identify which users are more valuable than others

Personas serve different purposes in different product development stages such as:

1. For a new product, they can be built from the insights you get from initial user research. 

2. In later stages, they are used to become more metrics-driven.

In the next segment, we will focus on different elements of a persona.