The Better Business Analysis Institute Presence. The Better Business Analysis Podcast with Kenjan Walsh Hi everybody and welcome back to the Better Business Analysis Podcast with Benjamin Walsh. And today we are going to talk about why business analysts should use personas. Personas are such an important element in business analysis when you've truly got the time to understand the customer's needs, your target customer, we'll talk about that in a
minute. And when you're truly value whether or not whatever change you are performing or whatever project you're carrying out or product you're releasing is actually going to make a difference. So personas are actually help join a little bit of the reality of your customer base into some kind of fictional characters. So if you don't know what a persona is, I'll start with what a persona is and why you would like to use them or why you
should be using them. So persona really is a detailed semi fictional so it does have facts associated with it. It is a representation of a segment of the market and marketing personas are used heavily for marketing and in the world of business analysis, we leverage that concept. We do things slightly different to marketers, but it's
ultimately has the same outcome. Marketers are wanting to sell more basically people engaging with products and using the product and it's ultimately what we want to achieve. So personas are semi fictional representations of the target audience for the product. Your target audience is really everyone OK and marketers can get quite hung up on that, especially if you have a large audience, you're going after
some mass market. I worked at a government department which was releasing a strategy and a set of tools for a large segment. And marketers really struggled with that to a point where they didn't believe or struggled with
the amount of personas we had. But we simply were just looking at a large customer base, which was pretty much a lot of people in New Zealand. And the only response that I could really come up with at the time, and I still think it's relevant is they were our own personas. However, some of them were a priority list. We're more of our target customer right now, OK? And our and our project should have really focused on those sets of personas. To start off with.
Personas encapsulate specific customer segment characteristics. If you don't know what a customer segment is, it is you. Your customers are made of segments like a pie, like a cake, you chop it up, that's who you're targeting. It's that type of cake which has different customers in it and there's different segments percentages. The percentage make up of your customer base can be represented by the customer segment and a
persona. They these segments have characteristics, needs, motivations and behaviours. So these are really important. The need, what do they want, what are the goals, what is the job that they want to complete? It's a job to be done, is another word of saying that what are their motivations are usually caused by pain. So pain points or problem statements, and what are the behaviours, how do they act? And so needs, motivations and behaviours are very much core to our custom segments.
Sometimes characteristics around our persona become overwhelming. People start going well, you know, they're between the ages of 18 and 24. They're most likely to be European descent. They might have blonde hair. You know, like you get to a point where the characteristics are just too too much. And actually you're moving away from grouping your customers into needs, motivations and behaviors which are more important than some of the demographic information I just read out earlier.
Demographics can make a difference, especially location or those demographics influence behavior because of tradition or where people live or you know, studies on, you know, if you're male or female, for example, or just take those two genders. There might be certain behaviors that you know if you're a generalized behaviors that a male might make over a female, for example. So characteristics only help make generalizations, but really they inform.
If they don't inform needs, motivations or behaviors, then they're not that important. OK, an example where you're selling to pregnant woman or woman who are either just had a baby or are currently pregnant, then those characteristics will will be important as a broad statement. And then within those that set, you could divide your segments into different needs, motivations, behaviors.
So those who are really wanting to prep for the expecting baby to those who are worried about health concerns. So motivation might be more nurturing, one might be just more preparation and factual. So there there are those kind of motivation needs and behaviors are more important that and obviously you've already identified that your greatest segment is your target customer is is pregnant woman or woman
with very young children. So why why personas useful persona as a business analyst, I guess using personas helps understand, helps make real who our stakeholders are. OK, So it's understanding our our key stakeholders. Now in a corporation or a large organization, you can start you may you you can use personas. There's no reason why you can't
for internal and external staff. I've recently just done a piece of work where I did a workshop yesterday actually, where we were designing the different audiences of information and some of those personas were both internal and they were external and they all just have different needs and motivation. So that is OK. There's no problem with that. It makes it kind of. I guess the only caveat I'd say there is that you why are you doing the personas in the 1st
place? If your target audience is external customers, you should be doing it. You should be focusing on external customers if you want. If you happen to have internal customers, then that's OK too. But you're not just doing it for anyone who's involved in the project. I just want to make that clear. It's not one to one with stakeholder management within a
project. Personas go beyond the demographics as we talked about providing those goals, pain points, and preferences which align with needs, motivation, and behaviors. Right, They're all preferences. Behaviors are interlinked. Pain points and motivations, Goals and needs. We're creating vivid characters here. OK, so and it will enforces us, actually enforces us using this technique and enforces us to gain a deeper understanding of who we're actually targeting.
And I have said that when I have applied personas to projects, don't do it all the time. And you know it's not something that I I do religiously. But in a situation, especially when I'm targeting an external customer, it's very, very important. And by by by defining these, it's not a tick box exercise. It's not just a fun cultural
exercise. And you do get, you do get value from having, you know, pictures of your customer on the I think that's really important in itself, just having an idea of who your customer is. If you work for a Ministry of Education, education ministry, having representations of the different types of segments or school kids that are out there knowing about them, talking about them through a persona, not, you know, real representations, representations
of necessary individuals but they could represent a population. But generally these are they're
they're anonymized. So they're they're not using actual people but they're representations of it might be really useful to be reminded that you know that's the that's the person that I'm trying to help here on a daily basis regardless of the change that you don't just a motivation that I'm working for this organization, working for a government department generally being paid less and these are all the type of people that are trying to help.
And my work, even though I might work on the service desk, that's I'm here to support little Tammy who is a disadvantaged child who's going to school in the regions, possibly, right. Cool. So it's really around providing A deeper understanding of who we're targeting.
That's the purpose of personas. But they can also help us with prioritization where we invest effort and ultimately guiding our decisions it. It actually helps us make more informed decision because it allows us to put out what we, what we might say is to put ourselves in the customer's shoes. It allows us to step into the shoes and say, what would a customer want here? Not what we want. What would be easier for us? What do we think is the best solution?
But actually what is best for that customer? OK, we understand their needs, their desires and aspirations and challenges, and we get to make informed decisions based on those insights. OK, deep insights into customer behaviour patterns. And you do get into psychology here. You start to actually go, well, what would change that person's behaviour?
If that's who we're targeting and that's who we want to use our product, for example, What is it about their behaviour that we need to know about and how will that change what our product does or how we market it. So we are talking about tailing our product. If it is a product or a service to make sure that it's tailored the content, marketers use it to tailor content specifically to move a behavior. They're experts in that customer
support. I guess we can work out, is this customer going to benefit from from from this change we're making. It allows us to measure whether or not our solutions are going to resonate with our audience. On a personal level, if we've got our personas right, we'll talk about how to get our personas right soon. And in terms of the general idea about thinking about your customers, it changes us to a customer centric model.
OK, instantly. Sometimes people will interchange the word user to customer. I prefer customer centric here. Users usually associated with internal stuff. Personas by themselves foster empathy. And if you're a great BA or you're a designer, especially if you're a human centered designer, then you'll know all about personas and you will know all about empathy and empathy mapping. And to be honest, most of the great Basi know have a high
level of empathy for the world. It allows you to to understand your customers deeply and you design solutions you actually go into bat for them sometimes, like on the in the boardroom. That and you're you're influencing solutions or products or even the direction of the company to truly meet the needs of your customer, which is win. Win. Because ultimately, if your customers are happy, they'll buy more.
But it's hard to get that across sometimes, mark marketers will use personas to target their marketing strategy. So it's useful if you've done it. Not that I've done it at the end of the line, after your product's developed their messaging features, interactions align with what's valuable to your personas. So that's really important too. So really, we should be defining these before it gets to your marketing team. Or you could utilize marketing resources to help you define
these upfront and for them. They may know about your existing customer base quite well and they might have a lot of information. We can use personas to prioritize features or I guess user stories and the apex that we want to focus on. That's it. Allows us to focus on what made us most to our target audience. In an agile situation where you're releasing a product, that might be the that might be your driver.
So the product owner should be looking at what's most important to your target audience all the time, and may only be making decisions around other requirements or user stories that will be done because they logically need to fit in order to enable the customer to complete their job the customer hasn't explicitly asked for. It allows us also to avoid assumptions. Personas prevent, I guess predicting individual biased on solutions. That happens way more than you may guess.
It happens all the time, either at the management level or the architecture level, even in the BA level. Sometimes we are basing our decisions and we need this to to drive true personas based on real insights, not just assumptions. And obviously doing all this stuff helps facilitate common understanding, improved communication across stakeholders. When we can say, hey, look, is Little Tammy going to benefit from this or we're not talking about it.
No, we're actively not focusing on Little Tammy for the Sprint or the first product release. OK, cool. Well, I'll stop thinking about that. That really focuses we're focusing on on Jane and Ann and those types of customers in this release. I can see why we're doing what we're doing. Everyone is speaking the same language. You're breaking down silos across teams using personas,
which is fantastic. And because you can use personas for different people outside of your even your development team, marketing, development, support teams, they all have a unified perspective on what you are focusing on and who you are targeting. This should personas should guide product design. It does. Good product managers do this, BAS, not so much human centered design designers do it quite a lot and sometimes do too much of
it, which we'll talk about soon. It's not all about your personas, but ultimately we're there to try and create products that add value. And this will allow us to focus our attention on our target customers, representations of them, measure success and reduce the risk of building stuff that just misses the mark. OK.
So we're going to run through some examples now of what a persona is and an example and we are then going to talk about a template that you can use when you write your user stories. We talk this talk about this often at the bit of Business Analysis Institute. It's actually a template that we
use. So I'm going to give you, you know, a secret if you haven't done our course yet, when we write our user stories, instead of having as a user or as an actor, you just replace the Aza and they are your personas. OK, so straight away you've got a place to use personas, You've worked out who your customers are and your personas align with the Aza. OK, yes, you might have internal customers. They can be represented by
personas. You might have your company itself as AI. Don't know Fit Inc Limited. If that's your fitness company you run, then that could be you as a company, you could say as Fitness or Fit Limited Inc Limited. I want to blah blah blah. So that's your persona in there. And if you have some personas that you've identified as part of your customer segments, which we'll talk about examples in a minute, then you would use, you would fit that into your story. And of course, epics are stories
as well. So your epics could will be represented by one of those personas that you're talking about. That's where you use them. OK, so now you know where you use them. And of course, if you have now inserted them there, then you've you've got a practical way of prioritizing each user story based on that persona's requirements. So if your target customer is someone who I don't know once like I said maybe as a a new mother they've just had a baby that should that should take a customer.
The mothers, you mothers have just had babies and you've worked out that your target customer is someone who is middle class, so has pretty good income, disposable income.
Someone who is buying for their baby, who's happy to spend money on both the safety of their child but also wants them to wear the finest things, let's say, OK, so that's your persona, so that basically let's call them the, let's call them Jane the overbuyer, potentially say that they are more than average, they're over the normal distribution curve in terms of providing for their new baby. They're going to go above and beyond and by all the great stuff, OK?
And wants them to look good at the same time. They may be, you know, in their early 30s and they just have the income to be able to to support that outcome. That's their motivation. They want people to see that their babies are looked after. They want to have all the they want the best for their child. They can afford to do that.
They want other people to see that they've invested in that experience for their child and you know maybe they're in some fashion and so they want their child to look good even as a baby to to be stylish as they are themselves.
So that's quite a I've just given you a a brief rundown on this particular persona and if one of the must have requirements for a new product for our new store maybe that is catering for this target segment, it would, it would you would have a must have requirement in there surely around premium products. OK.
This persona if that's our target customer we'll work that out with our lean canvas for example, that's who our main target customer is. We wouldn't have a must requirement around stocking low value or low cost goods that you could get at say Kmart or what's the equivalent in America, Walmart for example, that customer, they their motivations, their beliefs and their desires and goals is to buy premium products And so those they wouldn't, they
wouldn't be looking at, you wouldn't be looking at stocking products, you could get at some of those cheapest stores. So that gives you an idea of the thought process there and how you'd prioritize the job to be done and. How you it would influence your business model and what you what you even buy in stock. It also can help with
estimating. I guess when we talk about the persona in in regards to user stories and epics, it might help help estimate the effort and cost that it takes to meet the needs of that particular customer for those priority groups. And also the sequence in which you tackle the particular user story. What is the highest value items for your personas, not just
highest value items. OK, So what we're going to talk about is some personas, some example personas here that relate to a company, it's that's cool. We're working for this Fitness Inc and we want to create a product called Fit Pal, OK. It's a it's an app, it's an app, we're going to, it's a fitness based app. I think this is a good example, and I'm going to give you an example of three different personas here, which we can use to think about and to demonstrate the use of personas.
So let's say that we have looked at our target customers and we've identified in our target customer area, there are three distinct segments who we want to target, and they're represented by active Annie, busy Brian and Newbie Natalie. I'm going to give you a rundown of those 3 personas in Active Annie. I'm just going to give you background goals and pain points here, OK? The background, the goal and the pain point that they are that
Annie has. And of course you can expand this out to some motivations and pain points. Motivations are always good. But we'll we'll look at Active Annie. So let's say the background for Active Annie is she's 30 years old. Her occupation is a PhD student. She lives in LA, in America, California, and her fitness level is that she is an enthusiastic runner and weightlifter. OK, so think about those background attributes. Don't they all give you an idea about who Active Annie is?
OK, fit When you're thinking about this Fit PAL app that we're going to design this personal fitness app. And we've decided we've done our background, we've done our Lane canvas Active, Annie, really you can start to think about any Robinson, this PhD student, you know, obviously obviously smart, starting to be a doctor, which means income later living in LA, which is very body conscious, Location, you know where Hollywood's AT and the fitness level is really enthusiastic.
We are running and weightlifting. Can't you imagine in your head if you close your eyes and listen to that, listen to that description, Can't you imagine who active any is? Can't you visualize active any what you might look like now? Obviously your own backgrounds and experiences and environment will influence what active any looks like. And it doesn't matter what kind of I guess I would say you know cultural connotations you have.
Whether or not active any is African American or someone who's just you know a recent immigrant from Afghanistan or as Asian descent or born in the US or whatever it does that does, that's not important. But we can all imagine our version of act of any in our head.
OK. And obviously if you had a image that was associated with act of any, which is a good idea and and you know you can use AI to generate these images now as well you could you could target that specifically around the environment that you live in, your target customer if that really mattered. But I don't think some of those demographics make much of a difference. We know who active AI is and I head straight away now. Now active AI has goals, motivations and pain points.
And these goals, motivations and pain points a specific active Annie. And we'll see. This is a template we can use. So the active Annie, what do you think her goals would be? So one of the goals for active Annie is that she would like to track her work out effectively. OK, and matters. She's enthusiastic runner and weightlifter, which means that she's really into that, which means that it makes a difference if she's running two KS or three KS or four KS or five KS. So she really wants to.
She's really goal motivated. So she wants to track her workouts effectively. Maybe she wants to monitor her calorie intake and maybe she wants personalized exercise routines that are going to make the best use of her time training and and what she eats. So they're the goals, they are goals that we can assume. But we should test those goals.
And most importantly, we should have interviewed people in our active group that represent any who are enthusiastic runners and weight lifters and in the LA area around this age. And we should have looked at their goals and interviewed them and then worked out what are the common goals across that segment. And let's say we've done that and these are the goals for that area. We asked them what their motivations are. So her motivations, and this makes it a little bit real, is
high quality, strong coffee. OK, so one of the one of the motivations, she loves great coffee. She wants a quiet atmosphere for studying. That's really important. One of the other motivations is convenient. Located near college campus, it's something she's looking for in terms of this fitness Apple area. So they're not specific around necessarily like a a gym or an app or looking at a solution, right? This is just the motivations
that active Annie has. And then in terms of the pain points, she dislikes waiting too long for coffee. Don't we all? I I I can sympathize with Annie, but I'm maybe not the most enthusiastic runner out there at these days. She prefers not to be bothered by staff when studying, doesn't want to be bothered at all, and relies on strong coffee for concentration. So that gives you a little bit of an idea of more now behaviour or psychology around any. So that's that's important.
And we could actually design some features or some requirements that relate to Annie. So this would happen later after we've gone through all the personas. But let's think about some of the key features or stories or yes, I guess they are features, they're they're solutions, they're conceptual solutions in which Annie would like. So one of it might be workout training with progress towards goals like graphs she wants. She's already said that she wants personalized exercise for
herself. So she may be personalized exercise routines or something that resonates with Annie. And we already know because of the coffee situation in which she told us she will be inclined to want quick and professional service order online, avoiding lining up. OK, so that's Annie. I think we've got Annie, then we've got busy Brian. OK. So I'm going to walk through Brian and then Natalie a little bit faster, but you get the idea.
Brian Mitchell 40, OK, I want you to close your eyes and think about this. Brian Mitchell 40. He's a working professional, probably see a suit and a tie, his limited time for workouts and he also lives in LA, California. The goals for Brian or busy Brian? Brian Mitchell is he wants fit, quick workouts and a busy schedule. He wants to seamlessly integrate his fitness routine with work and family life. We already know Brian has a
family now and work. The motivations for Brian is he wants efficiency and time saving solutions. He's time poor, hashtag, time poor. Put a hashtag on that. He wants to stay active despite A hectic schedule. So with all that's going on with family and work, and he's 40 years old, he still wants to maintain his fitness at the 40, which is a critical time in a man's life. As I'm finding out with pain points, he needs to balance working with family and fitness.
OK? They are three circles that Brian needs to to manage in his life. He needs workouts that do not disrupt his day. He's he's on A roll with business, juggling business and family already, and with family and work and fitness. He needs to fit in around that day. OK, so that should give you an idea around what Brian is, OK? And we can all imagine what Brian looks like, slightly receding hairline. Maybe he got a tan because he wants to look good and he's working out.
He goes for runs, but he's busy and maybe he's a lawyer and he works at La and fitness is important to him. Family's too important to him. So he's not someone who's hanging around at the clubs and he doesn't have much time and he's really efficient and he and he schedules everything in his life. We all know what Brian's like.
So some of the key features that Brian has literally told you, some of the solutions in which Brian has told you his requirements, and some solutions or features you're looking at. The join between both the user story and the solution is which we call features quick workouts, 15 to 10 minutes reminders for consistency and time effective exercises. Right. We're going to move on to newbie Natalie here. So Natalie Adams, 25, beginner in fitness, also lives in LA California and she has just
started her fitness journey. OK, so beginner to fitness 25 newbie. The goals is that she wants to start fitness. She wants to learn properly and proper form and techniques. She wants to understand nutritional basics. She wants to gradually improve her professional level. Her motivations is she's eager to explore the fitness world and seek a guidance in education,
and wants to do it right. Her pain point is that she feels overwhelmed by all the information she gets from germs and places, and she needs beginner friendly content. So the key features for Natalie would be tutorials and educational content, gradual challenges that lead up and
clear information. So with this Fit Pal app in which we've identified these three kind of target customers, you would focus on your, the customer that's your early adopter, which one of these customers or personas effectively are your early adopters. You would do that in your Lync canvas and in this app, in this
kind of Fit Pal app. There's a premise in the lean canvas that we haven't talked about, which is that we think that we got to create an app that focuses on nutrition, exercise and also having a fitness, fitness pal where you meet this person over coffee and you pee your workouts and you make friends. So it's kind of a social, social, self exercising and nutritional app. In this example here, we've got our three customer personas that
we talked about. There might be more and we might say that the person that we're focusing on 1st is Natalie. So we might say that active Annie is someone that we ultimately want to target next. They're the kind of mass market workout people that we want to make this app targeted at. And that's our kind of mass market. And maybe some of the late adopters might be people like Bruce who are time poor and they might want to use the app feature but not the social meeting and learning feature.
And then naturally might be our early adopter. Naturally he's actively wanting to learn about fitness, so he wants to try something new. Maybe we do a bit of work out some insights around technology use and whether or not, you know, there's this another persona around that we can split out from nationally to those who use technology on the go all the time and those that don't and target on the ones that do use
technology. And I'm motivated to learn about fitness, but they can do it in a fun way by having a fitness pal drinking a cup of coffee and then learning from our maybe our trainers who we send out. So that's an idea about how you would use Pessonas and there were there were kind of three examples in this in this example at Fit Pal. Now that should give you an idea about the use and then how they can be applied down at the user story level.
And also like I just said, we've just made a decision there as a team that naturally would be our first target customer. So maybe the features that relate to Natalie's particular pain points and those epics are the personas, sorry, are the user stories that we should be focusing on 1st. So we've made a decision just using real people.
Well, real examples of people what the other thing that's really important when you are looking at personas is both to make sure that these personas are quantifiable too.
So we want to know what percentage of the market we want to have some really numbers, how many Nationalies are there in LA, right, if that's where we're going to launch, how many young people who are starting their finished, finished journey are there in LA. So give us some real numbers around that to make sure it's viable.
And then we want to measure that same we want to market, sorry to Natalie, we want to market to the Natalies, the 25 year old female who want to get into fitness, want to get want to use some of the features We've just, she's just described as being pain point areas for her and we want to market spend money on that. And we also want to measure how many of those Natalies are clicking on our landing page or
our app page. You know, how many are responding to the ads, how many are clicking through. Oh, actually it's really interesting. We were doing this marketing campaign with these features that we thought we would do first to target this target segment and we've actually found that a whole lot of what we would describe as active annies are actually clicking on it. So we can get that through Facebook.
We can get that through, you know, Instagram, which Facebook owns Tiktok, LinkedIn, potentially. And it will give us demographics and it will tell us and we'll go, oh man, there's actually people that are a little bit older, a little bit wealthier, a little bit more active into fitness that interests fitness already. They're already actively describing, checked in to gyms. Wow, They're actually responding to this ad. So we can that's when we go, OK, well, it's really interesting.
They're picking up on it. And so we're now kind of can really link the data to these real people we talked about, right. And and we can know whether or not we're not hitting the mark, we are hitting the mark. And it all is all about learning. It is all about getting that information, getting the data in to kind of measure whether or not our target segments are actually and our personas are real. And if we need to evolve them, we can.
If you do evolve your personas, then obviously your target customers may be changing and you need to decide whether or not you're pivoting from your original idea. And if you know anything about link canvases or have listened to those podcasts, you'll know what I'm talking about there. Now, when you effectively want to put these personas together, this let's let's just list off like 10 steps, really just 10 steps to create these insightful personas. So #1 is to do the research, right?
Is to gather information about your customers through interviews and surveys and means you're validating your hypothesis with real data to make sure they are your target customers based on the solution and the problems that you are solving. If you have been involved in start-ups, problems is what you measure, not your solution.
And the reason why you might. The reason that it's problematic to focus on solutions is that you we're notoriously bad at doing customer computer analysis and just because you have a great idea, there could be hundreds of other people with viable, what we call viable alternatives that you haven't thought about. OK? And you don't sometimes don't really understand how people customers are meeting their needs or solving a pain point
that you think is a pain point. So it's all around, let's say we'll just make the assumption that our pain point is valid and there and our solution is going to could be more popular and easier to use and solves the problems cheaper, faster, more efficiently than other solutions. Let's say that's true, then you also need. You need data for that. But you also need data to validate who is responding to you, to your solution and to the pain points you've solved by your.
Solution #2 is we segment our audience groups based on common common characteristics. Like I said though, it's more about behaviour than it is around demographics. OK, it's about behaviours and goals. It is still useful to have demographics so we can visualise the people they're useful for Targeting advertising so that demographics are literally used in Google ads or Facebook ads. And the behaviour side is out of the next level of marketing where we literally have data on behaviours now.
And so it can provide us with deeper insights into improving our customer experience or you know, changing the features and seeing how people, how a product actually performs in the market. And you can do that without building a real product. Just just a side note there, you could just have a landing page. It's called, it's I guess it's an MVPA. True MVP where you aren't even building anything, you're just.
Literally seeing whether or not our customers are responding to this app you're going to launch and if they're clicking on or interested in the features that you have on your website #3 you need to decide the layout for your persona. You generally draw these up, I would say a simple PowerPoint presentation, Google slide, physical piece of paper where you have a a picture of the person.
You can use AI to generate their or a sketch, and you have some demographics underneath the picture on the left hand side. And then you have sections like Background, goals, motivations and pain points, OK. And you might later add in the features underneath those personas. They're not. They're a response to the persona around what you think will, what features or areas or requirements you think are associated with those, those personas. And you can do that later.
If this is a or do this physically, I'd put it on a board somewhere in a project team or for your for your group or team where you sit. Those demographics really need to be based on real data. So you could say how many people of this age, you know, gender, occupation, location, how many, what's the data around that? What? What represents that person who's got their motivation? So you can also do that through keyword analysis. Say how many people are searching for fitness with
friends? And Google will literally tell you, give you a graph and tell you the percentage of people, their age, demographic. As you've set up Google Analytics, you can look into that. You're using that information and you should have percentages here. You can use this information to create relatable personas, so they're real. You want to describe the person's background, Like I said, maybe even a back story. What got them there? Give them a little bit more flavor, like a bit of a book.
We didn't do that earlier, but it also helps. You could say, well, you know, Natalie's just recently moved to LA Maybe she moved from mainland China where she was working and she came off her parents farm. So exercise was built into the farming life. But now she wants to experience a real exercise. She's got a job in finance. You know, you can give a, a really interesting back story to to Natalie here who's getting new.
It might explain why she's only getting into fitness now that she's 25 maybe, or what triggered that motivation? So you can be rich with this stuff, right. And. And and people might say, well, that hasn't happened to all the people that are within that segment or that persona. And that's OK, though you're trying to make these people real and relatable and they need they need reals and relatable could be two different things.
Real data could show quite different picture or make up to what you've described naturally as so use the data to drive it. When you define their goals, you want to do their jobs to be done goals. What does your persona aim to achieve? What are their objectives? What are the desired outcomes? What do they want? What where do they want to go? You may be helping them all along. The journey you may define their is really important here is that personas go hand in hand with
customer journeys. So you should map out the steps in which naturally carries out today to go and look out of fitness. If her goal is to learn more about fitness and start a fitness routine, maybe ask what steps she's carrying out now to learn about those things. Or even you know, the experience she's had before to go to a German, do something. Do you understand her customer journey that she's going through and the desired customer journey
when she uses your app? That's where you're linked to processes, and that's how your user story should really drop out of the steps and the customer journey. Then, after you've done the goals and the desires, #7 is you want to define the motivations and frustrations. What is driving your persona? Why the why? What motivates them to take action? What will motivate them to take action? Ultimately, you want your customers to take action.
If they don't take action, they won't use your product. You need to figure out what is going to motivate them to take action, what will motivate them. And if that price of that price not in in in indirect monetary terms is too high, they may not be the right customers to target straight away. They may be late. Late adopters, not really adopters. OK, you need to recognize their pain points and frustrations, and your product needs to solve
those. It doesn't matter that it's got all the whiz bang, other features. If it doesn't solve the pain points, they won't use it. And if it doesn't solve those pain points better, cheaper, faster than the competitors, they won't use it though. They'll start, they'll download it, they'll use it once, and they'll sign out. OK, that happens all the time. People are using for new features.
If it's an app, they'll down three, they'll download 3 copies of a similar app, they'll use them, they'll find the one with the best UX, the one with the best features, the cheapest option, and they'll use that. And then you can get false data where you think someone's downloaded my app, that's a win. But if they're not using it, they don't continue to use it. They don't load money on it, they don't go past the free trial. You can get false data.
And this happens so often, There's a massive company in New Zealand called the Warehouse Group. They, they run a kind of like a, it's literally a physical warehouse for a shop. So a little bit like Walmart and you go in there and they own these and then they went and they acquired lots of other stores. They acquired kind of an outdoor retailer called Torpedo 7:00. They have a mobile arm. They do lots of other things.
It's hugely successful, but they've had a lot of bad business decisions where they've people are shopping more online. They know that Amazon might be moving to New Zealand soon, so they're wanting to respond to that. They set up an online marketplace called the Market in New Zealand where other suppliers could use their warehousing. They could sell their goods online through this one marketplace. And look, it sounds fantastic. I used it quite a lot.
There's no reason why the market couldn't dominate the market. The New Zealand market in terms of online retail like Amazon has had in the US because Amazon wasn't, isn't here yet. Really it's in Australia, it's in the States and UK but we we have to that cost a lot of money to ship here And so it's not actually doesn't make it generally viable to do that. And the same way Trade Me in New Zealand has pretty much got all the online kind of auctions or used goods market in New
Zealand. eBay just doesn't exist in New Zealand. It just isn't something that runs here because Trade Me dominates the market. Peter Teal, the we'll talk about domination in his book. Now if you who happens to come and live in New Zealand sometimes with the market and the Warehouse group, they should have dominated that market. It seemed like they were dominating.
But then on recent times I started to search for goods that I wanted to buy and none of their results were coming up in Google ads or in the product listing under shopping shipping tab. So I was like very surprised that that wasn't the case. And what I found checking prices sometimes is it was cheaper to buy it from the retailer who was advertising on the market than it was to buy through the market because of their shipping and their logistics cause kind of
cost. It was standardized and so it was actually sometimes cheaper to buy it directly. So you'd go on the market, find the product you wanted, use the great search and then go buy it somewhere else direct actually with the retailer or you know, wholesaler who was selling it. So that seemed a flaw in their plan. I noticed that kind of early on. And the other thing about the market is that when they launched, they gave away a lot
of coupons. So they said, you know, if you spend $50, we'll give you $10 back. So a lot of people were saving these coupons and we're using these coupons and saving money and we're going on there. And there were massive amounts of coupons when you first signed up to the website and there was a lot of free shipping deals. And then they added a premium plan, a bit like Amazon Prime, where, you know, you could pay a monthly fee and then you wouldn't have to pay for shipping.
You could buy as much as you liked. So all those kind of tricks of the trade that all those online retailers now do, and if you hadn't thought too much about it, it looked like things were going well. Well, I just read the news the other day and obviously they hadn't done enough work on their personas, their business model or their cost model. So what happened was I think they had a false sense that they were doing really well and they've lost millions, hundreds of millions of dollars.
And now that part of their business is up for sale, another bad decision. And I would say that they obviously didn't do their persona work. They obviously didn't look at the behaviours and the pain points they were trying to solve and they weren't getting data on these, on these pain points and what they were doing.
And this is, I guess the lesson I'm going off on a tangent about is that by offering coupons and you know, free stuff, if you offer free stuff from free trials that can cloud your data, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying that don't use that as a forecast for how many people are going to continue to use your product. Because generally, the mass market loves free stuff and they'll use your product.
If they hear about it and you spend enough on advertising and they know they can get free stuff, they will go to your store. But don't take that that data set as an indicator of continued business. That's just the Side Story. And it's worth talking about as
we talk about personas here. So as we talked about #7 there, in terms of defining the motivations and frustration on our customers, #8 is to just add your own ingredients I guess to the cook pot around a unique traits, preferences, behaviours, communication, style, hobbies. You know you can you can, like I said, breathe life into the personas number 99 is to present. I guess it's optionally you can represent this persona in physical form.
You can use use a tool called UX Presenter AI Persona Generator to generate some detailed personas for you. You want that to have real data and or you know, you could just create your own personas, combine all the information together into a cohesive persona profile, update them regularly, refine them with data. Some of the main stories won't change, but maybe the data will keep them relevant. Maybe even Craden Dashboard. So I hope you've learned
something about personas today. Why we use them, how we can use them, What they are, where you can incorporate them, examples of them. And really think about integrating personas into your BA work today.