How to Create User Personas for Your Product: A Step-by-Step Guide
An Ex-Google PMM's take on product marketing.
Hi, my name is Henry, and today I’m going to walk you through how to create user personas.
What Are User Personas?
User personas are detailed profiles that represent different segments of your customer base. These personas include key information such as:
Background: Who are your customers?
Pain points: What challenges are they facing?
Discovery channel: How do they find your product?
Evaluation process: How do they decide to purchase your product?
Creating user personas helps refine your messaging and informs your go-to-market plan. You can use them to:
Tailor your messaging to different customer segments.
Identify the best channels to reach those segments.
How to Build User Personas
There are two approaches to building user personas:
Qualitative approach
Quantitative approach
I personally like to start with the qualitative approach and then validate it with the quantitative method.
Step 1: Start with Qualitative Research
Begin by looking at your existing user base and identifying patterns or similarities. For example, let’s say your product is an online data science bootcamp. By examining your current students, you might find that there are three distinct groups:
Academics: Students with a PhD background.
Engineers: Students with an engineering background.
Analysts: Students with accounting, finance, or consulting backgrounds.
Based on this, you can create your initial user personas: the Academia, the Engineering Persona, and the Analysts.
Step 2: Conduct In-Depth Interviews
Once you’ve created your initial personas, the next step is to reach out to 5-6 people from each persona for a 45-minute phone call. During the call, you want to explore four key areas:
Background: How did they get to where they are today?
Pain points: What led them to your product?
Discovery channel: How did they learn about your product?
Evaluation process: What criteria did they use to choose your product?
For example, if you’re speaking with someone from the Academia background, ask:
How did they end up in graduate school?
Why are they leaving graduate school for data science?
How did they research data science programs (YouTube, Reddit, etc.)?
What led them to choose a bootcamp over self-learning?
Step 3: Create Detailed Customer Profiles
After your interviews, compile the information into detailed customer profiles. Each profile should list:
Background
Pain points
Discovery channel
Evaluation process
This will give you a clearer picture of each user persona and how to best target them.
Step 4: Validate with Quantitative Research
Now that you’ve built your initial personas, it’s time to validate them with a quantitative approach. Create a survey and send it to your broader user base, allowing them to self-select into one of the personas you’ve identified. Make sure to include an "Other" option to capture any personas you might have missed.
Ideally, 90% of your respondents should be able to identify with one of the user personas you created.
Recap: How to Build User Personas
Start with qualitative research: Look at your existing user base and create initial personas based on patterns.
Conduct interviews: Talk to people from each persona to understand their background, pain points, discovery channels, and evaluation process.
Create detailed profiles: Compile your findings into customer profiles.
Validate with quantitative research: Send a survey to your user base to confirm your personas or identify new ones.
And that’s how you create user personas! If you found this helpful, make sure to give this post a like and leave a comment below to let me know what topics you’d like to see next. Until next time—see you!
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