3.3: Incorporate Persona Analysis - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Now let's talk about customer persona analysis.</v> The key actor in the job to be done analysis is referred to as a persona. Persona analysis is a method of representing the target audience for the product. In product analysis the user persona is a customer type represented as a fictional character with a made up biography, demographics, characteristics, and a clear representation of their needs and behaviors. It's important to differentiate between the customer and the client. The client is the end user that uses the product or consumes the services. That's who the persona is. Let's look at an example. In early 2010, TPC, a leader in college exam prep, was experiencing a major decline in its profits. Despite the high quality of education, their traditional brick and mortar business was not popular. Students were looking for flexible and asynchronous education. They found in person and predominantly one way online classes equally boring and ineffective. TPC CEO, Jeff Paulson, called his leadership team to discuss what do they do to change? The leadership team suggested going mobile. Since the release of the first iPhone in 2007 and the support of third party applications, this seemed like the right way to go. However, it wasn't clear which functionality would be most important for the users. TPC invited one of the well known consultants in an IT product delivery to help them organize a workshop and assess customer needs. During this week long workshop, several hundred TPC employees, developers, testers, product managers, IT engineers, sysadmins, along with their business stakeholders engaged in prototyping and analyzing user needs. There were four research teams. Each of the research teams focused on one of the customer types, high school students that were taking admission exams, the other focused on legal professionals preparing for the bar exams. The third one was focusing on the medical professionals. And the fourth focused on college graduates that were taking graduate school exams. So throughout this whole week, they engaged in active dialogue through observation, prototyping, and research, and they made three major discoveries. One, students were bored with study cards and electronic equivalent of the same cards and they wanted more interactive, more engaging experience. The second conclusion was that students wanted the experience to be heavily customized. They wanted an ability to create their profiles, with avatars, specify the number of questions and test assignments, and to even compete with others. The third one, students preferred questions to be grouped by topic so that their learning was structured and logically organized. So once the results were collected, agile teams started rapid delivery. And in three months the first TPC test prep app was completed. It was gamified, students were able to earn badges and keep scores for correct questions. Also, the questions were structured by topic. Basically everything that the research has shown. It was priced very competitive at $4.99 per month. And the company expected it to be a huge success on the market, but it wasn't selling well. They decreased the price to $2.99 and then $1.99 before starting to offer it for free but still it wasn't really popular. So after two unsuccessful releases Jack Paulson called the leadership team and they tried to brainstorm, what was the reason for the failure of their product strategy? Jack was concerned that the product was a major waste of time and budget for the company overall. He invited the company's agile coach and the agile coach asked the first question, who is the user of this app? And everyone said, of course, these are students who is the customer. Then the audience was really confused. What is the difference between the student persona and the customer? So the agile coach had to ask the question in a different way, who is paying for it, who is buying it? And that was an eyeopening question. Even those students were the users of this app, they were not the paying customers, their parents were. And then the next step became really clear. At that point a smaller scope research was done with the parents of undergraduate students. They did not find the app really helpful for several reasons. In person, like they believed more in in-person education and even online, they wanted to supervise their children. They were not clear how much time the children spent studying. And most importantly, what were the scores they were receiving and how better those scores were than the ones before they started using the app? And also parents did not really care about customization or gamification. All they cared about was the outcome. What was the child's test score and how it was improving over time? With that, agile teams at TPC prioritized different functionality for delivery. They created parent dashboards showing how much time their children were spending on the app, how many questions they attempted to answer, and how many of those answers were correct. Also they randomized questions to mimic the real test and dialed down on gamification because the goal was to educate, not really to entertain. Within a short period of time the app became super successful and earned a number of prestigious IT and educational awards. Now let's talk about user segmentation. This is another side of persona analysis. The term refers to the practice of dividing your customers into segments based on characteristics by age, region, language, goals, behavior, status, and so forth as relevant to the product that was being built. This term came from marketing because dividing potential markets or consumers into groups allows targeting their marketing efforts in the most efficient way. For example, suburban living is marketed to families and city apartments are marketed to business executives. Okay, so it was becoming clear that persona analysis based on user segmentation was not really sufficient to identify customer needs for technology products. Like many of the technology product related concepts, user segmentation that came from business separation was not enough. The concept was to group customers based on their natural characters to identify the target audience and build loyalty through empathy. For that, a number of customer segmentation categories were introduced. The first one is demographic segmentation, customers of same age, origin, or culture. Second one is geographic segmentation, customers from the same geographic areas or countries. Third one is segmentation by interest or hobbies, customers who like art, music theory, history and so forth. Next is, and very important one is behavioral segmentations, customer's loyalty, purchase behavior, attitude towards a specific product. The next one is psychographic segmentation, is the customer really ready to purchase, open to buying but not to look, not being interested in buying yet, just browsing, so forth? So we need to know where the customer is in terms of their decision making. And of course we know from the Proctor and Gamble example in lesson one, brands segmentation is really important. There is brand preference or loyalty. Some people just buy luxury brands or have preferences for a specific brand even if they don't like the product that much. And finally customer journey segmentation, is it newbie, a returning visitor, an interesting, visitor or an experienced purchaser? So all this information is used in designing marketing campaigns but it is equally applicable and frequently used in designing IT products. Based on customer segmentations, the needs, goals, comfort with the technology, the industry of their choice, all that is used by product managers to prioritize features and refine personas to reflect their preferences and biases in technology adoption.