A Product Manager’s Guide to Creating A User Persona

As a product manager, understanding your users is at the center of every product decision you make, and one of the best ways to know your users is by creating a user persona. In this piece, we’ll look through the basic steps of creating a user persona, plus resourceful templates you can use when creating one.

What exactly is a user persona?

A User persona is an ideal representative of your target audience. It is not merely a fictional representation because it is created based on the data analyzed from studying or researching about the users.

Why do you create a User Persona?

Creating a user persona before commencing product development has many advantages, but at its core, it helps provide the ‘personalized’ solution that users crave. It’s like when you use a product, and you feel, ‘Oh nice, this is exactly what I needed,’ at the back of that satisfaction you got is a product team who carefully researched your needs, created a user persona that captures you, and built a user-centric product that you now love to use.

Other reasons for creating User personas include;

• Help the product team to understand target users and make informed product and business decisions.
• Empathize with target users by identifying their struggles, pain points, and goals.
• It makes it easier for the product design team to put users first when creating wireframes.
• It can be used to draft a user-focused go-to-market strategy by enhancing messaging through storytelling.

How to Create a User Persona Creating

Here is a breakdown of the step-by-step process of creating a User persona.

1. Conduct User Research

As a Product manager, you must not assume you know your users; you need to reach out to them through interviews, surveys, feedback, etc. This research will provide the qualitative and quantitative data you need to make informed decisions about your target users. The type of research method used depends on several factors, such as resources available, location, and product type.

2. Identify patterns and connect the dots

From the data obtained in the research, you will then segment your audience based on similar patterns such as age group, location, gender, challenges, goals, profession, etc. It is always best to have multiple personas representing different user types. For example, single mothers and married women are user personas for a baby care product.

3. Define your Persona

You will add a more personal touch to the persona during this stage. You will need to give the persona a name, gender, age, location, occupation, and a picture relatable to the persona. You can add details like motivation, favorite quotes, and tech savviness.

4. Highlight their Challenges and Goals

This category is very important as it helps you identify pain points or frustrations your product or service can solve. This way, you can better empathize with them and better understand why you are building for them.

5. Document your Persona

You can document your persona using various tools to arrange the information you have gathered about your persona. Tools like Miro, Google Slide, Figma, Whimsical, and Canva can be used. There are also various templates available online that can make this process faster. Below is an example of how a documented User persona looks.

6. Update your User persona

This is one step that can be easily left out, but it is a very essential one. It is crucial to update user persona as you gather new data about them. Remember that your user preference can change, and as a product manager, you need to stay updated on this. As their preference changes, you need to update the user persona constantly.

You can find User persona templates below;

• Xtensio User persona template
• Canva User persona template
• Figma Community User persona template
• Visme User persona template
• Justinmind User persona template
• Miro User persona template

Endnotes

Creating a User persona can be challenging when there is no straightforward guide on how to do that. This is why I have put together these basic steps to help guide you as you work on drafting user personas that inform your design, development, and marketing decisions. I hope you find this helpful.

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