The customer persona (aka "buyer persona") is an archetype or three-dimensional profile that includes key traits of a particular customer segment. It will help us learn about their habits, behaviors, and interests to determine if they are early adopters.
It will guide your customer research, product, marketing, and design decisions. You'll start asking yourself and your team how "Jane the Working Mom" would feel about a feature change. How will it affect her life and her goals?
It's Alive!
Unlike the US Constitution, your customer persona is a continually edited and updated living document. You will revisit this document repeatedly as you learn new things about the customer.
Work Together
This document is also a great collaboration and communication tool if you work with someone else. We encourage co-founding teams to work on their customer personas separately and then come together to discuss. It's also a great tool for communicating with new team members or freelancers, from designers to marketers.
B2B
A mistake we frequently see with business customers is focusing on the business instead of the people inside the company with whom you'll be selling and working. While it's essential to understand what type of business you'll be selling into (industry, size), we will focus on the actual people inside those organizations (e.g., the Director of HR). So, for customer personas, make sure that they are people and not companies.
Broad vs. Narrow
More frequently, initial customer segments tend to be too broad. Therefore, as a rule of thumb 👍, we recommend being more specific. On the other side, an indication that your segmentation is too narrow is if you can't think of a single person who could fit your customer persona. You've invented a dream person that doesn't exist or who you would struggle to find. If you can't see this person to do an interview, you probably won't be selling anything to them. This case can happen if you build a precise persona based on just a single person, you know, instead of the general profile of a type of person. For visionaries who say, "But what about Facebook or Apple?" Those founders saw the potential to impact the whole world! That's great! But remember that they both started in very particular markets: Facebook focused on a single college campus (Harvard) before expanding to Ivy League schools, all colleges, and finally high school, and then to anyone. Apple started when personal computers were not a thing, except for a small group of computer hobbyists. Eventually, they were able to become ubiquitous in many homes and schools.