Never Lose Sight of the Customer

Dan Radigan Atlassian!

@danradigan

Why?

CREATE

CREATE VALUE

CREATE VALUE

TEST

CREATE VALUE

TEST

Defining Personas

Personas are fictitious, specific, concrete

representations of target users.- The Essential Persona Lifecycle, John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin”“

Personas will:• Improve products with targeted love for specific customers!• Increase the overall customer focus of the company!• Reduce team silos who work with the same customer profile!• Remain focused on actual customer needs and reduce internal

politics!• Increase our ability to empathize with our customers!• Make it easier to resolve issues

• Static documents!• Used in isolation!• A bunch of stats!• A replacement for user testing

What personas are not

The Software Team

Operate

Support!&!

Operations

Sell

Marketing

Make

Engineering

Product Management

Design

Validating a Persona

Hmm

• Demographics!• Motivations!• Concerns!• Competitive Landscape!• Adoption process!• Purchasing Role

Questions to ponder

Alex the Attendee

Contextual Inquiry

Customer!Interview

…EmailSurvey

Social!Networking

20 to 30

Communicating Outward

• Feature based personas!• Having one person do all the work!• Adding in your own bias!• Making them too easy!• Making assumptions without validating!• Selectively looking at the persona

Persona Pitfalls

Atlassian’s Journey

Work CodeIdeas

Code management and quality

Issue andproject tracking

Content collaborationand sharing

Ideas

WorkCode

Customer Experience

Alana the Aware

1000 people know her

Work CodeIdeas

Alana the Aware

Customer Experience

Work Work

+ TIME

What’s in it for me?

• Drives the creation of user stories!• Brainstorm features!• Prioritize features!• Key metrics for clear definition of success

Product Owners

• Personas drive design decisions. it’s about the customer.!

• Clearly communicate empathy!• Better user trials!

Product Designers

• Involve development in creating personas.!• Shared customer empathy!• Simplified data set!• Code is tighter with experience

Product Dev

"The personas are not useful, it's the

process and the tools that you use with

the personas, that's important.

I only understood the personas once I used

them in empathy maps and user journeys.

Up until then, they were just signs that I

had read."-An Atlassian Engineer”

“

• Customer Targeting!• Tighter value proposition with product!• Demo content!• Consistent language

Product Marketing

• No one is better to call your bluff…!• Support is the gut check on your personas. They don’t

shape them.

Product Support

Personas in Action

Ideal

Iteration MVP

Completing the Language

In review - personas will:• Improve products with targeted love for specific customers!• Increase the overall customer focus of the company!• Reduce team silos who work with the same customer profile!• Remain focused on actual customer needs and reduce internal

politics!• Increase our ability to empathize with our customers!• Make it easier to resolve issues

As Alana, I’d like to be able to track work by user persona because I want follow whose experience we’re making better by day.

8

Questions?Slides: TBD URL

Learn more: https://design.atlassian.com/