Design Thinking? Use Power Personas

Design Thinking is essential to creating the innovative products and services that now drive the Digital Economy.  Companies without the ability to imbed Design Thinking within their culture and processes will be challenged and ultimately disrupted, while those who embrace this client-centric and empathy-driven approach will be rewarded with increased market share and brand loyalty.  Knowing this, many companies have begun creating Personas as the way to stay focused on stakeholders, customers and users.

Personas were originally confined to marketing departments and mainly used to explain segmentation and brand strategy.  In 2004, Personas were introduced as a way to think about software design in Alan Cooper’s 2004 book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

Now that many leaders are aware of the importance of Design Thinking, Power Personas have made their way into the Innovative Enterprises and now inform everything from Enterprise Strategy and Pricing Models to Call Scripts and budget prioritization.  There is now a growing understanding that leveraging Power Personas can mean being first to market, attaining rapid customer adoption, capturing market share, and using valuable technology resources strategically.   Instead, those ignoring this vital component will likely experience increasing customer attrition, and market erosion.   

Many companies create Personas as an up-front imperative, but their power is crushed under the pressures of budgets, timelines, and resources. Typically, these Personas have not been created for Design Thinking, but were carefully crafted for an internal leadership audience –mostly by either Marketing or UX Design teams.  These Personas look pretty, play well to leadership to get budget approval, but have no power to help your organization leverage Design Thinking to assure customer centricity from concept to delivery.  These flat and lifeless Personas have no actual Power to guide Strategy, Product Development, or Customer Interaction.

As a leader, do you believe the answer in your organization to “Do you use Personas?” would be answered, “Sure, we created several last year and you can find them on the shared drive?”  If so, your organization does not use Power Personas.   More importantly, Design Thinking within your organization is likely stuck.  The risk of disruption is increasing.  Using Power Personas will begin to de-risk your organization.

If you aren’t sure how to get started with Power Personas,  follow this simple guideline to get started understanding Power Personas and how they are created for Design Thinking: 

Power Personas are:

 DATA-DRIVEN

Power Personas are created with data from the market, call center, feedback sessions, interviews, observations, click-through data and competitive research.  This data is collaboratively distilled into the Power Persona.  The data used reflects the importance of the Persona to the product or service, and is refreshed with the most relevant data to inform decision-making at every level from Strategy to Execution.  If Personas are created by a single person at a computer with Google Images and PowerPoint, it is simply a piece of a marketing presentation that was created as a check-mark for leadership.  It is NOT a Power Persona.  Take the time to get real data to support a real Power Personas and communicate that Data when collaborating to flesh-out your PPs.

ELABORATED

Power Personas feel real and evoke empathy, which is where Design Thinking starts.  By having this effect on Employees, Stakeholders, Product Management, and Technologists, they ultimately win very real customer(s) and stakeholders.  Power Personas always have real-sounding names, hobbies and families, hopes and dreams.  If not created with rich and believable backgrounds, a Persona is flat and lifeless and loses is Power status.  Any Persona that is created with a joke name (i.e. Mike Medic or Melanie Millennial), is rendered impotent when it comes to evoking Design Thinking.  When developing Power Personas, employ Lean Start-up techniques such as “Getting Out of the Building” to observe potential buyers and capture these personal anecdotes, sit with people who take customer calls listen in, shadow sales on visits, walk a day in the life of a customer to test the Power Persona against reality.

AGGREGRATES

Power Personas are aggregates that represent the right stakeholder or customer population, but are never represent to only one or two individuals.  Particularly loud or demanding stakeholder or focus group participants are temping to use as a basis and the data for them is easily acquired and familiar.  However, this inevitably leads to creating too narrow focus and stifles Design Thinking.   With data, collaboratively brainstorm as many Personas as you can, then pull characteristics from each before you settle on a base to elaborate.   Power Personas influence data gathering, market testing, physical design, and research you conduct and solution you ultimately provide to customers and/or employees.   As a guide, you should be able to start with 50 candidate Power Personas for any effort before collaboratively narrowing and condensing.

REFERENCED

Deep consideration and conversations about a Power Personas starts before a new Product, Service, or Enhancement idea is entertained for funding.    When prioritizing the relevant Power Persona is front and center in the conversation and referred to by name (i.e. “Explain why this would be good for Jenny” Is Persona data brought into decision-making sessions?  Arguments break out about whether Mike Jenkins (for example) will be happy with a given pricing model or feature.  Power Personas are posted where work is taking place.  Everyone from the CEO to the researcher, to the product developer talks about the Power Personas.   Is this the case with the Personas your company is using?  If not, check out your D, E, and A.  Chances are you have not created Power Personas in the first place. If your answer is yes to these questions, then please email me your company information; I want to invest! You are ahead of the curve and will surely outpace your competition.

 SIGNIFICANT

Power Personas are always play a significant role in enabling Design Thinking and thus move the needle in the market – but only if there is a market in the first place.  The good news is that the process of creating Power Personas reduces the risk offering the wrong product, service, or enhancement.  Gathering data to create Power Personas, leads to early indications of unprofitable markets, lack of desirability, and small stakeholder populations.  Ultimately, this process changes or even kills risky business models and ideas before they become a budget-breaking failure or brand issue.  Power Personas always represent powerful stakeholder populations -  you can’t substantiate a strategy, idea, product, or enhancement with a Power Persona, it’s time to change direction.

Remember that Power Personas are D.E.A.R.S. to make it further, faster with Design Thinking.  Later I will discuss using multiple Power Personas simultaneously to increase revenue and efficiency when pursuing complex markets.  Stay tuned if your business is serving Silent Generation, Baby Boomer, and Millennials simultaneously or trying to retain current customers while growing a different customer base.

It's Time for Product Craftsmanship

The biggest challenge for Agile is no longer establishing SCRUM teams or creating working software - the challenge in today’s fast-moving economy is releasing software that will move customers to buy and move the needle for business.    In Agile, we practice Software Craftsmanship, but now the new imperative must be Product Craftsmanship.  Here’s why:

To quote the first principle of the Agile Manifesto: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” If we deliver early and continuously, do we know that we are also delivering value?   I ask myself these questions: Why doesn’t SCRUM, Kanban, or Scaled Frameworks result in market success? Why are enterprises with high-performing Agile teams still falling behind the competition?

Should we be satisfied with “better ways to create software” as an end goal, or is now the time to aim for something more meaningful?

As the community of “guiding Agilists,” we are becoming the root cause of brand erosion and market disruption for our clients.  We continue to “help” our clients iteratively release software that no one will buy, no one will use, and may ultimately cost our clients their share of the Digital Economy.  Should we be satisfied with “better ways to create software” as an end goal, or is it now time to aim for something more meaningful?  We could be delivering a competitive edge, enabling enterprise success, and yes, even creating higher stock prices for our clients.

Those of us who have spent years working on Transformation know that success depends on more than the software development organization, yet I have heard many seasoned colleagues dismiss success with users or the market as a “Business problem.” We may have a product owner, but we are light on helping their leadership truly understand Agile or how to create a backlog.  This attitude leaves product owners and product management teams alone to struggle with prioritizing and what valuable and usable means.

With only rare exceptions, technology teams still claim success and move on to the next big thing.

These business partners and stakeholders are also the folks left to live with the product (and customer feedback) released by the “high-performance team."  With only rare exceptions, technology teams still claim success and move on to the next big thing. This trend makes Agile Transformation and even Agile adoption spotty, with stalls and resets rampant. We focus on Software Craftsmanship, when this problem can only be solved with Product Craftsmanship.

From the beginning, the Agile Manifesto valued minimizing waste through minimizing documentation while encouraging collaboration and communications.  Lean adds more language around minimizing waste. However Agile and Lean do not merely suggest minimizing waste in all of its forms, they also encourage understanding of customers and economics. For example: What is the cost of delay for implementing one Feature before another?

Some of the tools of Product Craftsmanship are already seeing success in Agile. Those who have spent any time with the Scaled Agile Framework or read Don Reinertsen’s book The Principles of Product Development Flow can see elements of planning and prioritization based on value.  Reinertsen suggests “taking the economic view,” and Leffingwell prioritizes based on “weighted shortest job first.” But sadly, Agilists in these scenarios usually end up coaching a planning processes and assume that software craftsmanship and product craftsmanship already exist in the organization.

We must start coaching and teaching both Software Craftsmanship and Product Craftsmanship,  otherwise we will lead clients to disruption. 

So, who are the Product Craftsmen? In the Lean Start-up community, Eric Reis and colleagues such as Steve Blank, Brant Cooper, Alex Osterwalder, and Yves Pigner seem to have Product Craftsmanship well in hand. According to that community, you need to test your assumptions (or Hypotheses) in real time while developing an idea. You then pivot as needed, change your business model as you learn, and constantly “get out of the building” to gather data and validate what will truly be successful in the market.

A perfect example of this is a scene in the movie The Social Network in which Mark Zuckerberg is racking his brain, knowing the product didn’t yet have what it would take to be a success. A classmate named Dustin runs over:

DUSTIN: “There’s a girl in your art history class. Her name is Stephanie Attis. Do you happen to know if she has a boyfriend?”

MARK: “Why am I being interrupted?”

DUSTIN: “Have you ever seen her with anyone? And if not, do you happen to know if she’s looking to go out with anyone?”

MARK: “Dustin. People don’t walk around with a sign on them that says—“

Mark stops and realizes what his product needs to be successful: a relationship status. The rest is history.  Mark was successful because he left his dorm room, went out into the world, listened to his users, and immediately changed the product based on what he learned.  Turns out Facebook was somewhat successful.

It’s very likely that if your business isn’t doing what Mr. Zuckerberg did as a way of working, you might as well burn your investment money - you won’t build the right product. The Lean Start-up approach works, and some smart enterprises are already adopting as many aspects of this system as possible. Lean Startup is a proven way to assure a valuable Product Model and it puts you on the path to Product Craftsmanship.

In the meantime, what is the Agile Community offering? We say the product owner owns the backlog and for the most part, that’s the full extent of our participation in Product Craftsmanship. Sometimes we might say something that sounds impressive, but is merely time-based: “You need to break epics into features and then break those down into stories that will fit into an iteration”.  Where is the value? Where is the guidance to assure that value is being created based on solid, client focused empirical data?

We must start coaching and teaching both Software Craftsmanship and Product Craftsmanship - otherwise we will lead our clients to disruption.  Or perhaps Agile simply becomes irrelevant.