by Bill Aulet
What is the bigger challenge for a startup (circle one):
Having enough time to research and figure out the best strategy.
Motivating people to keep making progress so that you can generate momentum and convince others to join you.
Persona or Not: When you see a spokesperson for a product, like LeBron James for Kia Motors or Jessica Alba for The Honest Company, are they the Persona? If not, who are they?
_________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________________
WORKSHEETS
General Information on Persona
1 What is the name of your Persona?
2 Where did you source this person from?
3 What types of biases are possible with this Persona? (e.g., it is a friend/relative who won’t be as honest, the Persona is a potential customer so you might advocate for your product too early instead of staying in inquiry mode)
4 What will you do to mitigate these biases as you work with the Persona?
5 What kind of access do you have to the Persona? (Be careful to use their time wisely because they are not as motivated as you by your process.)
6 What do you see as the strengths of this Persona?
7 What do you see as the weaknesses of this Persona?
8 I agree I will revisit this Persona to see if it is the best Persona on an ongoing basis, especially after Step 9, Identify Your Next 10 Customers, and change if a better one is found and willing. ________ Yes (good answer)
________ No (“No” is not a good answer)
PERSONA PROFILE FOR BEACHHEAD MARKET
Add a visual image of the Persona here
Name
Address
E-mail and phone
Title (if appropriate)
If business-to-business (B2B), where they exist in the overall org chart
Demographics:
Gender
Age
Income
Education level
Education specifics (schools, majors, awards, etc.)
Employment History (companies, jobs, awards, etc.)
Marital status
Kids and other family info
Ethnicity
Political affiliations
Other demographic 1:
Other demographic 2:
Other demographic 3:
Other demographic 4:
Psychographics:
Why do they do this job or live the life they do?
Hobbies
Heroes
Aspirations in life
Fears in life
Personality traits
Interesting habits
Other psychographic 1:
Other psychographic 2:
Other psychographic 3:
Other psychographic 4:
Proxy Products (which products have the highest correlation with your Persona)
Is there a product or products that the Persona needs to have in order to get benefit from yours?
Are there products the Persona uses that embody the psychographics and demographics from the end user profile?
Any other unusual or interesting products of note that the Persona has?
Watering Holes (real or virtual places where the Persona interacts with others like him or her):
Favorite sources for news (e.g., which newspapers, TV shows, websites, blogs)
Places where Persona congregates with other similar people
Associations Persona belongs to and the importance of each
Where does the Persona go for expert advice and/or to get questions answered?
Day in the Life (describe a day in the life of the end user and what is going on in this person’s head):
What are the typical tasks the Persona does each day, with the amount of time associated with each?
Which of these typical tasks are habits?
Which require the most effort?
Which does the Persona enjoy?
Which does the Persona not enjoy?
What makes it a good day for the Persona?
What makes it a bad day?
Who is the Persona trying to please the most?
What is the top priority of the person/people the Persona is trying to please?
Priorities:
Priorities (what are your Persona’s priorities—focus first on biggest fears, then biggest motivations—and assign a weighting to each so that it adds up to 100) 1. _________________ Weighting:__________
2. _________________ Weighting:__________
3. _________________ Weighting:__________
4. _________________ Weighting:__________
5. _________________ Weighting:__________
Now, revisit the General Information worksheet and update as needed, especially for items 3, 4, 6, and 7.
Note: These worksheets are meant to guide you but not constrain you. The Persona should paint a rich picture and convey important information about your target market, so feel free to customize this worksheet as appropriate.
ADVANCED TOPIC: PERSONA PROFILES FOR MULTISIDED END USER MARKET
How do you build a Persona profile when you have multiple types of end users for your startup, such as with the increasingly common platforms being built today? The fundamental concept is the same, designating one Persona for each type of end user, but the Persona profiles must be coordinated and consistent with each other.
Awa Kone, Jeronimo van Schendel, Lisa Tacoronte, and Benedita Sampaio e Mello took my class at MIT and worked on a project to create a platform, dubbed “BuildLine,” to help designers, contractors, and suppliers to better collaborate when turning ideas into tangible products by making relevant peer connections and facilitating the project management process.
While the team had some significant domain expertise in this field, they chose wisely to make the Personas people other than themselves. You will see excellent Personas for all three sides of the proposed new venture (but not perfect, as they never are, especially for a one-semester course where so much has to be covered).
You’ll notice how they handled and coordinated all three sides of the end user market. I really like the detail summarized in one slide for each Persona, so you get a rich understanding of each Persona and can quickly determine what is most important to each, which is highly beneficial when you have to make decisions keeping three Personas in mind instead of just one.
I would have liked to see more on product proxies and watering holes, and at times I felt like their profiles veered more toward advocacy for the product as opposed to focusing solely on understanding who the Personas are, but all in all, they did a tremendous job!
First, an overview of the players in BuildLine:
Then, the three Personas for BuildLine:
Notes
1 For more on the power of the narrative, see Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath and Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement by Marshall Ganz.
STEP 6
Full Life Cycle Use Case
WHAT IS STEP 6, FULL LIFE CYCLE USE CASE?
Understand and describe the full context of how your product will fit into your Persona’s workflow. This is the customer’s perspective.
WHY DO WE DO THIS STEP, AND WHY DO WE DO IT NOW?
The Full Life Cycle Use Case provides valuable information for future steps and also helps the team understand potential barriers to
adoption from a sales perspective. Now that you have the Persona, you can do a lot of the primary market research required to complete this step, but your output will still be just a first draft because you won’t have enough information to define this step completely.
By the Book: See pages 83–86 of Disciplined Entrepreneurship for basic knowledge on this step.
See pages 86–90 of Disciplined Entrepreneurship for examples of how different companies and teams have addressed this step.
Without understanding the Full Life Cycle Use Case, your product will have no context and generate little to no value.
PROCESS GUIDE
Observe not just what you are doing in this step, but what you are not doing. Now that you have a Persona, shouldn’t you simply ask what that person thinks about your product idea? No! You do not have nearly enough information to start advocating for the customer to buy your product.
How about starting to design your product? That time is coming. In the next step, you’ll start outlining the specifics of your product, but first, you need to focus on the overall context your product will fit into. High-quality products often fail because too much time is focused on the technology or the features, and too little time on how the end users would integrate the new product into how they currently go about their lives. You’ll explore the latter in the Full Life Cycle Use Case.
As with all of these steps, your goal is to spend enough time, effort, and thought to get a useful first draft, but you will continually update this information as you move to future steps, especially Step 13, Map the Process to Acquire a Paying Customer. You also want to keep using primary market research to fill out this information, rather than guessing or extrapolating based on existing research or intuition. With a grounding in primary market research, you’ll end up with a valuable set of information that will prove a competitive advantage—don’t give away this information!
To map out the Full Life Cycle Use Case, first use the Sketch of How the End User Currently Solves the Problem (or Doesn’t) worksheet to sketch out a visual diagram or flowchart showing how customers currently attempt to solve their pain, or what processes result in their customer pain. Without understanding customers’ current workflow, you will have a hard time getting your new product in their hands, because people don’t like to change how they go about things, especially if they are satisfied with their current workflow.
Next, you will use the Full Life Cycle Use Case worksheet to map out everything related to the end user’s discovery, acquisition, and use of your product. Here is an overview of the 10 stages of the Full Life Cycle Use Case, updated from the original definition in Disciplined Entrepreneurship.
For each stage in the cycle, explain who will be involved in that step, when and where the step occurs, and how it happens, as well as other detail that seems relevant. Entries in the worksheet will have dramatically different complexity. For business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, the entries maybe very simple, even trivial, but for business-to-business (B2B), the answers will likely be much more complex in certain areas.
How the end user actually uses your product will likely be the most complex part to describe. Give some brief bullet points on this worksheet, and then use the Sketch of How End User Will Use Your Product worksheet to provide a visual overview with diagrams, flowcharts, and pictures.
The result of this step will be a body of information about the end user’s interaction with the product so that your team is on the same page before starting to design the product itself. If the team is not in alignment on the workflow sketched out here, individual team members will pull the product in different directions, reducing the clarity you’ll have around whether your product is effective at solving the end user’s customer pain.
GENERAL EXERCISES TO UNDERSTAND CONCEPT
See the back of the book for answers to some of these questions.
As of June 2016, Android users were able to choose between 2.2 million apps, and Apple’s App Store had 2 million available apps. Yet very few of them have been successful. Why do most mobile phone apps fail to become economically interesting or viable? (Circle one)
They don’t have the right functionality.
People don’t know about the app.
Take two products that you use a lot, one in your personal life and one in your business life. In less than one hour, using intuition and secondary sources if needed, try to map the Full Life Cycle Use Case for each product using a copy of the Full Life Cycle Use Case worksheet.
WORKSHEETS
Sketch of How the End User Currently Solves The Problem (or Doesn’t)
Full Life Cycle Use Case Worksheet
Stage # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Action How do they determine need, and what is their catalyst to take action? How do they find out about their options? How do they analyze their options? How do they acquire your product? How do they pay for your product? How do they install or set up your product? How do they use and get value out of your product? How do they determine the value they gain from your product? How do they buy more of your product? How do they tell others about your product?
Who is involved
When
Where
How
Misc.
Sketch of How the End User Will Use Your Product
Reflection on Full Life Cycle Use Case
Looking at these worksheets now, where do you see the gaps in your understanding?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
How do you intend to fill those knowledge gaps?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Which stages of the Full Life Cycle Use Case are you most concerned about as posing risks to the adoption of your new solution?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
You have completed your first draft of the Full Life Cycle Use Case! You are probably at least a bit uncomfortable with some aspects of it, and that’s understandable; plan to circle back to it as you complete additional steps and gain more understanding. But let’s keep moving forward and start to define what your product would be within this overall context.
STEP 7
High-Level Product Specification
WHAT IS STEP 7, HIGH-LEVEL PRODUCT SPECIFICATION?
Create a visual description of the product and make a simple draft of a brochure.
WHY DO WE DO THIS STEP, AND WHY DO WE DO IT NOW?
You need to make sure that all your team has a common agreement on what the product is. You have likely had an idea from the beginning of what your product will be. Now that you know who the customer is and in what context that person will use your product, you can intelligently start the process of defining your product.
By the Book: See pages 91–94 of Disciplined Entrepreneurship for basic knowledge on this step.
See pages 94–101 of Disciplined Entrepreneurship for examples of how different companies and teams have addressed this step.
As you translate your idea into a product spec, you’ll find out whether your team is on the same page!
PROCESS GUIDE
“Finally,” you say, “now we can start to talk about the product!” Yes, now is the time. Why did I wait so long? Simple: I wanted you to stay open minded. It was important that you be in full “inquiry mode” and not be in
“advocacy mode.”1 Staying in inquiry mode significantly increases the odds that you will design a product your target customer loves and gets optimal value from.
In this step, you will build a High-Level Product Specification and ultimately a first draft brochure (which can be physical and/or digital, but the concept and content is essentially the same). This achieves the following important objectives:
