What Are User Personas?

Reviewed By: Bernie Maloney

In some ways, the value of any product is in the eyes of the beholder: the person who buys or uses it decides its value. So how can the people who create products and services understand what their users or customers need?

While not formally a part of scrum, user, buyer, or customer personas are a tool that certain scrum teams utilize to empathize with actual customer pain points, needs, and problems. Having this empathy is what helps us build better solutions to those problems.

Not only that, but the persona describes specific (albeit pretend) people, which means you won’t be trying to create a product for every possible type of person, but a specific type of person, ultimately making it more valuable to that type of end user.

What Is a User Persona?

Traditionally, a user persona is a representation of a fictional user that helps product designers make products that will be valuable to actual users, but personas can be used across professions and industries to align the work you do with delighting your customers.

The persona is made up of details that help you understand and empathize with what the person needs from the product, service, or experience you are creating for them.

Some scrum teams choose to use these personas. As a scrum team, your personas can assist you as you work to maximize the value you deliver in sprints. Product owners and developers alike may find their work supported by personas.

How Can Fictional Personas Help a Scrum Team?

Fictional personas help the developers on the scrum team view what they're creating from the standpoint of buyers and users. This helps them ensure that each increment delivers value for the people who will buy or use it. 

User personas can make it easier for developers to carry out their work from a user-centered perspective. User personas can intersect with user stories — another optional tool some scrum teams deploy. A particular user persona might spawn several user stories built around particular interactions that the user might have with a platform, device, or product. However, a team might employ user stories without user personas and vice versa. 

How User Personas Facilitate Decision-Making

User personas can make some decisions about products much easier. Imagine you're a wedding planner organizing a wedding for a couple. You'll be recommending either an outdoor, casual-leaning reception with food trucks and a photo booth, or an indoor reception in a large, fancy venue complete with white tablecloths, fine dishware and glasses, and a four-course dinner.

Your reception recommendation will depend on who your "user" (or in this case, the couple getting married) is. You'll make a certain decision for these two personas:

• Riley, 30 years old, Vice President of Finance at a banking firm, identifies photos of indoor dining and classic apparel as things they admire in a wedding
• Cindy, 28 years old, Senior Software Engineer at a technology startup, enjoyed their friend's outdoor wedding that had more of a summer camp vibe than a traditional wedding vibe

While a persona can't tell you everything your actual customer or user wants and needs, personas provide guardrails to steer the process of providing an experience, product, or service that delights the end user.

User Personas Help Teams Avoid Bias

All individuals have biases, but many scrum teams strive to avoid biases that will reduce the value of what they're creating. Let's look back at the wedding planner example above. The wedding planner may have several biases that make them want to choose an outdoor wedding: they know the wedding will be in early September in Bozeman, Montana, and they personally love the outdoors in Montana that time of year. Looking at the product through user personas can support the planner as they make decisions aimed at bringing joy and delight to the wedding couple and their guests. 

User personas give a method for teams to put aside personal bias and look at the product from the perspective of the user or buyer. The process of creating and inspecting user personas gives the team an opportunity to inspect their own biases. 

Examples of User Personas

A very simple example of a user persona for a video game might look like this:

On the other hand, a more complicated user persona for a puzzle game might look like:

There are many user persona templates available. You can pick one or create your own that includes the information necessary for your team. 

How to Create User Personas

Since personas aren’t part of the scrum framework, there’s room to experiment with the best way to create them on your scrum team.

Many people think that because the product owner is most focused on the customer, they should be the ones creating the user persona. However, as with many activities in scrum, creating user personas is best done as a collaborative activity. The product owner could take a central, guiding role in the creation of user personas, but personas work best when everyone contributes.

Here are a couple of ways to get started:

• Segment your audience by region, age, relationship status, and other demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral characteristics
• Collect all the relevant data you can about a particular segment, such as customer interviews, customer support requests, market research, etc.
• Then take what you've learned about the segment to create a user persona 
• Experiment with the persona and adapt as needed to increase empathy with your customer's problems and goals

By taking this deep dive into segments of your customer base, you'll be educating yourself about the problems they are facing, what they are trying to solve, and their common pain points. It's crucial to empathize with their pain points because you are, after all, creating a solution that should help them solve those problems.

Once you've created working or preliminary personas, it's a good idea to put them to the test. Personas can be validated several ways, including:

• Customer interviews
• Customer surveys
• A/B testing various personas
• Analyzing website statistics showing user regions, demographics, and actions taken on the website

Preliminary personas are a good way to get up and running quickly, providing the scrum team with a working idea of their customers so they can think about this audience as they carry out their work. Validation is a great way to test assumptions and fine-tune the personas with evidence.

What Should a User Persona Include?

A user persona should include enough information about users to allow you to understand the goals and needs they have for your product. However, a user persona shouldn't include too much distracting information. 

In general, it's best to start simple: a name, a picture (to help make the persona feel real), some basic information on who they are, and one or two goals they have in using your product. You can always add more information later. 

Personas Are an Optional Tool for Your Toolbox

Although not part of the scrum framework, user personas are an optional tool used by agile teams to align their work with actual customer pain points, needs, goals, and expectations. The purpose of a user persona is to help a team discover the true value of the product they are making. Fictional personas help us view the product from the standpoint of its buyers and users. User personas can make some decisions about products much easier. Try them out to see if they support you and your colleagues!

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