Product personas: what they are, why they’re so useful, and how to define them

To build a product strategy that links user needs with organizational goals, you need a rock-solid understanding of who your users are and how your product helps them. 

One time-tested way to stay focused on your ideal users is to develop a product persona—a detailed description of your users, their preferences, and what they wish to accomplish with your product.

Personas help your product team understand who your product is for so you can build features they’ll love.

Here’s a look at personas: how to create them, how to use them, and how they help you understand your users so you can build a more successful product.

What is a product persona?

A product persona is a fictional example of a product user, including their key behaviors, goals, and responsibilities. While a persona is not a real person, it represents the real people who use your product.

In the words of Alan Cooper, author of a leading book for tech industry managers, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity: 

“Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users. Although they are imaginary, they are defined with significant rigor and precision. Actually, we don't so much 'make up' our personas as discover them as a byproduct of the investigation process. We do, however, make up their names and personal details.”

Let’s look at how personas can help you and your product team keep the right focus.

4 reasons product teams should develop personas

Product personas keep you focused on the key behaviors, goals, and responsibilities of the people who use your product. 

Here are 4 ways product personas help you stay focused and build better products:

1. Personas help you avoid designing for the generic user. When you try to build a product that pleases everyone, you end up pleasing no one. You’re much better off designing a product that satisfies one archetypal user’s needs in particular. 

2. Personas help you create understanding and empathy with the people who use your product. Even though personas are fictional, they represent the needs and expectations of real people—meaning they help you see things from your users’ perspectives. This means you’re more likely to create a product that satisfies their needs. 

3. Personas help the product team discover solutions. Personas help your product team synthesize the ideas of several users into the best solution for a given situation rather than becoming order-takers.

4. Personas help you ensure you’re not building for yourself. Personas help you separate yourself from the issue. It’s no longer “I think people will want to use the product for this purpose because I would.” Now you can reason, “Based on our research, Paula the Product Manager needs the product to do X.”

What do personas look like?

You need to make personas visible for them to provide value to your product team. There are many different ways to develop a persona, and the best approach depends on your team and product. 

For example, product manager Kent McDonald once worked on a conference submission system, and he shared this persona example from that product:

Whichever template or approach you choose to develop a product persona, some essential things to include are

• A name: giving your persona a name helps your team build empathy with them. It also makes it feel more natural to refer to the persona when discussing their wants and needs.

• A photo: grab a stock photo or create a sketch to illustrate your persona, and make them feel more relatable

• Characteristics that impact their use of your product: identify any behavioral information relevant to how they would use your product. For example: do they have accessibility needs? Do they only use your product on mobile? How familiar are they with technology in general?  

• Goals, motivations, and pain points: what is the user trying to accomplish with your product, why do they want to achieve those things, and what obstacles get in their way? 

You may track additional pieces of information about your personas, like interests, values, or a daily routine. Whichever details and information you include, the goal is to help you build empathy with your users and make meaningful product decisions.

5 tips for building product personas

When you take an intentional approach to building personas, you’ll learn a great deal about your users that helps you build a product they'll love. 

The key is to back up persona creation with focused user research. Without this, you’ll end up creating personas based on your perception of your user’s goals and behaviors rather than what they are. Here are 5 tips you can use to build a data-informed product persona. 

1. Collect information about your users

Good personas are based on the stories of actual users, so a foundational step is to collect information. 

Interviews are a great way to get closer to your users—use a tool like Contentsquare’s Interviews to set up 1:1 calls with relevant participants. Ask them directly how they feel about using your product, what they’re using it to do, and why they chose it over other potential solutions. 

For more spontaneous answers, set up surveys for people actively using your product. Use a tool like Contentsquare Surveys to trigger on-site surveys to appear at crucial moments in your product experience, such as when users engage with important features. Ask about things like what brought them to your product today in particular, and how they’re finding the product experience. 

With Contentsquare, you can not only launch surveys but also invite survey-takers to a follow-up interview

2. Identify behavioral patterns from your research

After you’ve collected information about your users, look for patterns in your research results. The goal here is to group similar people based on similar behaviors to identify potential personas. 

Also look for ways in which behavior differs between users. Those differences in behavior may be clues to who your personas are. 

Some examples of behavior patterns include

• Do they focus on one task at a time, or are they constantly switching from one task to another?

• Do they poke around and try different approaches to figure out how to use your product, immediately search for help, or just stop and stare at it?

• If they are accessing your product from a computer, are they a keyboard, mouse, or trackpad person?

Use heatmaps to provide additional insights and complement the data you already have from your user research. Heatmaps show you where users, in aggregate, click, move, and scroll on your site and help you understand the most and least popular areas of a page.

🔥 Pro tip: using Contentsquare’s Heatmaps? Check out the powerful filtering options. 

If you’ve spotted a behavior pattern or attribute that might help you identify a persona, use filters to view a heatmap specifically from people who exhibited that characteristic. You can, for example, segment by returning users or users with a particular device.

Contentsquare gives you several options to customize which data goes into your heatmaps 

3. Identify your primary product persona

Most products satisfy different needs for a variety of different people, so you’re likely to come up with multiple product personas. However, even though your product might be relevant to lots of people, you can’t tailor-make it for all of them. 

Identify the one persona that represents the users you had in mind when you decided to build your product. This is your primary product persona. This doesn’t mean you only have one persona: there will still be secondary personas who use your product—whose use case is slightly less common—that you need to consider. 

A good practice is to make your design decisions with your primary personas in mind and then test those decisions against your secondary personas. 

4. Find key touchpoints during the customer journey

Once you know your primary product persona, plot out the customer journey map for them. 

Note specific touchpoints the persona has on that journey, such as when they first log in to your product, use a new feature, or need help with a particular step. 

If this information isn’t obvious, use a customer journey visualization tool like Contentsquare’s Journeys. Journeys turns your customer journey data into a sunburst-shaped graph that reveals where users first land, where they tend to leave, and the pages they visit along the way. It shows you which touchpoints to focus on when creating your map. 

Use Journey Analysis to understand which pages your users pass through

5. Share your product personas with the product team

Once you’ve created your personas, it’s time to introduce them to your team and organization. 

To effectively introduce your personas, make them as concrete as possible. Ensure your presentation has plenty of visuals and emotive descriptions—you could even mock up a LinkedIn profile for your personas.

You’ll also need to educate your team on why user personas are useful. Personas are primarily a design technique, so not all your stakeholders will have heard of them. Some may find the concept alien—or even a little silly. When you introduce your personas, explain that they’re there to guide prioritization and design decisions for your product.

How to use personas, as a product team 

Here’s how product teams use personas to ensure their product designs delight users. 

Use personas to help you prioritize

The information contained in personas is a valuable resource for product backlog management. When creating your backlog items, identify which persona that backlog item is for. If you can’t link a backlog item to a persona, you might be able to remove that item from your backlog altogether.

Product personas help keep you focused on the groups of people you’re building the product for.

Use personas to guide your design decisions

Personas provide you with insight into the people who will use your product so you can make design decisions that result in products that people find easy to use. 

Personas help you understand the environment in which people use your product, their comfort with technology, and any characteristics they may have that impact their use of your product.

3 challenges to using personas effectively

You run the risk of encountering the following challenges to using personas effectively:

1. Your team creates personas, but you don’t do anything with them

The challenge: you create your product personas, share them with your teams, and then never look at them again. This happens when your team doesn’t know why or how to use personas to guide their priority and design decisions, or when they didn’t support creating personas in the first place. 

A solution: when you introduce your personas to the team, communicate why you have personas and what you’ll use them for. Let them know that when the team discusses whether to build a new tool or feature, they should ask whether the primary persona would need or use it. Also, explain how the behaviors and characteristics described by the personas can help influence your product design and prioritization decisions.

2. You create personas without the appropriate research

The challenge: the personas come about as a result of brainstorming or some general discussions, but without significant data. As a result, the personas represent the cognitive biases of your team members rather than meaningful representations of actual users that can help the team prioritize and design features. 

A solution: establish a clear plan for user research that includes surveys, user interviews, and observations to better understand your users. If you’re creating personas for an existing product, supplement these research activities with information about how users currently use your product.

3. You created personas in a silo

The challenge: you did user research to back up your product personas, but you didn’t involve the product team when you created them. So you have the personas, but everyone only sees the description without all the details that provide meaningful context. Without all that background, you lose buy-in. 

A solution: look for ways to involve the entire product team in user research. If you can't include everyone, involve (at least) a product trio—a product manager, product designer, and tech lead—in user research and creating the personas.

What to do after you’ve created your product personas

Once you create your product personas, refer back to them regularly until your team members view them as real people and refer to them to prioritize brilliantly.

Product personas are a powerful way to understand and empathize with your users. They help you gain a deeper understanding of your users so you can build a product you know they’ll love.

FAQs about product personas