Developing Customer Personas

🧑🏼 How To Design Better Personas In UX (https://lnkd.in/eGPXmPNZ), a step-by-step guide to reduce decoration and add meaningful data to make personas more helpful and effective. Neatly put together by Slava Shestopalov. ✅ We need to know who users are and what they need to do. ✅ We can use both personas and Jobs-to-Be-Done for that. 🤔 They serve different purposes and focus on different things. ✅ Jobs-to-Be-Done focuses on user needs and outcomes. ✅ Personas focus on users, their behavior and mental model. ✅ Useful personas emerge from profound user research. ✅ They help visualize users, their goals and motivation. 🚫 Don’t focus on demographics to avoid stereotypes. ✅ Include the way of thinking, background, “a day in life”. ✅ Always add at least one persona with a disability. ✅ Add a story, pain points and how they use your product. ✅ List user’s habits/products they use daily, often and rarely. ✅ Finally, add needs, wants and fears mentioned by users. ✅ Then, prioritize key points for each role in your team. We often speak about personas being an outdated tool, successfully replaced by Jobs-to-Be-Done. Yet often in practice they are compatible. Both move the focus to user needs, yet they shed light onto user from different perspectives. Knowing how users think, behave and feel is as important as what they do. As Page Laubheimer noted, personas help remove box-checking mentality. They tell a story of the customer, what their environment is, what their habits are, the tools they use daily — and give product teams a way to think about users in a much more approachable and tangible way. Ultimately, use what works for you and for your team: just make sure that the user details aren’t invented, and root in actual research with actual customers. Useful resources: Personas vs. Jobs-to-Be-Done, by Page Laubheimer https://lnkd.in/eHA2Ft4J A Guide To Building Personas For UX, by Maze https://lnkd.in/ehCzACZW Personas for UX, Product, and Design Teams, by UserInterviews https://lnkd.in/eeE3pVUK A Simple Guide To Personas, by Rikke Friis Dam, Yu Siang Teo https://lnkd.in/eRA52v5m Five-Steps Framework for Building Better Personas, by Nikki Anderson, MA https://lnkd.in/eGWpqkdz Fixing User Personas, by Jordan Bowman https://lnkd.in/eDPCr63Q Personas Make Users Memorable, by Aurora Harley https://lnkd.in/eh-PYMxc A Closer Look At Personas (A Series), by Mo Goltz https://lnkd.in/eGqbr9wy https://lnkd.in/eBDsSsaR #ux #design #research

Do you know how to correctly set user personas for your product? What are user personas? Should both Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne land in the same user bucket? Well... It depends! A user persona is a made-up person representing a group of users in your product. It’s explicitly designed to help product teams understand their end users deeply by digging into their problems, goals, needs, pain points, behaviors, and preferences. The common misconception is that user personas are based on demographic data. While for some products this may be the right choice, this will usually be wrong and misguided. The user persona concept is not really about representing real people but representing a pattern of behavior. So, to correctly identify your user persona, you should not start with a name and a fake bio. Not at all! Instead, you need to dig deep into your product's analytics data and identify groups of users that interact with the Product in a similar manner. Thus, for example, for Spotify, you could identify the following groups: • Casual, free users • Paid users • Creators    Of course, you can go deeper and look for more granular personas within those main groups, but that's a story for another day. To the point, definitely, King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne would not fall into the same persona bucket. The King is most likely a Paid user, while Ozzy is a Creator. I can however imagine a Product, say about a medicine tracking app, where both Ozzy and Charles would fall under the same, "elderly, who need help to track their medicine intake" group, though they are very different people when you get to know them. And this is ok, again, user personas are about identifying patterns of behavior, not about any specific user, fictional or otherwise. Giving those patterns names and backstories has only one goal: To help you better communicate, to connect emotions and context to any problems the problem is built to fix :) Just like it helped to build this post! Just to add: knowing your demographics will help you build the right product, but it's not the same as crafting user personas. It will help you craft an imaginary user to closely match your typical user :) Do you agree with me? What are the product personas in your favorite product? Sound off in the comments! P.S. User personas are only a single tool in a Product Manager's toolbox. To learn more about other tools and how to become a Great product manager, visit www . drbartpm . com.

We've all seen the meme: Two men. Same demographics. Worlds apart. One's the King of England. The other bit the head off a bat. Yet most marketing personas would put them in the same bucket: "Affluent British Male, 75+, High Net Worth, Property Owner." This is why demographic-based personas are broken. They tell you WHAT people are. Not WHY they struggle. Not HOW they decide. Not WHEN they need you. Real personas should be built on: → The tensions people navigate → The problems that keep them up at night → The outcomes they're desperately seeking → The barriers standing in their way The below reMarkable Hand-Drawn #AdvertiZine explores why you should: Stop segmenting by age brackets and income levels, and start segmenting by actual human experiences. Your customers aren't data points. They're people with problems. #advertisinghistorytoday

How do you attract clients? Surely not by alienating customers, right? But that’s the approach of the PAM Advertising agency. In fact, they have a list of 29 criteria on their homepage for who shouldn't seek their services. Counterintuitive? Maybe, but often the best approaches are. The idea that saying who you’re not for can be more appealing than saying who you're for is called negative framing. It's backed up by a 2025 study by Karen Anne Wallach from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She recruited people who liked dark coffee and showed them a review of a new dark roast, Folgers Noir. The reviews were identical, except they randomly included one of the following messages: “This is the coffee for you if you like dark roast coffee!” (positive framing)  “This is NOT the coffee for you if you don’t like dark roast coffee!” (negative framing) Afterwards, everyone was told that they’d be entered into a prize draw and asked what they'd like to win: $1 in cash or a $10 gift card for Folgers Noir. In the positive framing group, 27% chose the gift card. However, in the negative framing group, 40% picked it - a 48% uplift. Negative framing made the same coffee more desirable. That's because we know that a product can't be all things to all people. So telling the target audience who the offering is not for makes them more likely to believe that it will fit their needs. So by ruling some prospects out, PAM Advertising makes their target clients feel like the agency will be a better fit than competitors who try to be everything to everyone. But as Wallach's study shows, negative framing can be used in different contexts. What about your business - can you be clearer about who it's not for? If you're interested in learning more behavioural science, sign up to my newsletter, AstroHacks. Each fortnight I look at one bias and explain how you can apply it to business or marketing challenges. Link in the comments ☕

Growth Unlocked 🎉: From PMF to Scale - Mastering the journey from $1m->$10m [Part 2]✨ ✨ ✨: Ideal Customer Profile: Why you can’t be everything to everyone. In the beginning stages of selling, it’s normal to want to go as broad as possible and dream of signing a Fortune 500 logo whilst also winning SMEs through a PLG motion. The challenge with this approach is that it's slow and it becomes expensive quickly. It’s rare for the same product and set of features to serve a disparate group of buyers. Focus is critical in an early stage startup and your team needs to know who they should be prioritizing. This applies equally to a product manager thinking about feature trade-offs, a marketer writing content or a sales person deciding who to reach out to. The solution to this is having an ICP - an ideal customer profile. ICP means the segment of customers whom you’ve identified have the biggest need for your solution. Has biggest need = will derive the most value, has the highest propensity to pay, and (should be) the easiest and quickest to close consistently. It’s simple how to define an ICP - set certain parameters into which your buyer should fall, eg. company size/sector/geo, technologies used/communities they’re a part of etc. Don’t be worried to make your ICP as narrow as possible at the start. As you build more features and open up the applicability of your product, you can loosen the criteria. Your ICP will not stay static. The persona, and the parameters which define your ICP, will evolve. Persona is the target buyer within your ICP. For most products, target persona will mean a few individuals (best if these personas are within the same function/department, it’s much harder if across function). When thinking about who, consider: 1. Are they primarily the user or the buyer? 2. If user, are they senior enough / have enough authority internally to get budget for the purchase? 3. If buyer, are they close enough to the problem to understand the need. Do they have enough bandwidth to engage? Who the target buyer is will determine your go-to-market motion as you’ll have to figure out the most cost effective way to reach them. If you’re finding success targeting users who have small budget, you’d likely start with a marketing led/PLG motion (low $ acquisition). If you’re targeting more senior individuals (VPs, Heads, C-level), then you can afford a combination of marketing and sales (high $$$ acquisition). With your ICP & target buyer set, your team can create buyer/seller journeys. At $1M ARR, you can experiment and refine as you learn what messaging/motion lands. The deals you lose can be even more informative than the deals you win. If you’ve found the right buyer with the highest pain point, you should see very good conversion through your sales funnel (which we’ll come onto in the next post). If you’re finding friction with your supposed target demographic early on, it probably means something needs changing. 

Breaking into new personas in 2025? Here's how to leverage AI to build persona-based messaging. ⛔️ Mistake: Don't wing it with new personas. Don't set up your reps for failure. ✅ Step 1: Gather great data Persona creation is garbage in / garbage out. Feed AI with solid info: - Transcripts of sales calls - Competitor content - Key influencers to follow - Transcripts of customer calls ✅ Step 2: Feed into AI I like ChatGPT. But this can work with the others. Leverage this prompt: Take the attached [sales call transcripts, case studies, etc] and turn this into an Outbound Squad Messaging Matrix. The messaging should be written using the customer’s voice. This messaging matrix should be formatted into a table with these four columns: 1) Priorities Format this into a statement like this: [headline]. [outcome] + [avoid problem]. - Headline: What is top of mind for your prospect’s peers? Imagine you have a dozen of your prospects gathered in a room. All working at similar companies in the same role. What is top of mind for that entire group right now? What trends are they worried about or focused on? What do they want your help with? - Outcome: What outcomes do they want? What are the specific outcomes, metrics, or KPIs they want to improve? - Avoid problem: What problem do they want to avoid? What problem are they hoping to address or solve? Here's an example: Skill gaps & staffing. Find and attract the right talent to accomplish our IT business goals—while avoiding unnecessary costs and project delays. 2) Current solutions Now think about how the prospect is getting the job done. People: Are they hiring, reducing headcount, etc? Process: Are they implementing a specific process? Technology: Are they using technology? A competitor? 3) Problems Problems are what get in the way of priorities. This is what your prospect hopes their current solution will help with. This sounds like: “Manually processing payroll is labor intensive and frustrating for me.” But get to the impact on the business. This sounds like: “Our team is manually processing payroll across multiple systems. We need to hire extra employees just to handle the manual work, and we can’t hire as quickly as we need to. We won’t hit our hiring targets this year.” Help me define the problem in the customer's voice. 4) Aspirations This is your prospect’s desired future state. These should be similar to the outcomes your solution provides to your customers. ~~~ This is for: [company name] who sells [solution] to [persona]. Example clients of theirs are [insert examples] ✅ Step 3: Validate findings with real buyers NEVER rely on AI alone. - Take this to similar personas at your org - Take it to board members - Hire industry-expert consultants - Validate with customers ~~~ Leverage this approach to quickly build persona-based messaging to help your outbound/selling efforts. Was this helpful? Tag someone on your team who could benefit from this.

How do I find people who actually want what I offer? This is one of the most common questions I hear from early-stage founders. So here’s a simple breakdown to help you find prospects  that match your Ideal Customer Persona （ICP）: 🔹 1. Define them clearly , beyond demographics. Don’t just stop at “female, 30-40, entrepreneur.” Go deeper: – What problems are they googling at 2 AM? – What platforms do they hang out on? – What triggers them to finally take action? 🔹 2. Hang out where they hang out. Are they venting in Facebook Groups? Liking competitor posts on LinkedIn? Asking questions on Reddit or Quora? Your prospects are already talking—you just have to listen. 🔹 3. Look at your first 5 best users. If you already have a few happy users or clients, reverse-engineer them. – Where did they come from? – What did they ask before signing up? – Why did they choose you over others? 🔹 4. Use filters + intent tools. Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, or even X （Twitter） search can help you find people actively talking about your space. Search for signals like: “looking for ［solution］” or “struggling with ［problem］” 🔹 5. Talk more. Pitch less. Start conversations. Ask what they’re struggling with. Share insights. Build trust before the ask. Because the best prospects aren’t bought—they’re resonated with. Remember: You don’t need everyone. You just need the right ones, and to show up where they already are. If you’re a founder trying to attract your dream customers online, let’s connect—happy to share what’s worked for me and my clients. #EarlyStageStartup #CustomerPersona #SocialSelling #StartupMarketing 

Five years ago, Warburg Pincus LLC invested in BetterCloud and urged us to work on a project to narrow our ideal customer profile (ICP). It's the most impactful thing I've ever done to improve conversion rates, shorten sales cycles, increase deal size and ultimately transform the company. A big mistake many CEOs make is believing their product is for everyone. It’s tempting. More potential customers should mean more sales, right? But in reality, chasing too broad a market drains resources, distracts your team, muddles messaging, confuses your product roadmap, and kills go-to-market efficiency. Being laser-focused on your ICP drives alignment across product, messaging, and the go-to-market motion. When the right prospect engages, they’ll feel like you built it just for them. Anyone who has built a product or service knows that the things a small business needs are very different than what a huge enterprise needs. A company is different from a school. An IT buyer is different from a security buyer, a sales buyer is different from a marketing buyer, a director level decision maker is different than a C level decision maker… but we still believe we can sell to different segments and personas as the same time. The process to define and use your ICP is relatively straightforward but does take time. The larger your business, the more data you have, the more resources you have to crunch that data the more time you should spend to do it as scientifically as possible. The high level steps are: 1. Build a Customer Dataset: Gather all your customer data. Current and churned customers, won and lost opportunities. Enrich it with firmographic, business-specific, and buyer demographic data. 2. Engage Your Team: Your best sales and customer success people hold invaluable insights about your most successful (and worst) customers. 3. Analyze & Identify Pockets of Gold: Identify common attributes of high-performing accounts and avoid the traps of poor-fit customers. 4. Communicate the ICP to the entire company with the “why” behind the attributes that make up an ideal customer.  5. Rework your messaging to appeal to your newly defined ICP and narrow your growth initiatives to be focused only on the accounts that matter.  6. Assign the right ICP accounts to your reps and ensure they’re focused on the right buyer personas. 7. Product Development: Reassess your roadmap to align with the needs of your ICP. You should see impact fast. GTM funnel metrics will improve. Conversion rates should rise, with better leads turning into stronger opportunities. You may not get more leads, but their quality will increase. I’ve been discussing this with many Not Another CEO Podcast guests, so don’t just take my word for it. I wrote a deep dive on how to “Narrow Your ICP and Transform your Company”, with real examples from other companies. You can read the full article here https://lnkd.in/e5EN3XSR

Every good narrative needs a villain. That’s the lesson Dave Gerhardt drilled into me (& how it unlocked a major shift in how we’re positioning Warmly.) We explored three candidates for our villain: 1. The Competitor Villain: 6sense Tempting, but ultimately too limiting. This frames the story as us vs. them. But the real tension / problem is bigger than any one company. 2. The Silly Villain: Minimus Bluewald My alter ego, CEO of Coldly, selling “generic cadences and soulless spreadsheets.”.... It works as a metaphor. But it lacks the gravity we need to lead a serious shift in how GTM teams operate. 3. The Category Villain: Account Based Marketing (ABM) Dave's choice ✅ ABM was built for a time when targeting accounts felt innovative. But the landscape has changed. The problems? ABM treats “accounts” as if they buy things. People do. It’s slow to react to real-time signals. It forces sales to chase titles, not actual intent. And it creates friction between marketing and sales over what’s “working.” So we chose our villain: ABM. And we’re replacing it with something better: Person-Based Marketing. Instead of marketing to companies, PBM tracks real people: across web, social, job changes, and research behavior (and activates only when those signals matter). It blends the best of inbound and outbound, aligns teams on one pipeline goal, and lets AI agents do the grunt work. The result? Faster deals. Higher conversion. Less finger-pointing. More signal, less noise. This shift is our north star. If your marketing feels stuck… maybe you’re fighting the wrong villain. Warmly, Max PS. I’m on a quest to tell my story as a founder. Follow along as I build my founder brand. PPS. To unlock our next chapter (Series B), we need to scale from $5M to $10M ARR so we can continue to help GTM teams build pipeline. With Warmly, marketers know exactly who to target and sales rep only work the hottest leads. #FounderQuest

Knowing your customer base is essential for crafting strategies that drive growth. A practical way to approach this is through the Market Metric Lens, which segments customers based on company size, types of integrations, and/or onboarding needs. These insights let you craft strategies that meet the unique demands of each segment, helping you stay ahead and keep customers satisfied. Here’s a look at three key areas to consider: 1. Company Size: Cubs, Bears, and Elephants Segmenting by company size allows you to tailor your approach to each type. Cubs are small companies with growth potential. They may one day turn into Bears, which are mid-sized and often a core source of revenue. Elephants, the large enterprises, may be fewer in number but bring significant value. By understanding these groups, you can allocate resources wisely, nurturing Cubs to grow, supporting Bears to keep revenue steady, and managing Elephants to maximize their value. 2. Types of Integrations: Standard vs. Custom Integrations play a critical role in customer satisfaction. Bears often rely on standard integrations that meet common needs and are cost-effective. Elephants frequently require custom integrations tailored to their specific systems. Custom work can be resource-intensive, but recognizing the gap between standard and custom needs allows you to develop scalable solutions. This way, you can serve Bears more broadly and manage Elephants effectively. 3. Onboarding Styles: Normal vs. Bursty Onboarding can make or break a customer’s experience. For example, let’s take compare a company with steady (normal) vs fluctuating (bursty) user volumes. “Bursty” customers face bulk onboarding and removal challenges, which often lead to higher support costs. On the other hand, “Normal” customers have more consistent user bases, making onboarding smoother. By refining the onboarding experience for Bursty customers, you can reduce support costs and improve satisfaction, leading to better retention. In short, the Market Metric Lens provides a structured way to understand and serve your customer segments. By focusing on company size, integration needs, and onboarding preferences, you can make targeted decisions that improve resource allocation, customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, drive growth. How do you approach segmenting your customers for better results? Share your ideas in the comments! #productinstitute #metrics #customersegmentation #marketstrategy #customerexperience #productmanagement