If you’re at the beginning of the product development process, you’re probably thinking a lot about the types of users that you’ll be targeting with your new product. As a product manager, we’re constantly researching and thinking about the people that use your products. The more specific you can get in the profiling of these customers, the more you can tailor what you’re building to solve their problems and meet their needs.
But how do you begin to do that? You probably have a mix of quantitative and qualitative data from your research, but how do you begin to synthesize that into the image of a real life human that you can then turn into a visual representation of this persona? This How-To video from Miro is super helpful in breaking down the different data elements that go into building an effective user persona: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic. This contains everything you need to gather your information together to start to craft your persona.
As far as the tools to create the actual persona graphic/slide, there are a ton of ways to do this. If you have design experience, you’d probably lean towards something like Adobe Photoshop or Figma, but if you’re not comfortable in those programs, chances are you’d opt for something more basic like PowerPoint. Personally, I’ve been doing a lot more with the Canva platform because I find it to be the quickest, easiest, way to get things done. I realize there are limitations to what you can do (it’s certainly not anywhere near as potent as Photoshop) but for everyday graphics or slides for PMs, I think it’s unbeatable. I can quickly mock up most of what I need with little hassle.
So, I created this user persona Canva template that PMs can use as a starting point for creating their own customer profiles/personas. I had a B2B example in mind when I created this user in mind. If I was a SAAS PM I would be interested in the customer’s consumption habits, pain points, goals, and preferred social media platforms and devices. The template’s completely customizable so that you can make it your own. Have fun creating your own personas!
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