Personas Are the Heart of a Product Strategy
For whatever reason, talking directly to customers from a product perspective seems to be low on the totem pole of things most companies want to do.
One element of a good strategy should be that it contains a secret that others don't know, can't discern, or cannot execute upon.
If a set of plans can be easily copyable -- and that copying disadvantages you -- then it's not a solid strategy.
Most things, however, can be easily discovered and, as a result, competed away.
Contacts about prospects. Your content or advertising. Your latest features. Those things can be competed away.
In fact, copy-pasta or fast-following is a legitimate strategy for some companies to take.
That being said, how can one discover a strategy which, even in perfect information, can be hard to beat?
Earlier, I had written about how culture can be one of those (Culture and Product Strategy is Truth Seeking and Truth Telling.)
If there's a truth-seeking approach to building a strategy, one source is understanding deeply the ideal set of personas, current and future.
Strategy is not about executing the low-hanging fruit available today. This is an execution play.
Strategy needs to anticipate opportunities in an ambiguous environment.
Without being able to accurately spot trends and tell the future, understanding the deep needs of your customers, your ideal personas, is a way to do this.
Demographics can be a source of opportunity. For macro-investments or initiatives, exploiting large demographic shifts with the right product offering or business model works.
But demographics can be readily learned by others.
So the secrets need to come from really understanding your ideal persona.
Their current needs, their dissatisfaction, their future behavior -- those are a way to start to think about a product strategy.
What are examples of strategies and understanding the persona?
Many people make the mistake of thinking their persona is a demographic, which it is not. While the demographic (age, income, marital status, geography) may give some insight into your persona, it just scratches the surface.
For example, someone who is highly risk-averse will respond differently to someone who is adventurous.
A customer who is status-driven will respond differently from a customer who prioritizes utility.
Titles are often used as a way to talk about a persona. But as you can imagine, while most titles do encapsulate personalities in many cases (for example, a VP of Sales is likely to have a distinct personality from an individual Accountant), being able to understand the persona behind the title is part of crafting a strategy.
But isn't this the same as messaging?
While messaging is, in fact, part of a strategy (not something left as an after thought), the persona work necessary to build a successful strategy needs go to deeper.
Here are some examples:
Snapchat, like many social media apps, started off by targeting college students.
College students are a demographic.
The persona insight that they nailed was based, supposedly, on the founders' insight: guys like them wanted to be able to share pics or texts that didn't leave a smoking gun.
Their core persona may have started with a demographic -- young men in fraternities unabashed about sending d-picks as a way to flirt with women (I don't know if this is totally true).
If this were just an opinion then the business would not have succeeded. This insight ended up going much broader than the initial target demographic, and it captured a broader need for protecting things from living on the internet forever.
How much of this was foresight, accident, or emerging strategy, only the founders really know.
But the point is a strategy emerges when the insight is based on some truth about their core persona. A runaway hit occurs when that insight crosses demographics.
What is the asymmetric bet?
A strategy needs to be Actionable in the face of Ambiguity. But a good strategy needs to produce Asymmetric returns.
One of the reasons for needing a strategy is that it is the best use of limited resources. This means that if the return is 0% -- the amount of time and money spent is exactly returned as a result of the strategy -- the strategy likely wasn't good.
Even in the case where all other options are negative, a 0% return is just a walking dead business, which means that's still the wrong strategy. It could mean there is no strategy available. But no good return still counts as bad.
So an asymmetric bet is part of a strategy.
In a statement, it can turn into something like "if we are right, it means...." and then some case can be built for why the product strategy yields business results bigger than the investment.
Why is truth-seeking culture a necessity?
Because customers may and should say something unexpected (after all, if your initial hypothesis, without any interaction with customers, is right, so will the best guesses of your competitors), the culture needs to be willing to search for and embrace the unexpected.
Are insights based on the persona the only source of a strategy?
No. It's just a place to begin first.
Now, serving those customers may not end up being part of the strategy. It could mean firing a set of those customers to double down on a smaller, emerging set of customers.
This may come from being honest about existing advantages, a true "know thyself" moment for the company.
But without a truth-seeking culture, embracing the potential secrets and unlocks from personas just won't happen.