Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

by Roman Pichler

Personas are fictional characters that usually consist of a name and a picture; relevant characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes; and a goal. The goal is the benefit the persona wants to achieve, or the problem the character wants to see solved. Different personas can have different goals. For instance, I could create a persona for my healthy-eating app who wants to lose weight, and another persona who wants to experience fewer digestive problems. Understanding the personas’ goals allows you to create a product that does a great job at creating value for the customers and users. It avoids the fallacy of a solution-centric approach: worrying more about the product and its features and technologies than the reason people would want to buy and use it in the first place.