Topic Teasers Vol. 42: Persona Problems

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We are creating personas for our projects just as we were taught in our agile classes. However, the end products aren’t selling as well as the earlier version. To be honest, people seem to be boycotting them or changing brands. I just don’t understand the disconnect between what we are developing and what the customers appear to want once it is released.

A. Customers are fickle, so it may have nothing to do with the product you have created. If you used the agile team steps as shown on the Agile Alliance website, just keep doing what you are doing.

B.  Perhaps you are working your agile processes in good faith, but creating the wrong personas for whom to design your product. Find a more realistic way to model what the real customer wants.

C. Your product owner is the person who is responsible for setting out the features for new or upgraded products and deciding which ones should be included with any release to the marketplace. Just worry about your team metrics and leave the business decisions to those with more power than you.

D. Personas have proven to be an unsuccessful way to ascertain what customers want. Create databases to capture customer feedback on service calls and set a person to spend full-time scanning social media sites for comments or suggestions about your products. Include each customer suggestion in the next update of that…

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