User Research – A Matrix of User Personas
Complex industries have complex personas. Breaking down the bias barriers to embrace the users.
Identifying & defining a problem
After breaking down the bias barriers of mixing outdated “buyer personas” with our software’s actual users we were able to move deeper into understanding who the users were. When working to define reasonable scopes of work, breaking down the problem into manageable pieces is key to forward movement and successful trust building with leadership. I had identified that we had core archetypes of users but before we could define the user personas that lived in each of those spaces we needed to understand the different levels of enterprise operational maturity our customers were and the target customers we wanted to work with.
Leading the research
Working closely with our customer advisory board and our major internal stakeholders I held several workshops to help identify what was expected of the core archetypes and core types of users that would fit in those archetypes. Once again focusing on user actions, not user license types. These workshops were one on one and not recorded to induce a feeling of safety for open feedback.
Results
I was able to identify four types of maturity across all of our customers user base. This included one that the SaaS company was severely underserving. So much so, I was told from various consultants, that we shouldn’t bother with creating those users personas.
These findings led to a shift in the company’s understanding, product direction, and sales tactics.
Supporting documentation
Four Archetypes x Four Maturity levels = 16 new user personas
*Owners here is defined as a person that is responsible for paying for the SaaS product. And X is defined as varied possibly across multiple LOBs
Evangelizing – Reporting out
Presenting these findings to leadership helped shape the cloud product course for the next two years. The company shifted from catering to long term, expert users (Matured) to focusing on the low maturity users. Doing so, helped the company pivot into new sales sources that were currently serviced by consumer software like Miro, Mural, and Lucid. While shift this did ruffle a few feathers internally, it was lauded as a win from our major customers and users alike.
Complicated software requires a flexible understanding of who is using it. A customer may have different types of maturity even within itself. Having a user matrix helps us understand the internal makeup of the enterprise, while also allowing us to cover the vast spread of users we need to account for when designing and navigating through the platform.
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