PERSONAS

The client/user is the basis of everything. Not just in innovation, but in all business spheres, customer-focused organizations are much more successful. Therefore, our analysis begins by trying to understand who is the target customer of the opportunity.

A productive way to complete this step is to bring together marketing, sales and customer service teams for brainstorming. Each opportunity requires such a meeting. The only exception is when opportunities focus on the same personas.

The step is simple, but extremely important to generate ideas that will be useful throughout the case building process.

To make the meeting as productive as possible, I created a roadmap of what should be discussed between the innovation team and the departments mentioned above. Consider that these points are the minimum the company needs to have information.

Roadmap for meeting with teams:

Persona Title

• who's your target customer? Large company, supermarket, automakers etc?

Persona Description

• what makes the persona fit into this profile, in what situation or in which case it would use its solution.

Persona Objectives

• persona or job/position enterprise objectives.

Persona Challenge

• challenges to "get the job done" in the current process that tasks are currently done.

Responsibilities

• how the performance of the persona is evaluated, how this executive is promoted or what would make his results be considered excellent.

Skills

• what skills the persona needs to perform its function.

Reliable Information Sources

• what is the source of information that the person uses to keep up to date. Consider that this can be a great product outreach strategy in the future.

Influences

• people and companies that influence the persona. Depending on the opportunity, the discussion can generate qualitative insights for marketing and sales.

Knowledge of the Product or the Opportunity

• how much the person understands about alternatives that exist in the market.

Education

• what is the level of education of the persona.

Experience in the Position

• does she have a junior, full or senior level?

These personas should be saved in "Cards" like the one in the model below:

These cards should be enriched with information over time by those involved in the innovation project and will certainly be very useful for several other projects of the company.