The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your Customer Persona (+Template)
By Nelly Yusupova and Joyce Chen
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‘We need customer personas so that we can deeply understand our customers, so that we can serve them better.” -Nelly Yusupova
The core of product development lies in creating a product that customers will want to use because it solves a real problem in their lives. In order to do that, you’ll need to understand your customers, including what their life looks like and what their problems are. Customer personas are a way to document customer research.
A customer persona is a representation of your target customer, consisting of key demographic and psychographic characteristics. As you create your customer persona, you’ll be able to step into the shoes of your customer and get a better sense of how to create a product that they’ll want immediately because it makes their lives easier.
To help you understand how to create a customer persona that maximizes your chances of achieving product-market fit, we spoke to one of our Passport mentors, Nelly Yusupova. Nelly is a CTO, startup tech advisor, and founder of TechSpeak.io, bringing years of experience in tech product development.
Introduction to Customer Personas
In the video below, Nelly walks through:
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what a customer persona is
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when to create one
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how to narrow down your potential customers
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what information should go into your persona
According to Nelly, you want to include any personal information about your customer in the persona, even if it’s not directly related to how they consume your product. Not everything will play a major role in your actual product development, but you may be surprised at how some small details about your customer can help drive major features for your product.
Customer Persona Template
As a starting point for creating your customer persona, we’ve developed a customer persona template. This tool will help you hone in on your customer persona, and can be adapted for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) models. Sign up for a free Passport account to access the template and view the full resource on how to create your customer persona.
Ready to build your customer persona? Access our template and the entire library of product development best practices with a free Passport account.
