From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

Build user personas off your interviews

From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

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Build user personas off your interviews

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- What's up, everyone. This is all about building user personas. And you can build them from the interviews that Evan just talked about. First, I want to say this is a bit of a buzzword alert. Because what I'm going to talk about in this lecture is of course user personas and how to make them. But I want you to know that if you go to many companies and become a product manager, they will likely already have a good idea of user personas. And you will likely not be the one making them. If you do have to make them, it's something you will do with the design team. In any case, understanding what a user persona is and what they're used for is really useful to being a product manager. And it's something you need to know. So have you ever heard of the term user persona before. If not, you will when you become a product manager because designers are talking about them all the time. User personas are just aggregates of observed user behavior. So let's say that I'm a product manager at eBay. For those of you that don't know, eBay is an online auction website where you can buy and sell products that people put up for sale. As a product manager at eBay, if we talked or interviewed a whole bunch of users, we would likely find out that there are groups of certain users that behave in similar ways. For instance, there are people who shop once every few months on eBay for a certain type of collectible item. There are also people that come to eBay to look at reviews and prices on certain items but very rarely purchase anything. And then finally, there are probably some heavily engaged users that log in every day to look for a specific item to come available. And they snatch it up really quick and try to resell it. Then on the other side, we have the seller side. So these types of users are sellers on eBay. And there are groups of them as well. So people will sell something once every few months when they need extra cash. And then there's another group of people probably who use eBay all day, every day and make a actual living off of selling items over the internet that they purchased in person. You could imagine that if you were building a product or feature that is targeted at a specific user behavior, it would be really convenient to have a user to refer to as an example, rather than just say, I don't know, this feature is targeted to all people between the ages of 25 and 40 who sell a lot of stuff on eBay every day and make a living off of our site, right? This is where user personas come in. To make a user persona, we interview or observe a large number of users. Then you find a user behavior that is observed frequently, and pretend that it is one fictional user doing that thing. Then you name that fictional user with a real name. You give them a description like how they like to use your product and what matters to them. And then you even give them a bit of background information. You're actually kind of creating a fake person here. The purpose of user personas is to make it more convenient to talk about certain user behaviors that you're building for. But also to increase empathy towards your users. If you're looking at a bunch of metrics on a screen and see a whole bunch of numbers that are describing a certain way that a large user base behaves, it's sometimes hard to keep in mind that these are real people out there in real life doing these things. User personas make behavior and metrics more relatable as a human. All right, so head on over to the next lecture. And we're going to go over what an actual, real-life user persona might look like.

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