Business Planning › By Example: Create a Persona and a Source

By Example: Create a Persona and a Source

John Wheeler is a Net Worth product manager for Forward, Inc. He is responsible for helping ensure that the release and feature requirements for his product satisfies the needs of his customers.

John receives market research that describes a typical buyer of a new product that he is planning. In addition, John learns from a Forward, Inc. sales representative through an email that a current customer, Miki Wireless Devices, has expressed interest in the planned product and has requested some requirements that would help ensure a new sale to the customer.

To help ensure that the information he has received on his new product is not lost, John completes the following tasks in Product Vision:

• To capture the market research information about the typical buyer, John creates a persona for the buyer and names the persona Charlie Smith. John indicates that the persona is the chief technical officer in a telecom hardware company. To complete the persona, John adds additional information from the market research about product needs, pain points, and buying habits.
• To capture the information from the current customer, John creates a source of type Customer for the company Miki Wireless Devices. Because the company is based in Japan, John selects the Geo Segment Japan. He completes the remaining information for the source, including information about who to contact in the company.

John creates the requirements Miki Wireless Devices has requested in the new product. As he creates the requirements in Product Vision, he selects the source Miki Wireless Devices to link the requirements to the requestor. The new requirements can now be traced back to Miki Wireless Devices as they go through the development cycle.

Because the requirements also fit the needs of the Charlie Smith persona's profile, John associates the requirements with that persona. Because he associated the source and persona, John can quickly look at the requirements and see which markets, customers, and personas value the requirements. This information can be invaluable if changes in the scope of the product require decisions on which requirements are included and which are left out of scope.

More information

About Sources