This article is part of Flip the Lens: the series that changes how you see the concepts you thought you’d already figured out.
Let me get one thing out of the way before people start sending me angry emails.
I don’t hate personas. We need them. If you’re buying media, personas are the currency, because every channel out there is sold to you by attributes. That’s just how the plumbing works, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody.
But when a team hands me a persona at the kickoff of a product project and tells me this is who we’re building for, I already know how the next nine months are going to go.
My problem is a persona is an aggregation. Somebody took a few hundred people, pulled out the attributes they had in common, averaged them, gave the result a first name and a stock photo and a quote in a speech bubble.
Then I’m told I need to see the world through her eyes. But the thing is, when I try to see what she sees, there’s nothing there, because she isn’t a person. She’s a persona of something…. And more obviously, she’s not real.
The false comfort of feeling like you’ve done the work
The reason I say personas are counterproductive rather than just unhelpful is that they feel like empathy.
You’ve got a name, a photo, a day in the life, maybe a little bar chart showing how tech-savvy she is. The team looks at it and feels close to the customer. And the moment you feel close to the customer, you stop asking questions.
That’s the trap we fall into, personas don’t leave a gap you can see. They fill the gap with something that looks right, everyone feels like they’ve done the work, and then everybody moves on to the roadmap.
But there’s a second thing that happens, and it’s worse. Your persona will never surprise you. You built her out of the things you already believed, so she agrees with you every single time you consult her.
The difference is real customers surprise you constantly. That surprise is the entire value of talking to them. When you replace the customer with a construct, you’ve engineered the surprise out of the process.
People aren’t consistent, and that’s the point.
I’ll give you an example.
Say I’m a vegetarian. I plan my meals, I read labels, and I’m involved in what shows up in the fridge. Put that in a persona and you’d have me pegged.
Then I’m on the road for three days and it’s nine at night and the last thing in the case at the airport is a turkey sandwich, so I eat the turkey sandwich. Or I’m at a dinner where the host has already ordered for the table, there’s short rib in front of me and eight people watching, and I’m not going to turn the meal into a conversation about me, so I eat it.
I’m the same guy with the same values. What changed is the situation I was standing in, and the situation won.
Now ask yourself which one of those is the real me, because the honest answer is both, and a persona can only ever hold one.
Completely different decision, because the context changed.
A persona is built on the assumption that a group of people always act a certain way. So it can only ever describe the middle of my behavior and miss every moment where I’m making a choice. But here’s the thing, the moments where I’m making a choice are the only moments you can sell into.
At some point you have to stop asking who they are and start asking what’s going on around them that causes them to do what they do. What you actually need is a name, a place and a time. When I’m trying to get someone’s perspective, I need a backdrop. I need to know who, where and when.
Once I’ve got a name, a place and a time, I can build everything else around it, because now there’s a real situation with real pressure in it and real tradeoffs somebody had to make.
You can play that role, you can put yourself in that person’s shoes and hear what they heard and feel what they felt.
You cannot play the role of an average.
The other thing a real story does is force your judgment out into the open. The most common thing I hear in a research debrief is “well, I’d never do that.” Whether you’d do it or not is completely irrelevant. But personas make that reflex invisible, because you’re never confronted with somebody who did the strange thing. You’re only ever confronted with the version of the customer you already approved of.
And then there’s everyone, the persona left out entirely.
There’s a video I love of a mechanic changing the oil on a new Suburban, and instead of draining into the pan the oil runs straight down over the transmission. Somebody engineered that truck beautifully for the person in the showroom.
Nobody in the process was playing the role of the guy who’d be under it with a wrench two years later.
That’s what a set of buyer personas does to you. It gives you a very detailed picture of whoever signs the check and says nothing about the admin who has to deploy your product, the ops person who inherits it, or the support rep who sees the consequences.
Any one of them can kill your sale, kill your consumption… but chances are, none of them are in your deck.
So here’s the assignment.
Pull up the persona doc your team is working from and ask one question of it: when was this person last real? Not when was the deck last updated, when did somebody actually sit across from a human being this was based on.
Then go find one person who bought in the last ninety days and ask them what was going on in their life the day they decided. You’ll get more out of that one hour than the persona has given you all year.
Keep the persona for the media buy. Just don’t ask it to help you build.