Customer Stories & Personas to Nail Your Product Development

Your vision is to improve product development.

You want to have a clear-cut path and understanding of every new item in your product development.

You may find that mapping out a new item in development is challenging to ensure all facets are considered every time and key things up later in the process, causing reworks or missed opportunities. Or, you may find that despite having a product brief and utilizing project management frameworks that are proven to work, you still have difficulty missing pieces in that process when it comes to the actual product design.

One solution to this dilemma is using customer stories early in development before developing spec sheets or tech packs.

Why would you want to use a story? That doesn’t sound useful? I’ve been using these for a while to get a complete picture of all aspects of a new product. I’ve even started using them in various program development to catch details upfront that could otherwise be missed. The goal with stories is to think of the different potential users of your product, and walk through their day, really understanding their problems, goals, motivations, and pain points. You want to catch every aspect of their problems to be solved and jobs to be done so that when you go into product development, you have a clear understanding of what you need to develop. If you create a new product and it only solves half of their problem, sales will be poor, you may end up with a ton of excess inventory, and you may be out of business without a second chance. Depending on the project, you may not incorporate every detail you come up with in the story. However, you will, at a minimum, be working with all of the details upfront, and it’s a choice to exclude certain aspects rather than find out later that you actually forgot them.

Let’s use a basic example to walk through, such as developing a new mug. Now, a mug has already been done millions of times. However, for the purpose of this article, we are going to work on an example of a customer story as though it’s a relatively new item to market. So let’s say you’ve done some market research and heard from your existing customers that it would be great if you developed a travel mug in addition to your regular glassware. You have some very loyal customers who love your brand. That sounds easy enough, right? We will look at a couple of elementary examples of how Michelle and Bruce could use this mug. I recommend keeping your stories to roughly two paragraphs or less, sometimes three if it’s a more involved development. Three to five personas are the most common target to ensure you look at a wide enough range.

Customer Persona and Story 1: Michelle

Michelle is a mom of three and works full time. She drops the kids off at school and heads to work right after. She’s a coffee drinker and is always on the go. She gets frustrated with the mugs she buys because they don’t fit the cup holder in her car the same as in the van. Depending on the day, she rotates between vehicles, and she likes to have her go-to mug. She knows how much coffee and cream to put in, it just works. She’s always trying to jam the mug in the cup holder to hold it perfectly so, and at times, she will turn fast, and the mug spills. She wishes the lid would close better and seal. This mug she’s using is fairly cheap; it even had a weird smell for a few days when she first got it. Not to mention, since jamming it in the cup holder, now the bottom looks terrible. By the time she gets to the office, it’s common for her mug to have a leak down the side and the cup holder gets sticky. When it comes to brands, Michelle doesn’t mind having names on things when it comes to brands, but she is partial to bright patterns and designs. She likes any accessories she carries to have a personality. Michelle would spend up to $30 to have a mug that works well.

Customer Persona and Story 2: Bruce

Bruce works in an office, and he’s very particular about the cleanliness of his car. So much so that he doesn’t allow food or drink in it. He waits until he gets to work and gets his breakfast and coffee ready. He likes to be able to talk at the water cooler anyway. It’s where he gets the latest gossip. Bruce likes using travel mugs for his coffee because they tend to be larger, and he likes the lid. While he doesn’t like his car messy, he’s even more concerned about his shirts. He likes mugs he uses to be sturdy, a nicely sealing lid, which also keeps the heat in. A nice handle goes a long way as well. He’s a slow coffee drinker and doesn’t want it to get cold by the time he’s done at the water cooler. He dresses nicely for work and appreciates when any accessories he uses compliment that. He’s also big on brands, and if he paid a lot for something, he wants people to know.

In these basic customer story examples, what did we learn about considerations for development?

1. Keeping temperature warm is a must.
2. A lid that seals is essential.
3. Fit within vehicle cupholders is key.
4. Think about your branding plan and what the outside of the mug will look like.
5. Make sure the mug doesn’t have a factory or chemical smell. Michelle associates that with cheap.
6. The design needs to be visually appealing to different customer types.
7. Durability is another key.
8. Think about your price point and get as many of these items incorporated to make sense for your market.

Top Considerations in Developing Customer Stories

1. You may already have a customer journey map and have your customer personas developed, and if you do, you may use those personas, but if you don’t, determine a customer name for each story. It’s important to refer to these customers by their name and have a visual. A picture is a nice touch as well. During all of the development, you can have this image that you are working to.
2. Get into the mindset of each customer persona and think about their morning, their workday, pain points, motivations, goals, and anything else that could relate so that you can get a visual of this person, their personality, and what makes them different from your other customers. Each story should have a different customer type so that you are working with a variety of viewpoints.
3. Walk through their typical day and note everything that pertains to your product you can think of. Consider all of the senses when it comes to your product- sight, smell, taste, sound, touch.
4. I recommend working with your team on brainstorming these ideas so as to catch diverse opinions. Again, if you’ve interviewed your customers and mapped their journey, you may already have personas, but it’s important to get diversity if you haven’t. The people who interact with customers would be a good start, especially if you have customer service or support people.
5. Note the insights in a summary that you got by walking through their day. We used a simple case of a travel mug, but you would be surprised at how you can recognize things that you wouldn’t usually think of when you are in the shoes of a customer.

In summary, other uses for customer stories

You should try this approach when it comes to marketing as well. Use your personas to walk through how your customer will find your product. Think about how and where they search, the communication they will get from you, every interaction they will have with you, and find the insights, gaps, and holes you need to fill before you even get started or have an actual customer.

Try using customer stories the next time you plan to develop a new product or service and comment how it went!

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Written by Nicole Hullihen, August 21st, 2021