Agile Personas: How it works

Knowledge instead of gut feeling

Personas that are how you WOULD LIKE the target group to be, or how you THINK you know them from experience, do not lead to the goal, because these users/customers do not exist.
The be-all and end-all of persona use is therefore: the personas must be based on statistical data. Ideally, they are supplemented with qualitative surveys such as interviews and user observation. This makes the persona credible and alive, and gives it a name and a face. The collaboration of employees from Sales & Consulting, After Sales, Research & Development and, if necessary, UX brings valuable knowledge to the process of persona creation.
It is particularly important that the product developers are close to the persona. They may not deal directly with customers, but they need to know the persona almost best of all so they can develop the product in the right direction.
If a product is so special that it only has a very small, highly specialized group of buyers, it is also possible in some cases to conclude that a persona is not necessary for this product.

Do not fritter

In order for personas to help the team, they must be precise.
A good persona brings only RELEVANT information, no ballast. If you want to sell a trip, you need to know on which channels your persona can be reached, e.g. what apps she uses on her smartphone. Shoe size or smartphone color are not important here. A good persona sedcard fits on a DINA4 page. Here are some sample personas.
A persona should credibly convey to the team why this persona would/should buy the company's product or use the service offered. In other words: HOW the product/service will benefit the persona and thus the customer, what problem it solves.
Of course, a product can solve more than one problem or benefit the customer in more than one way.
To stay with travel: People who book a trip may want to relax, or educate themselves, or have an adventure. There are trips where you can achieve all three goals. But in order to sell the right trip with good chances of success through the right channels to the right customers, ONE of these three (or more) goals should be chosen as the main goal.

Stories bring personas to life

To develop or optimize a product in such a way that it really benefits the buyer persona, and customers thus buy it and also recommend it, you need a story. The persona is the protagonist of the user story. Based on the persona's characteristics, a need arises that our product can solve or satisfy. Let's take the journey again:

"As a top manager with a lot of difficult meetings at stressful times, I just want to unwind and relax on vacation."
Or:

"As a student who had only tedious online classes during the Corona period and was pretty much always at home, I finally want to go out again unbridled, have an exciting adventure with lots of people."
Develop true-to-life scenarios for your personas, bring them to life with stories. Based on such stories, developing or optimizing the appropriate product is much easier.

People evolve - so do personas.

Over time, you get to know your customers better. Or customers evolve and then have different needs than at the beginning of the customer relationship.
Or your company first worked with protopersonas to save resources and now wants to expand them into "real" personas. Either way, a data-driven persona cannot be static.
Once a year, review your personas based on the latest insights from all the teams involved. Depending on the results, adjust your existing personas, develop new ones (if, for example, the student mentioned above has a job or a family and thus has different priorities), or rethink your product strategy. Even Heraclitus knew: "Everything flows".

Users, buyers, primary personas.

The buyer is not always the person who uses a product. In such cases, you need to consider who your primary persona should be and align your strategy primarily with them.

Another travel example: You want to offer group travel for young people. From the fact that the young people travel and the parents probably have to book and pay for the trip, or at least sign off on it in the case of under-18s, there is a difference between user and buyer:

User

Sophie, age 16:
"I want beach, sun, fun with my girlfriends, meeting new people (hopefully guys), action and great photos."

Buyer

Christian, 45, Sophie's father:
"I want to make sure that Sophie has fun but is well taken care of at the same time. That safety is taken into account during action sports and excursions, so that no accidents happen and that the young people do not have unrestricted access to alcohol. That the supervisors in charge are trained personnel who speak the local language and are well versed in all aspects on site."
Same product, two personas. You need to decide who you want to target primarily to market your product with the most success.
If your product is designed to satisfy too many personas and you are therefore having a very difficult time selecting a primary persona, this may indicate that you may need different product variants or should resegment your market.