What Are Agile Personas?

What Are Agile Personas?

Agile personas represent fictional characteristics of the people that are most likely to buy your product. Personas provide a detailed summary of your ideal customer including demographic traits such as location, age, job title as well as psychographic traits such as behaviors, feelings, needs, and challenges. 

A typical layout is presented in a visual form like a single page that includes customer name, photograph (usually stock images), job title, business goals, pain points, buying behavior, and professional bio summary.

Agile personas examples include the people that are to utilize the product being built like the director, system administrator, or project manager.

For example, “Mike Barns, 41, project manager for a tech startup. 

Goal: Seeks innovative ideas to build a product using Agile techniques.

The number of Agile user personas to create depends on how broad your target audience is or how many people your product is created for. Ideally, some organizations create 3-4 Agile personas. Remember that Agile personas represent your most valued customers, not a generalized audience. This approach helps a team get a better understanding of who they are building the product for. Without personas, a team might ask unhelpful questions like “what should we do?” instead of a customer-focused question like “what value can the user derive from the product?”

Before you can develop detailed personas, you’d need live customer data that is not based on guesswork or assumptions. Some of the best practices for creating user personas for an Agile team include conducting customer interviews, online surveys, market research, and customer feedback requests.

As a result, team members can uncover the answer to questions like:

• Who is our target user?
• What are their goals and aspirations?
• What are their challenges?
• What stage are they in the buying journey?
• Who is the key decision-maker?

By the end of this process, you and your team can gain more clarity on who the ideal customers are, how to communicate with them and build solutions for their needs and challenges.