Going Beyond Personas

Deep customer empathy is crucial for any business looking to connect with its customers. It's the ability to understand and relate to the needs and wants of your customers, to see things from their perspective and to anticipate their needs. But it's not enough to simply empathize with your customers, in general. You must also empathize with the right specific people.

These specific people – your customers or would be customers – have specific characteristics, desires and mindsets that map to the opportunity you are pursuing. For example, in the earliest days of AirBnB, they must have seen an opportunity with people who needed to stay at a destination, couldn't find any hotel or affordable hotel available, and were willing to stay in a private home or room. These people could be identified, recruited, interviewed, engaged into experiments. In this way, these specific customers would provide the learning the early startup needed to iterate and improve their offering.

A common business practice is to create a persona of their ideal customer. The business often assumes that this "averaged, culminated" person represents a large swath of their market, and they base their product decisions on this persona. Of course there is logic to this behavior, and aggregating and generalizing customer learnings can be helpful, especially for marketing activities. But, we need to be careful to avoid the pitfall of using the persona as “end all, be all '' for deep customer understanding. The reality is that real, living, breathing customers enable deep learning, and having this persona – an up-leveled generalization built more to service reaching the “Total Available Market” – can actually work against the product team.

Differing customers have differing needs, wants, and pain points. We do recommend that after gaining empathy from a number of different types of customers, you write problem statements for those "types''. These types can be those you believe have the greatest need, the biggest unsolved problem. And those initial thoughts of the ”who” these customer types are, who to solve for, may have come from hunches, observations of common struggles or annoyances that people deal with, or even from research studies or well known societal issues. 

Using Airbnb again as an example, one customer type would have been the conference attendee who couldn’t find any availability, for even a single small hotel room, close to the “destination” in a crowded city. But another customer type to pursue would be the vacationer who‘d much rather stay in an actual neighborhood, in a homey setting, rather than in a perfunctory hotel environment.

Of course each of these customer types could have been a persona, but we want to remember to get to the real people for learning. Empathizing with a general persona tends to "shut the door" on the deep understanding and connection that you need. Additionally, how do you run experiments with a persona, rather than with real people? Usually the answer is that you don't—the persona's poster hangs on the wall, looking smart and well-formatted, while experimentation based on insights derived from actually living people just doesn't happen.

Gaining that deeper customer empathy means observing, listening to, and experimenting with these real, living customers. The habit of continued engagement with real people allows you to learn, iterate, and evolve your solutions so they may truly meet customer needs.

Deep customer empathy and experimentation are a couple of the elements of a strong, thriving innovation culture that we explore in our book,The Intrapreneur's Journey, where Hugh Molotsi, Mjumo Mzyece, Diran Soumonni and I have written about how companies can drive growth by empowering employees to work on their own ideas. Our soon-to-be-released second edition includes new African innovation case studies.