Persona repository

navigating buy-in

Developing a persona repository requires rigor in user research and diligence in communicating the attributes discovered.

This is a story of how I poked, prodded, and listened until engineers told me what truly matters.

When we got buy-in, we iterated, iterated, iterated.

Current customer engineers find tuning process too complex and burn through too many devices.

“

– headphone device account exec

It startS with CUSTOMER ISSUEs

Device value

=

config quality

>

config effort

Customer engineers  waste time configuring complex audio devices.

In parallel with  business challenges

Companies lose money on poorly configured audio devices.

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fix with no customer access

Software configuration was cumbersome. The ask was to devise an approach to improve tool experiences without access to customer engineers.

my steps through the maze

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persona data

Interview internal engineers for multifaceted data.

persona repository

Create engineer persona repository to evaluate workflows.

co-workers as role-based personas

01

Interview invites were sent to internal engineers with a light-hearted, low stress message. Initially, I sat alone in the conference room...

Patience is the only virtue

ISSUE:

no one showed up.

Solution:

I resorted to stalking participants in the break room. With a bag of stickies in hand, I made engineers more comfortable with a conversation about their work needs.

Participation success!

The break room stalking worked too well. And then another issue cropped up...

Engineering therapy

Engineers shared data we needed to understand their mindsets. At session end we would ask,

02

ISSUE:

"anything else to add?"

Suddenly interviews switched to therapy sessions.

45 minutes turned into 2-hours. How do you stop someone from sharing?

Solution:

Just Listen

I took the opportunity to listen to all their grievances and ideas. Capturing attributes about their engineering discipline but also their positive and negative touchpoints in the audio device configuration flow. 

Virtual calls beget calls...

Once engineers got wind of the research, virtual calls were requested and popped up everywhere. Providing data across cultures.

interviews

therapy sessions

workshops

virtual calls

after about 50...

We shared a comprehensive persona repository.

It included different engineer attributes and their workflows with positive and negative touchpoints.

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