Importance of User Personas in an Early-Stage Startup

In this day and age, companies recognize the need to be customer-focused but often fail to understand who the customer is. In this article, I will share my approach to solving this problem and how I helped an early-stage startup define its target customer.

Business Context

When I started working as a lead product designer at oak9, the leadership team informed me that the company targeted developers and security engineers. The company was in a DevOps security space and the goal was to secure cloud architecture through infrastructure as code*

*Helpful Note
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) helps engineers manage and provision cloud infrastructure through code, instead of relying on manual processes (e.g. directly on AWS or Azure).

Realizing the Problem and Addressing It

Because I didn’t have much experience in the domain of DevOps security, I conducted user interviews as part of my research. This led me to discover the following insights:

1. Developers are not responsible for cloud infrastructure
   Whenever I spoke to developers about security, they kept mentioning application security. This happened because the DevOps engineers are typically responsible for the deployment of cloud infrastructure, not regular developers.
2. Not every company is using infrastructure as code
   When I asked developers about infrastructure as code, they either didn’t use it or didn’t even know about it. Again, this is because average developers have little to do with cloud infrastructure.
3. Security teams have different priorities and responsibilities
   During my talks with security engineers, I realized there are different flavors of security (e.g. threat modeling, app security, cloud security). Additionally, security engineers are rarely responsible for enforcing security changes since it is the responsibility of DevOps engineers.

There was clearly a discrepancy between my user research and the information I received from the leadership team. Oak9 was still an early-stage startup, so a lot of conversations were centered around future rapid growth. The leadership team was hoping that developers would take on the responsibility of maintaining cloud infrastructure and forgot about current customers. As a result, the marketing, design, and development processes were misaligned. To resolve these issues, me and my team created user personas.

Defining User Personas and Using Them

I am not going to explain the process of creating user personas in detail (many talented people have done so already), but I will share how I utilized user personas at oak9 to target the right customers and solve customers’ problems. After multiple customer calls, user interviews, and competitive analysis, my team and I created 6 user personas that covered the majority of our use cases.

Unfortunately, the creation of user personas was only half the job. I had to ensure that those personas were put to use and that everybody at the company knew about them.
Here is what I did:

1. Mentioned personas in Jira stories
   Both developers and designers work better knowing that they are solving a concrete problem for real people
2. Shared personas with the HR team
   User personas are invaluable attributes to educate new hires about the company’s target audience
3. Shared personas with the marketing team
   Messaging becomes more targeted and thus more effective when the marketing team uses personas
4. Printed them
   It’s easier to use something when you don’t have to look for it. Printing personas is a great way to keep them visible

Lindsay is familiarizing herself with the newest team members

Defining User Personas and Using Them

Defining user personas is a challenging and time-consuming exercise. Although it might be hard to convince the leadership team of its benefits, not defining user personas could cause the team to solve the wrong problem or waste the marketing budget on the wrong audience.

I would like to end this article on an important note: as the company grows and acquires a larger customer base, user personas should evolve as well. Make sure to revisit them from time to time. It’s not set in stone you know 😉