01 — Project details
Over the years, Apptentive had accumulated tombs of knowledge on their key persona: the product manager. However, in my assessment, this knowledge was disparate, hidden on seldom-accessed share drives, and otherwise inconvenient to access. My mission was to distill our persona knowledge into a more accessible format, supplement it with more current information, and build out adjacent personas of interest.
02 — The process
Persona work starts with careful observation, and I was lucky: Apptentive used a service called Chorus to record every customer and prospect call across the organization. Filtering by job title, I was able to identify and observe hundreds of calls, initiate firsthand interviews, and gather findings from key customer-facing personnel to build our four core personas: product, marketing, research, and engineering. From there, I transformed our long-form persona bibles (some 20+ pages long) into a single-page, "at a glance" card. With our personas more digestible, we saw an increase in utilization of persona assets and our sales team reported more confidence in approaching and conducting cold outbound on these personas.
