Planting Dandelions, Not Roses: Making your Personas (Archetypes) Spread like Weeds

Jack Rosenthal at UXDX Community: Cultivating High-Impact UX Research Methods. Video: https://youtu.be/dWwr5JKOscA

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and background

[00:00:07] Hey there, nice to meet you all. Thank you for the great introduction, and the great starting there, that was a great topic to cover. I think everyone knows it's important for the documentation and the note taking pieces to be standardized as best as possible, so that was a great one, I was taking some notes, so thank you for that share.

[00:00:25] Today we're going to be talking about archetype or persona adoption. At our company we are really more focused on archetypes. I won't go into as many of the details of the differences; the data that you're collecting is usually by and large the same, and so on and so forth. But as we kind of go through this process, for those of you who have worked with personas, you'll see that there's a lot that goes into it.

[00:00:48] Sorry, I got a little ahead of myself. I'll do a quick little introduction here. Here's a little bit of my background. I did most of my work over at the University of Illinois back in the day, got a few certifications in research. I work currently in IT infrastructure, that's where my research is going. Prior to that I did stuff with ETL tools, so extract transform load tools, using a graphical interface, so you can kind of drop tools on a canvas and it can basically automate pieces for you. And then even prior to that I was working in agricultural technology. So John Deere has a lot of stuff that they do that you don't see for 20 years, that's where their researchers and their UX comes in: stuff with wearables, voice command, mobile, even working with the people in the manufacturing plant as well as the people that are actually operating the equipment.

[00:01:35] My current company is Nutanix. They do IT infrastructure management. What that is is it's providing the tools that the IT departments need in order to maintain the technical pieces that a company needs, right, so the servers that are there, any type of file storage, the laptops you have set up, that's done through IT. Typically you need to keep track of all your virtual machines, all the apps that would go on the laptops and stuff like that. That's what they do as the management software that goes on top of the hardware that you have there.

The work that goes into personas, and how it gets diminished

[00:02:09] So moving back to archetypes and personas. There's a lot that goes into this. We put in a lot of time making sure that we look at prior research. We need to understand, with the dandelion planting metaphor that we're talking about here, we need to understand our seeds, and that's going to happen through prior research, through work that's already been done and communicated internally, as well as when you start doing that literature review. You need to be able to cultivate the land, right, you need to talk to the right participants and you need to collect the right data, and there's a lot of things that go into that, and a lot of time that work is necessary to make sure that you're really building up what you need. Finally there's that planting and gardening, so you have to take all of that stuff, you pull it together, you start analyzing and seeing what those trends are, and then you create that framework to be able to put together who are these distinct personas or archetypes that you have.

[00:03:01] And there's a lot that goes into that, but if you don't do it right after the fact, as well as think about the strategy that goes into it, all of that hard work can be diminished with different little pieces. You can put spotlights on it and it can be beautiful and detailed, but impressive is not always impactful, and if it isn't usable then it doesn't end up mattering as much as it really should. When you think about things that are viewable but not necessarily easily consumable, that can also be a challenge. You can toss this stuff in a glass case and it's just not easy to get to what you need, because there's too much quantity and it's not all the most useful or important information, but it's very detailed. You have to keep in mind that quantity does not equal understanding, and so if they don't get what's going on here, it doesn't necessarily matter as much as it needs to.

[00:03:50] Beyond that, what you'll do throughout the process of creating your archetypes or personas is going to be presenting a lot. But presenting is not necessarily using, so sharing frequently is not the same as sharing purposefully, and we'll go into that a little bit later. If it doesn't resonate with the person who needs to consume it, it's not going to have the same type of impact. So we go from putting all of this work together into a circumstance where it's not having the influence that it's supposed to have, and all the hard work that you put together, we want to make sure we optimize that and really have it be as much of an influence as possible.

Roses versus dandelions

[00:04:30] So this is where we get to this metaphor of roses versus dandelions. Roses are beautiful, they're just not always the most practical thing to have. It's challenging to maintain the soil pH, the nutrition that's in there is very strict. It can be painful: nobody likes being hit with a thorn. And while it does look good, it's typically more of an aesthetic piece than it is something that has value in many different ways and shapes.

[00:05:00] Dandelions on the other hand, if you guys have ever looked up anything about this, I did a little bit of researching them for this presentation, but they're one of the most successful plants on the earth. They have very effective seed dispersal, so it is coverage in and throughout where it needs to be. It can spread very quickly as necessary, and it's also a very hardy plant. I think we've all seen some of those memes or jokes about, a flower is getting everything it needs but it's dying, whereas a dandelion is like, oh look, there's a little bit of dirt in between these two pieces of sidewalk concrete, perfect. That hardiness is what you want to be able to create, and that's done through a bunch of different little pieces that build on top of each other.

[00:05:47] But the other end of it is that dandelions are very useful in many different ways. They're edible, there's a lot of nutrition for them, they have medicinal qualities, which I didn't know before. And the one that I thought was very interesting is that they actually will aerate the soil, so they're good for the soil in a somewhat similar way to worms, and that helps everything else grow. So you want to have an impact for the things that you're doing, and you want it to be not only varied in where it's showing up but also in how it can have an impact. But it needs to be clear as we go through, which I'll be talking through today.

[00:06:23] So today's topic of what we want to cover is about baking personas into the DNA of your company, and it takes more than just the good research that I know you all are capable of doing. It takes the strategic work to make sure that it's accepted and kind of taken in, it's adopted and internalized effectively. So the things that we'll cover today would be the proper support for your garden: you need to find the support from an influential champion or an ally for this project. Showing off the garden: the evangelization process is extremely integral to the success of what you're doing here. We need to make sure that people are understanding the value of the stuff that's coming out and its uses as directly and clearly as possible. We have gardening with others, so as you go through this process this is going to be a common theme that you'll see, is making sure that you can establish this communal sense of ownership, so that people are involved, engaged, familiar and also supportive of the project that's going on right now.

[00:07:27] The last one we have here is selling at the market, so you need to put this into an already established system. There are already teams and organizations out there. Saying "hey, use this for your work" is not enough, you need to try and tie that into some kind of standardized process, and it's about identifying and implementing those personas within that already established process.

Finding an influential champion

[00:07:50] So to begin, we're going to talk about getting that influential champion that you need. First of all, let's talk about the type of person that this is. You need to identify either multiple directors, or one or two people that are in senior leadership, that's the VP and up level. And in the end you really need to have someone like that because they need to be able to push. We'll talk a little bit more about what this person looks like, but it's very important to make sure that they have the authority to be able to make changes that you're going to have to ask of them later on.

[00:08:20] They need to understand the benefits of your personas. So it's not just, hey, this is what personas are used for at a high level, it's, hey, here are the things that you can use this for and here is exactly how this will impact the situation in many circumstances. I found that one of the most important things and one of the most clearly impactful things is conversation and communication between different teams, and in particular the one that I would bring up would be designers and PMs. There are designers that have good understanding of the area and our different users but still need that additional detail, and appreciate the richness and the vividness of it in order to do their work and understand the context for why they're doing their work and how that's impacting a user's experience. Then on the other end you'll have these PMs that have plenty of background with our users, maybe they could use a little bit more understanding and wisdom about these different types of users, but every time they're putting something together and communicating it, having that shorthand of, yeah, it's this type of user here, is going to be very important to be able to communicate a lot of information in a short period of time. So we need to be able to make sure that our champions understand something at that level of detail and granularity.

[00:09:32] Next, as I was sort of explaining earlier, they need to have the authority to make changes to standardized processes. The reason that this is, is that you need to take your personas and you need to tie them into a process that is happening over and over and over with multiple people consistently, and is standardized across the team, so that it can be kind of watched and you can help it grow and make sure that adoption is going effectively. But to do that you need somebody who can say, you guys don't have a choice, you have to do it this way, this is how we're doing this now, to be able to lead the way. And it's not about forcing people to do stuff, it's about having that momentum to be able to now say, okay, here's what we need to do, what do you guys think about this, how would you want to use these things, with the understanding that they know personas are coming either way, we need to figure out how this helps us and how we want to engage with it and use it as a tool.

Evangelizing: showing the value of your garden

[00:10:26] Now the next thing I want to talk about is the evangelization piece here. So we want to show the value of our garden, we want people to understand, hey, there's fruits and vegetables here, we have a little bit of watering but it does all the work for ourselves, we're not having to store things, so on and so forth, so that they can get what they need. And rather than talking about all of the details that we would go into for structuring how to describe those things, I'd like to talk about the when and a little bit more of the mechanical end of it.

[00:10:55] So the first one is, you want to present, right, we all know this. It's early and periodically, not early and often. You want to do it regularly but you don't want to oversaturate. Now, the audience needs to be familiar with your archetypes, and the way that you can find that balance between telling somebody the same story over and over and over in six different types of presentations: you can find different ways to diversify how you evangelize. So there's all hands where everyone's sitting in, you might get some engagement but maybe people are kind of checked out at different times. You have your weekly syncs that are a little bit more intimate. But you also have different methods, different media. If there's ways that you can show these things by sharing videos on your Slack channels, you can do newsletters, there are tech talks that you can put together. Find different ways to do this, not just different teams to do this with.

[00:11:51] And the other part, when we talk about teams, is really related to the first adopters. So find the groups that you know will be engaging with this effectively, and also the groups that need to be engaging with this effectively, and those are not typically the same group. I think we've all seen this in different circumstances. But you need to make sure you engage with them so that all of the challenges that are associated with learning a new process, or adding to a new process, are taken away as much as possible. Anytime you can make it a little bit easier, you give one less reason for someone to go, this is not worth it, I don't want to do this, or even worse, I'm not going to do this.

[00:12:33] The next piece I want to talk about is getting the audience involved. Everybody that has done research has sort of had this experience before, where people come and they have feedback that they want to give, or they want to share an article. That is something that you want to encourage and get feedback from, and it's important to handle that in an appropriate way. If it's information that is going to contradict what you're seeing, then you need to go out and validate those pieces. So this is an opportunity to take someone who might disagree with a piece of what you have, engage with them directly, and then make that change, saying, okay, well, let's take a look and validate that piece, that makes sense, it seems like it's different from the data that we're seeing, but let's go through this together and get some pieces here. Here's what we're seeing, what are your thoughts, are there any things that we need to take into account to make sure that this is actually accurate?

[00:13:22] And if it's not, if they go, hey, this is the wrong type of user or something like that, it's important to be able to identify those things at the beginning and say, hey, we fixed those things. Now you've taken somebody who is interested, given them a sense of ownership here, giving them a sense of participation here, and then also reinforced confidence in the project. They know that when something comes up that's wrong you have engaged with this, and they can make the assumption that you will do that again and again for any other problems as they come up. So as there are other things that they might find, they might disagree with, they at least can look back on the experience of, hey, we went through this here and it was clear. So when you tell them, yeah, we went through and validated it, they already know what that process looks like. So a lot of value in getting your audience involved to foster that sense of ownership, and that's going to be an exceptionally important thing for the process.

[00:14:12] Next we have giving concrete uses. We can talk about how personas can be used, we can talk about how it's good for communication, or telling a story, or this or that, but if somebody doesn't have sort of the imagination or the vision to be able to really imagine what's going on there and how they could use it, they're kind of stuck, and you're going to find a lot of people that are doing that. And also it can be challenging because you've been sitting in this data for so long, you have to pull yourself out and say, okay, what is the exact thing that we can see, an exact process here? Having those focused training sessions can be very useful. And also, one example we have is updating product requirement documents. That's something that we are going to be talking about a little bit later, because that's something that we're implementing over at Nutanix using our personas and making sure that that is in there. But in order to do something like that we needed to make sure they understood how that would look, we needed to make sure they could find the information that they needed in the final artifacts that we put together, and we needed to go through various training sessions.

[00:15:13] And that kind of brings us to this last point here, which is make sure they understand how. So if you're going to have the expectation that people are going to be using it in a certain way, you need to make sure you can see some of those folks doing that from beginning to end, and create any resources that they might need. So those training sessions that we talked about will help get you good questions and understanding. Workshops that we can do really help with pivoting and doing iteration on how this should be done. And these question and answer opportunities are also a very powerful tool to understand where we should go, so that when you're putting stuff together like an instructional document, you know the questions that people are asking and you can provide those pieces the second time around, the third time around, the fourth time around. Just make sure that you don't just hand somebody a document and say, this is exactly how you do this, you should be fine, because that's not enough, and a document that you hand off to somebody is something that can just be more or less ignored almost immediately.

Gardening with others: collaboration and transparency

[00:16:09] Okay, so I'm moving a little bit quicker. If any of you guys have any questions after the fact, or we're not able to get to them today, again feel free to please reach out to me, I'll be happy to go into more details. But the collaboration, as we talked about before with creating that sense of ownership, is going to be important as well.

[00:16:27] So, gardening with others. You want to collaborate with the people who are consuming it. It's important to understand the landscape of understanding that you already have internally, to make sure that you know what you need to highlight and what things you need to maybe not focus on as much. You need to be able to evaluate what that internal knowledge and appreciation is, and then also you want to incorporate that data into your approach in whatever way you can. And this is going to help combat those comments of, we don't need this, we already have it, or, I don't understand the point of this, or, this is a waste of time, you should be focusing on something else. When people are involved in that way it's going to be helpful. And when you have these helpers that come to you, make sure that you do not make them feel like, oh no, we know what we're doing, we're going to do this, blah blah blah. You don't want this to go into a black box and come out with the product, because there are going to be people who are skeptical, and the people who want to help might have a lot of really good value, which we'll talk about in this next slide here. Oh no, we will talk about it a little bit later, apologies.

[00:17:29] So, publicity at milestones. You need to make sure that you have transparency throughout the process, and it's great to make sure that at these milestones you're touching base with the people who, maybe there are people who are dissenters, maybe there are people who are just very curious, maybe it's folks that are just important stakeholders. You need to make sure they see what's happening as things are coming together. So when you go from blurry picture to a little bit more clear picture to vivid picture, at each point when you need to make those pivots you can do that. This is where you'll see people come up and say, I don't agree with this, or whatever else, and it's important to make sure that you find those things before the end. You don't want it after, it's a very big pain in the butt. I've talked to plenty of researchers where they have to go into a meeting now where a director or a VP now needs to fight with another director in a different department, and there's a whole conversation, and in the end your data can also suffer because you have to make some kind of concessions of, well, maybe this is happening here, maybe that's not happening there. And that can be a problem. So doing that earlier in the process: extremely important, extremely helpful.

[00:18:32] Next, and this is the point that I wanted to talk about before, is involving the internal experts when it is relevant. We have a team at our company that is basically more or less embedded in our customers' organizations, and it's helping them set up the product, it's helping them maintain things, and also make the most out of the product that they're already paying for in the first place. So as you can imagine they're in the trenches every single day, but they also have a very unique and useful area of feedback here, because they have richness and savviness of what's happening day to day as well as seeing that bigger picture and the business context that surrounds it. And as we know, if you're not a researcher, understanding the business context is a very good way to be able to communicate with leadership, with management, and with folks that need to look at it from that perspective. It also can be helpful for groups like marketing and sales who you want to kind of have on your side and working with you on these pieces here.

[00:19:36] Now, while you might not have this exact group at your company, I can guarantee you that if you are above a company of a certain size, maybe one or two hundred people, you should expect that there will be some people that have this really high touch and very interesting perspective of engagement with your users, and that that will be there. So keep an eye out for that group.

[00:20:00] The last piece here is about workshops to complete. When you're getting to that finalization process, bring everybody together in a workshop, just a two-hour thing. This can be a very helpful piece here. But you want to drive the agreeance, make sure that stakeholders agree on what this is, they look through all the personas, we've agreed to the adoption strategies and made sure that we understand what the concrete next steps are for making sure that people are adopting these pieces and what that looks like. What this does is brings everybody together, sits them in a room together and forces all of us to say, yes, we're on the same page and we all agree to what we're going to do and what this is that we have. This makes a huge difference and removes a lot of question marks or any kind of surprises further down the line of, like, somebody going, no, this is not useful. Nip that in the bud during those transparency milestones, and then make sure that you have tied it with a nice bow by the time you get to that final workshop, so that everything there just comes together and everyone's on the same page.

Selling at the market: tying personas into existing processes

[00:21:02] The last piece that we have here is selling at the market. So I've been talking throughout this presentation about the ways that we can tie in our personas to a standardized process. PMs have a sort of cyclical process that they stick to, designers do, everybody has these things, be that OKRs or product description or product requirement documentation. This could be checkpoints that people have for QA. There's always something that is a consistent process there, even for something as far as like service support tickets, right, there is a process there. You want to make sure that you can try and find a way to have your archetypes or your personas tied into that.

[00:21:47] So that's what we're talking about here. This is where the champion is the most important out of all the steps in the process, this is where they are the most important to that process, because they need to be able to have the authority to implement that change, to say, hey, I know that we do this this way, we're going to add this little piece in here. And that consistency there, along with the familiarity that you've already brought up, really helps you move past publication day, right, that day zero of what you have, into the pieces that you need here, the day one or day two stuff, where you've implemented everything, now you're going through and kind of monitoring what's happening, making sure you're helping it grow.

[00:22:29] For our circumstance, next quarter, organization wide, all of our PMs now have a section in their product requirement document where they have to specify and share details related to the personas that are relevant to whatever the product or feature is that they're trying to get through. This is going to be a great opportunity for us, and this is why talking to everybody that was involved in that process was important. The PMs need to understand what's going on, how to get the information correctly, how to be able to just put that in there very quickly in a way that's effective, and that means that they need to know exactly what details they need immediately, rather than just having to read a book.

[00:23:09] When I first put together all of the information that I have for personas, it might have been 25, 30, 40 pages of details. It still needs to be slimmed down, it needs to be more accessible. It's great to have all those details and it's good to have those in the background somewhere, but there still has to be something that is bite-sized enough that can be handed off and almost has that kind of iceberg impact of, like, you see the little piece at the top and then all that stuff at the bottom is also available, but you just don't necessarily see them because you don't necessarily need them just yet. So making sure that you weave those personas into something that is already existing is going to be really helpful for you, to help reinforce familiarity and breed comfort with using these personas.

[00:23:52] We need to continue to publicize after the fact as well. So that upkeep does not stop just because we've presented and shared out everything and we've seen it being used a few times. We need to make sure that it has good visibility after that. So we have things implemented, a champion has said, hey, you guys have to do this, we need to keep that in the public eye and in the front of everybody's mind. So what I've done is I put together quarterly newsletters where we highlight specific personas, and that's saying, hey, this is still here, we're still engaging with this. There's calls to action: you guys have any questions, go check out these other resources that we have, or do you have feedback, let me know, because as we all can appreciate, our users change and evolve, our personas change and evolve.

[00:24:38] So having those types of pieces are really useful, and try and find different, interesting, unique ways of doing this. One of our researchers, actually a few of them, came up with this sort of concept of creating and printing these informative, kind of like playing cards, where you can look at it, see what the name of the persona is on one side and then try and understand, think of, okay, what does this person probably do, then you flip the card over and take a look. And then stickers, right, you want people to just see it. It's similar to advertisement where you kind of want to have it everywhere, and the subtlety of it being in a bunch of different places can have a positive impact on your perception and your perspective of that specific project.

Conclusion

[00:25:17] And those are the big pieces that we have for selling at the market. So just to kind of conclude: let's start planting these dandelions together. Let's plant them generously, far and wide, and make sure that we help our consumers. We want to publicize across teams and in diverse different ways so that people can get this in different ways and neuroplasticity can really kind of take hold in a good way there. Let's make sure that we're giving concrete use cases and demonstrating their impact as directly and as succinctly as we can. We want to make sure they understand exactly how this impacts. Let's make sure that we keep consumers involved throughout the process so we can iterate and we can pivot as necessary and avoid some of the pitfalls of people being frustrated or unhappy with the results at the end. And finally, let's sell at the market. We already have these established places here. Let's drive consensus at the end through that workshop we were talking about, and then let's clarify the next steps in adoption so that we fit into the system that is already there, rather than asking the system to turn into something completely different.

[00:26:23] So thank you guys for the time, really had a great time with you about this. If you have any questions I can open the floor now to questions.

Q&A

[00:26:32] Host: Excellent, thank you very much, Jack. That was a really great, detailed theory of how to make your personas more actionable, I guess, really. So as Jack said, if you have any questions please write them in, we've got about two minutes for questions, but I'm going to jump in with the first one because it's the first thing that jumps into my mind. I always think of that saying, I would have written a shorter letter but I just didn't have the time. And it comes to, there's a huge amount of time required in making it digestible, making it like that snapshot and selling it in. So it's almost a full-time job in the selling of it. How do you find time, because you're also having to do the upfront research and all of that, to do that evangelizing bit as well?

[00:27:21] Jack: It's a combination of things, I think. There's a lot of planning that needs to go into it, and I think that also even gets into a conversation about how do people balance their bandwidth. When we think about those types of things, you have to understand what you can do. But I found different methods that could be useful. One is, when you're talking to the people that are helping you with prioritizing your work, making sure you clarify all of it there. If you're talking to a manager, chances are you're not the only person on that team, so talk through and talk out loud when you're thinking through what needs to be done with your team. Hey, I have these things here. If somebody asks you, do you think you can get this done next week, it's not, yes I can get this done next week, or no I can't, it's, here are the things that I have, this is how I prioritize them, do you think that I should move something to be able to do this?

[00:28:07] Jack: And when we talk about balancing these two pieces here, for me it was a little bit of burning the candle at both ends, so there was some stuff that had to happen there. But I think the things that can be your friend are creating slide decks that are versatile, so they're larger and you can kind of have them set up differently for different audiences, and that's probably one of the biggest things. And then the second part is, try and think about what content goes in these different size things. So you're already putting together the work to get this research together, but when you're talking about putting out newsletters, that should be a distillation of the content that you've already put together. So understand what was already in the original document and then what's going to be in this new piece that's sort of a subset of that information, and then try and optimize for getting that information over there. Because once you've done that once — currently we have 15, I think, personas — once I've done that once, it took a little bit of time, now all the rest of them have taken about a third of the time to put together. And so those are big pieces there. The rest of it for me was about staying organized as best I could.

[00:29:14] Host: Yeah, it's a great example of, the first one is always the challenge, but once you've worked that, and as you said, work with your partners, don't go off in a corner and do it yourself because there'll be problems.

[00:29:26] Jack: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:29:28] Host: Excellent. That actually brings us to time, but just want to thank you once again, Jack, for sharing, and I hope everybody out there enjoyed it as much as I did.

[00:29:37] Jack: Thank you.