John Pruitt and I wrote the Lifecycle books because there were no detailed instructions to create data-driven personas and so many persona efforts were failing. Personas created from data should work—just like anything based on data should be enough to change minds. It turns out that data isn’t magical, and it can’t change deeply-held opinions. Collecting data is expensive, and it’s easy to ‘side step’ data-driven insights by questioning the collection and analysis of the data itself.

Data is far less powerful than assumptions. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

in 2005, newly launched as a consultant and convinced that personas are an invaluable tool (as I still am), I focused on my ad hoc persona work. In 2006, Don Norman wrote Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus after a lunchtime conversation we had when John and I were teaching at the NN/G conference.

Ad hoc personas are created with key stakeholders and decision-makers. They solved the practical issues that get in the way of so many otherwise awesome product plans: misalignment, miscommunication, politics, empire-building, strongly-held opinions based on months or years of immersion, slippery assumptions based on almost nothing, unclear or missing goals, and ignored opportunities to measure things. Data-driven personas can’t solve all of these problems.

Alignment personas are created collaboratively to:

• create a common language that is focused on users

• force articulation of measurable goals at a project level

• bring all the assumptions and deeply-held opinions out into the light (without causing political upheaval)

• let the stakeholder team show themselves that they are misaligned and inspire them to fix it

• match business priorities to the satisfaction of key users

• change the conversation and debates to focus on ‘does our primary persona Jen really want that?’ instead of ‘I will win this point because I’m more powerful than you are.’

• create a set of hypotheses that can be validate or invalidated with data

The process to create these personas was ‘ad hoc.’ The result was alignment.
I created the Executive Alignment in Five Conversations workshop to help teams create alignment personas. Bringing key stakeholders or executives together to get all their deeply held opinions and assumptions about users out onto the table is practical, fast, and incredibly impactful.

Read my articles and watch videos on alignment personas and sign up to be notified when my free course launches.