User Persona – How it Works with User Story Map in Jira

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When combined with user story maps in Jira, personas can guide your development process, ensuring that every feature you build is aligned with your users’ goals and challenges.

Creating effective personas involves gathering and analyzing data about your users. Start by conducting research through surveys, interviews, and analyzing web analytics. This will provide insights into who your users are and what they need.

Begin by identifying key characteristics that define your users. Look at demographics such as age, gender, occupation, and education. Next, delve into their goals—what are they trying to achieve with your product? Understanding their pain points is crucial; as identifying the challenges and frustrations they encounter.

Create a User Story Map from Persona

Creating a user story map from personas helps you visualize the user journey and identify what your product needs to deliver. Here’s how you can create one, starting from goals, moving to steps, and breaking down into stories.

Goals 

Start by identifying the primary goals of your persona. What are they trying to achieve with your product? For example, Emma, our travel enthusiast persona, aims to experience new cultures and destinations without breaking the bank, find unique and memorable experiences, and save money to go on more adventures.

Steps

Next, outline the steps Emma would take to achieve these goals. This involves breaking down the user journey into specific actions. For instance, Emma might start by researching travel destinations, then move on to comparing prices across different booking platforms, and finally, booking her travel arrangements.

Stories 

Finally, break down each step into detailed user stories. These stories describe specific tasks or features that will help Emma accomplish each step. For example:

• Researching destinations: “As Emma, I want to explore different travel destinations and find inspiration for my next trip.”
• Comparing prices: “As Emma, I need to compare prices on flights, hotels, and activities across different platforms to find the best deals.”
• Booking travel arrangements: “As Emma, I require a seamless booking process that integrates all my travel arrangements in one place.”

By structuring your user story map around Emma’s goals, steps, and stories, you create a clear, user-focused development path. This approach ensures that every feature you build is directly aligned with the needs and objectives of your users, making your product more effective and user-friendly.

Build your user story map from your personas with ProductGo – Agile User Story Map, Portfolio Roadmaps & Persona for Jira

Attach the Persona to the ProductGo User Story Map

Integrating personas into your user story map in ProductGo is a straightforward process that enhances the relevance and focus of your development efforts. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Create Your Persona in ProductGo

Navigate to the Personas section in ProductGo.

Click on “Add Persona” and fill in the details for your persona. For example, Emma Johnson’s profile would include her travel goals, challenges, and tech-savvy nature.

2. Develop Your User Story Map

Go to the User Story Map section.

Outline the main goals, steps, and user stories for your product based on the persona’s needs. For Emma, the goals might be finding unique travel experiences and saving money.

3. Link Personas above the Goal

Locate the persona icon above the Goals on the user story map.

In each Goal, there’s an option to link personas. Select Emma Johnson from the list.

This helps the team to remember who the end user is when working on each task.

4. Use Persona Insights to Refine Stories

Review the user stories with Emma’s goals and challenges in mind.

Adjust and refine the stories to better align with her needs. For instance, if Emma struggles with finding deals, ensure the user story addresses this by including a price comparison feature.

5. Collaborate and Share

Share the user story map with your team.

Ensure everyone understands Emma’s persona and how each story caters to her needs.

Regularly revisit and update the persona as new data and insights are gathered.

Keep Your Persona Up to Date

Creating and using personas is an ongoing process. Regularly update them as you gather more data and as user needs evolve, keeping your development process aligned with your users’ changing requirements.

Maintaining up-to-date personas is crucial for keeping your product development aligned with real user needs. As your users’ behaviors and preferences evolve, so should your personas.

Conclusion

Incorporating personas into your product development process is more than just a one-time task; it’s an ongoing commitment to understanding and serving your users better. By regularly updating your personas and integrating them into your user story maps, you ensure that your product evolves with your users’ needs.

[Joanna Weber]

This is great! A really powerful next step that can make a substantial difference:

"SO THAT". “As Emma, I want to explore different travel destinations and find inspiration for my next trip so that I can feel confident that I have the right information to made the best decision."

The activity is the first part; the *job to be done* is the second part - what she's really trying to achieve (and you can test this through interviews, surveys, etc.) - is certain benefits that she gets from travelling (experiencing other cultures, relaxing, etc.). The intervention that you are hoping to offer her (e.g. website) is a way to reassure her that she has the best information to fulfil those needs, so through how you shape the product, and how you talk about the product, you would explain to her how the product gives her the information that she needs e.g. price comparison, if that's important to her.