The Skeptic Persona

I recently had a 1:1 with a product manager on my team. He walked me through some of the great work his team was doing around better defining the problem space that their team services and the customers or users they build products for. Like a good product manager, he had broken down the different needs of the users, and further segmented them into useful personas. It was great!

Throughout our conversation, he helped me understand what products and services his team was going to offer for those different needs and segments. The product narrative was strong.

But it led us to an interesting conversation — our segments are made up of internal users as we are a grouping of teams who build internal products. The way we had broken down our segments of users, we realized we had focused a lot on those users who would be interested in potentially “buying” or using our products. But what about the ones who have parallel problems to be solved (problems we aren’t yet solving today but are relevant), or ones who actively use other products instead of the ones we provide?

What if we defined a Skeptic Persona?

This isn’t a new concept — product teams often consider their total addressable market and segment users to understand their needs within there. As a team building for internal users, we hear a lot from these customers — it is easy to hear their requests, their needs, and prioritize these use cases since they are our colleagues!

But what about the customers who have use cases our products do solve for today (or potentially ones we should solve for in the future), why do these users choose actively to not use our products? What might we stand to learn or gain by understanding our most hesitant user better?

Building out the Skeptic Persona allows you to better learn about and define that skepticism:

• What products or tools are they using today to accomplish their tasks or solve their problems? What do they like more about these?
• Are there features or functionality that are missing from your products that could attract them to your offerings?
• Is there something standing in the way of them getting onboarded?
• Do they even know that your products or services exist?
• Are they using a solution that is perhaps better or cheaper than what your team makes? Perhaps more relevant for internal tools, but should your team consider supporting that product as part of your suite?

The answers to some of these questions can help you chart new areas of opportunity for your team. You likely are asking many of these questions in your typical product development lifecycle, but next time you’re talking about segments with your team, try sketching out that skeptic and considering what they would say! It just might unlock some new ideas.