Summary of Using Personas to Prioritize Features

Video Summary: Using Personas to Prioritize Features

The video "Using Personas to Prioritize Features" discusses the significance of User Personas in product development and feature prioritization. Here are the main strategies and methodologies presented:

Key Financial Strategies and Business Trends:

User Personas: Essential for documenting user research data, making it relatable and easier to reference during product design discussions.
Prioritization of Personas: A strategic approach to determine which user segments should be focused on, enabling smart trade-offs when conflicting user needs arise.
Feature Prioritization Matrix: A systematic way to evaluate features against User Personas to inform product decisions.

Methodology for Prioritizing Features:

Create a Spreadsheet: List all features and User Stories in the left-hand column.
Add Personas: Place the names of User Personas across the top row.
Prioritize Personas: Assign a priority percentage to each persona that sums to 100%.
- Example: Primary persona (50%), Secondary persona (30%), Tertiary persona (20%).
Score Features: Use a scoring rubric to evaluate each feature based on how it meets the needs of each persona.
- Scores can be +1 (slightly positive), 0 (neutral), or -1 (negative impact).
Calculate Weighted Scores: Multiply the feature score by the priority percentage for each persona and sum these values to get a total score for each feature.
Evaluate and Discuss: Use the total scores to inform discussions on project scope and feature prioritization.
Tag User Stories: Optionally tag User Stories in the backlog with their scores for future reference.

Conclusion:

The method allows teams to objectively evaluate features from the perspective of their target audience, facilitating informed decision-making in product development.

Presenters/Sources:

Not specified in the provided subtitles.

Notable Quotes

— 00:22 — « My opinion is that the majority of the benefit of personas is simply just going through that process of creating them and truly internalizing the data and the themes that you discover. »

— 01:32 — « Of course, we wanna accommodate all of our user persona segments as much as possible, but if we strategically prioritize them, we're able to make smart trade-offs when we run into conflicting user needs. »

— 02:28 — « So this is very much a strategic business decision driven by a lot of considerations. »

— 04:00 — « If it's negative, then you would subtract that amount. »