Proto personas
Fictional characters that represent a specific group of users. They are used to help the development team understand the needs and goals of their target audience. Used in conjunction with user stories, proto personas can help to ensure that the product meets the needs of its target users.
Overview
Proto-personas are preliminary, hypothesis-based representations of user groups developed early in product discovery before conducting detailed user research. They are created based on team assumptions, existing customer knowledge, and market analysis, capturing a persona's name, role, motivations, pain points, and goals. Proto-personas serve as a starting point for user research and design, helping teams articulate what they think they know about users and establishing hypotheses to validate through interviews and research rather than remaining guesses.
Why Are Proto-Personas Valuable?
Proto-personas make team assumptions about users explicit and testable, moving conversations from vague generalizations to specific hypotheses that can be validated or refuted through research. They provide focus by identifying specific user groups that products should serve, preventing the trap of trying to serve everyone equally. Proto-personas also accelerate product development by enabling teams to start design and strategy work while research is ongoing, rather than waiting for research to complete before beginning to think about user needs.
When Should Proto-Personas Be Created?
Proto-personas are most valuable early in product discovery:
At product conception: When starting work on a new product, team members should collaboratively develop proto-personas to align on who the product is intended for and what needs it will address.
Before conducting user research: Proto-personas establish what the team currently believes about users, providing a baseline against which research findings can be compared, making it obvious when research reveals surprising user needs that contradict assumptions.
When entering new markets or user segments: When expanding a product to serve new user groups, teams should develop proto-personas for the new segments to ensure the expanded product actually meets these users' needs.
For cross-team alignment: When product, engineering, design, and marketing teams have different views of the target user, developing proto-personas together creates alignment and makes disagreements explicit so they can be addressed.
What Are the Limitations of Proto-Personas?
Proto-personas are based on assumptions, not data, so they often fail to capture important nuances about real users that only emerge through research. Teams can become attached to proto-personas and resist revising them when research contradicts assumptions, limiting the value of research. Additionally, proto-personas without backing research may lead teams to build for imagined user needs rather than actual user needs, wasting effort on features users don't value.
How to Create and Evolve Proto-Personas Effectively
Developing proto-personas that inform rather than constrain product decisions requires these practices:
Develop proto-personas collaboratively: Involve product managers, designers, engineers, and sales/customer success team members in proto-persona development so diverse perspectives are incorporated and team members feel ownership of the personas.
Document assumptions explicitly: Clearly label what is known from existing data versus what is assumption, making obvious what needs to be validated through research and preventing teams from treating hypotheses as facts.
Use proto-personas as research guides: Use proto-personas to develop research guides and interview plans, ensuring research addresses the team's key assumptions about who users are and what they need.
Update personas based on research findings: After conducting user research, update proto-personas to reflect what was learned, replacing assumptions with actual user insights and revising or eliminating personas that research showed are not important segments.