Roleplaying for shortening the Product Development cycle, part 2

Posted by Fitzy

October 19, 2007

Hi all!

As promised, here’s the second in this series of articles. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to digest the last article in this series (which you can find here), which served as an introduction to a process you might use to develop products for your markets and customers. It’s a pretty traditional approach, but one that works in a variety of industries.

This article will focus on how to use roleplaying techniques to develop personas or “characters” with which you can help test your products before they get to the customer for their review and input.

So what is a persona or “character”? Think of a movie, television show, or book you like. Each of these mediums has a set of “characters” that interact among themselves and with their environment. Each character has a few basic qualities:

a name
a description (what do they look like? where are they from? what do they wear? and so on)
a set of skills (what can they do? what are they good at?)
a set of companions/friends/coworkers (who do they hang out with? where do they spend their time? and so on)

So how does this help you? Take a common customer. Let’s say we’re writing a book about internet marketing techniques. You might ask a few questions about your target audience or customer:

Who is your customer?
What are they trying to accomplish?
What do they already know?
Who do they know?
What internet sites do they visit regularly?
What do they spend on advertising?
What would they be willing to spend on your book?
What other products could they buy that would have a similar effect to your book?

Now most of these are common questions… But let’s take a look at what you do with the answers…

Let’s create a couple of characters from the information you might gather from the above questions:

Cathy
- Cathy is a homemaker and mother with a computer just getting started on the internet with blogging
- She wants to make some money with her blog to help with her bills and maybe give her some spending money
- She’s not the most technically adept individual, but can follow instructions
Bob
- Bob is a professional writer who is trying to move to the internet to help with marketing his products
- He wants some ways to market his work via banner advertisements and possibly do some work for hire for other blogs/websites
- He is willing to learn some of the technical aspects of the web, but isn’t a programmer

In the next article, we’ll take these characters and do some roleplaying with them to help work the kinks out of the book you’re developing.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next time!

–Fitz