First up – despite the title, I don’t think personas are everything. They certainly have a shelf life and I think they are more valuable towards the discovery and design side of building a product. If you only introduce them during development, it is too late.

However, I’ve seen too many examples of where a product manager designs a product and is able to list off certain target markets the product is aimed at, but none of those target markets has ever actually seen the product or been part of testing. When they see the product, it invariably is misunderstood and underused.

It is when you do not properly understand the user when you are most likely to bring your own biases to a product. In that situation, you build it to how YOU like, deceiving yourself that the actual user would also want to use it that way.

I’ve seen it in myself. I love flexibility and customisation when producing charts and graphs, so when I needed to build a dashboard for customers, I started from that point. I even interviewed some customers and cherrypicked testimonials that broadly supported the approach I wanted. However, for most of the users, all they really wanted was something very simple and static – just a few bar charts and maybe the ability to filter over time for the most important information.

Forgetting what I personally wanted, and better understanding user needs would have saved me a lot of time and disappointment.

If you don’t use personas, you are the persona.