3.5. Tips for Agile Personas

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• Put aside any ideas about the desired user experience and the product features when you develop your personas. Describe the characters according to your market insights. Do not make them fit your ideas and assumptions!
• Only include information that helps you make informed decisions about the user interactions, the visual design, and the product functionality. Leave out the rest.
• Create separate user and customer personas whenever the users and the customers are not the same people. This allows you to capture the user and the customer-specific needs, and it makes divergent or conflicting goals easier to see.
• Whenever you create several personas for a product, choose one primary persona. The primary persona is the character you mainly design and build the product for.
• Your personas should help the development team empathize with the users and view the product from their perspective. To achieve this, your personas must be believable.
• The template below puts the user or customer modeled as a persona into the user story (based on by Rachel Davies’ user story template).

As , I want <what?> so that <why?>.

• Adjust your persona descriptions, as you learn more about the users and customers and their needs by building prototypes, product increments, and MVPs.
• While personas are a powerful tool, there are instances when they are not appropriate. If you create a product that serves a small user group, then working with personas may not be necessary. Similarly, if your product does not have any end users, the employing personas is not advisable.