I once saw four giant photos, each a with a different smiley person, posted on company elevators. “Those are the personas the marketing team came up with,” an unhappy-looking product manager told me. “They're making a big deal out of them but they don’t help us at all.” It turned out these were buyer personas, profiles of the people who wrote the check for the company’s product. Meanwhile, the product team had developed their own user personas, profiles of the people who used the product day to day.
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In B2B especially, buyers and users are often different people. They have different concerns, motivations, and needs. A product needs to solve for both, as does its marketing. Personas are a team sport. Successful product cultures bring all the functions together to develop a common understanding of buyer and user needs. Do you use both? What works best? Tell me a story.