Persona-Driven Product Strategy (without huge research)

I know basically everything about personas (I co-authored the Persona Lifecycle books). I know that most teams either dislike personas or have an executive who dislikes them, and I completely understand why. And I agree!

I've come up with a new way to do personas get the benefits we all know they could and should have in the product strategy, ideation, design and development process. Instead of boiling data down into fake people, I start by creating Alignment Personas that capture, consolidate, and align deeply-held assumptions about users and customers. The exercise itself is quick and results not just in the alignment personas, which you can then use as hypotheses so that your data collection and analysis can be surgical vs sprawling, but also in alignment in the way key stakeholders think and talk about users. It's magical.

If you are doing ANY persona effort using any method and are at all stuck, or you're about to start one and you have questions, call me. I can probably get you back on track within an hour or so.