The Persona and Journey Map Playbook

Creating and utilizing personas and journey maps is common practice for those on a product, service (i.e. Customer Experience (CX)), or marketing team. These documents are often created at the beginning of any new initiative and are used in conjunction with design thinking methodology as part of a user-centered design process. Product leaders often refer to them as they are planning out product roadmaps, aligning with executives, and when defining KPIs.

User experience designers, user researchers, service designers, and product managers are roles often responsible for creating these documents; Other roles can include business analysts, product strategists, and project managers. In some organizations, this can fall to any role responsible for understanding user needs such as HR specialists, supply chain managers, graphic designers, data scientists, or even administrative staff. This book will engage those new to these concepts by providing a solid foundation of personas and journey maps through relatable examples and metaphors to aid in their understanding.

Being able to produce and utilize personas and journey maps is expected of any product design team member. Those in junior to mid-level roles need to be able to utilize existing frameworks and examples in order to produce these documents. This book will provide a guided approach that walks through what information to include, what research methods to use, and how to incorporate objective findings into the final deliverables. Those in more senior roles need to be able to create a strategy for how personas and journey maps work together across different product portfolios and across product experiences. This book will help those in senior positions increase their value and leadership visibility by creating more relevant personas and journey maps that align with the needs of stakeholders (high altitude), product leaders (mid altitude), and individual product team members (low altitude).

What You Will Learn

- Why many existing persona and journey maps fail and learn a new approach to personas and journey maps based on the concept of altitudes.

- What details a personas and journey map should (and should not) have that will provide the most value to an organization to make decisions related to its users.

- What user research activities should be used and how to effectively synthesize insights to inform personas and journey maps.

Who This Book is For

Creating and utilizing personas and journey maps is common practice for those on a product, service (i.e. Customer Experience (CX)), or marketing team. Other roles can include business analysts, product strategists, and project managers. In some organizations, this can fall to any role responsible for understanding user needs such as HR specialists, supply chain managers, graphic designers, data scientists, or even administrative staff.