Let's analyze the conflict between Persons and Works, learn how to sharply grow in sales and development speed with their help. To do this, we will understand who the Persons and Works are, why they are needed, where to get them and how to achieve the desired goals with their help.
Persons
First, let's clarify the terminology. Let's start with Person. Let's even say this: "Personality Method". It is a set of techniques or techniques used in marketing and product design to describe the target audience or its segments. You often hear the term Target Audience Portrait. This is almost exactly what we are talking about, only today we will figure out what alternatives are and in what cases Persons are good, and when it would be better to replace them, and if so, how.
The persona method is used to describe the audience. If you already have an audience, then you can study it. For example, a user of a commercial account on any social network can easily view the socio-demographic characteristics of the audience of his group, or even better - delve into Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics of his site and find the age composition, gender, interests and much more. It is not difficult to find this or a similar characteristic of the audience:
- men / women - 60/40
- age - 24-55
- interests: entertainment, travel, IT, outdoor activities, children
- plus many other parameters that may or may not be important.
What does it give us? Almost nothing.
Therefore, such an audience is divided into segments that are homogeneous according to some characteristics, preferably with reference to your key metrics. These are usually sales.
Let's imagine a very specific case from life, when we decided to segment such a very abstract audience, as we just saw above. This is one service with online clothing sales. Among the metrics that were assessed, of course, there was revenue, and revenue by time of day to see what time to expect the highest server load. It turned out that the maximum load should be expected in the evening after 21:00 and until 01 of the next day. Fine! And here are Persons ?!
Dealing with the workload, we found out: about 70% of traffic at this most profitable time was for women 25-40 years old with the interests of “children, beauty, fashion, entertainment”. Let's supplement this portrait with the fact of buying clothes on the Internet in the late evening hours and you can get this Person:
Anya, 27 years old, married, a sales manager at a large FMCG company, now on maternity leave to take care of a child. The whole day she is busy with a small child, trying to be a good mother and guardian of the family hearth. Likes to cook, travel and look good. She does yoga and Pilates, loves shopping.
Our "Anya, manager on maternity leave ..." is already a person. There are usually several such persons according to the number of the most important key segments of our audience, which we animate using the persona method. We'll figure out what to do with them a little later.
Work
First, I propose to imagine all the services that are created by startups, and all the solutions that are developed, in the form of a kind of hired employees that a user or consumer hires to do some kind of Work for them. For example, Uber will quickly find you the nearest driver who is ready to take you where you want for a small commission, Prisma will decorate your photos for Instagram, which advertisers hired to buy some of your attention, in order to sell you some more services that do any Work for you. Etc.
If not very clear, then let's turn to our “Anya, 27 years old”, who, after her baby fell asleep, instead of shopping, can go, for example, to electronic design courses to decorate her Instagram for moms with bright pictures. To do this, Anya installed herself Photoshop or Illustrator, which do work for her to create creatives. Or maybe this is not Anya, but a completely different person who, it seems, cannot end up in the same target audience with Anya.
Meet Volodya:
Volodya, 37 years old, a specialist in mobile interface design, single, bearded, loves skiing, motorcycles and airbrushing, blogs about airbrushing for choppers, uses the same tools, but for 10 years and at the pro level.
The persons are completely different, and the works that Anya and Volodya "ordered" from these services are the same.
Why all this?
Fine! - Your marketer will say when he enters the advertising office and sees analytics describing your Persons. Further a matter of technology! Set up targeting and go! At first everything is fine, then worse, but still profitable and in the end the audience with the face of Ani, 27 years old or some other, will be exhausted or become expensive.
Therefore, it makes no sense to torment your audience with an increase in the impressions of advertisements that annoy them. They don't get clicked on because they don't work.
Conclusion: The persona method is well suited for marketers to work in wide acquisition channels, when the profile of these Personas is well understood. But until the channel of attraction is exhausted. Stop pushing your product. Everyone who saw and wanted has already bought.
In theory, personas are also great for introducing your developers to the end customer. Let's hope that they are no, no, and they will put themselves in Ani's place and do something just for her. Probably. Unlikely. Or definitely not, if only by accident. And here's why: the fact that Anya is 27 or that she is on maternity leave does not at all explain that she needs Photoshop or Illustrator. Simply because there is no connection between them. And if you tell the developers that Anya, and by the way, Volodya, needs these tools to make creatives for social networks as quickly and beautifully as possible, since they are engaged in design and SMM, then it will be much more useful for them.
To make it clearer, we will illustrate this situation, as is customary in the Jobs to be done methodology, which was developed specifically to solve such problems with immersion to specific user problems. It was from here that the "work" began.
How does the Works work?
To help developers, or in general anyone interested in this, benefit from knowledge about the Jobs, Job Stories are compiled according to this template:
- [situation description / context]. I blog for moms like myself. Or I run a Behance page with airbrushing sketches.
- [motivation]. I want to have a handy tool for creating creatives for my blog on social media.
- [result]. To get great results that will make me stand out for the quality of work and professional level of implementation.
Anyone, having read such a Jos story, will be able to draw some conclusions on promising areas of development. When I showed the draft of this article to my friends, they gave me two options at once:
- Create presets of image sizes taking into account the standards of different social networks
- Create tools that emulate an airbrush
Moreover, through simple calculations, you can find out that the design market in SMM is slightly larger than the airbrushing market, which means that we can conclude that the option of developing size presets for social networks is a more profitable development direction. Accordingly, priority should also be given to him.
Now let's get back to Personas for a moment. Will the description of the Persona of Anya, 27 years old, make it possible to draw the same conclusions? Of course not. This is the main difference between Works and Persons. They are good each in their own way, but in different situations.
So what should you choose?
We already know when personas work well: when you need to target using persona characteristics or just visualize the target audience for some slightly specific purposes, like getting your team to know the consumers of the product you're making. You can also create creatives for advertising campaigns based on Persons, which are intended for the same Persons, then the target audience will recognize themselves and react to advertising.
About Jobs and Job Stories, we learned that they allow you to identify areas of development and prioritize them. Of course, you can use such examples of solving consumer pain in advertising campaigns, it also works.
If you've read this far, it means that you are interested and especially for you there is another recipe for how to use Persons and Job Stories. Namely together. They complement each other perfectly. Reinforce ad campaigns customized for Persons with Job Stories illustrations, then the former will grab attention, and the latter will serve as a trigger for the client.
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When we found this out, we simply combined the portrait of the target audience with a plot about fines for violating the boundaries of land, thereby increasing the conversion several times.
Tactics and strategy
It is extremely useful to use this technique when building a long-term strategy.
Returning to the same Uber in this context, we will try to make the best offer of all competing services and defeat all other taxi aggregators. But does this mean that Uber's business model is unshakable in the long run? I doubt it.
Here's a Job Story for me as a consumer of such a service:
- [situation description / context]. I have a meeting today in the city center
- [motivation]. I want to get to this meeting and not be late
- [result]. In order not to look like a non-punctual person
Obviously, it's not just Uber that can be hired to get me downtown by the time of the meeting. Scooters, the subway, and my own legs will suit me. That is, there are always competitors.
You can endlessly improve your product and defeat other taxi aggregators and still lose in the end. Think of Nokia… The most far-sighted players understand this and rely on constant innovation. My favorite example is the iPod, it was taken apart like hotcakes on market day, and now Apple releases an iPhone that practically kills its own product. But along with it, it kills almost all other smartphones on the market, leaving behind the entire market that belonged to the iPod.
This is a strategy. In the long run, you need to focus on solving the user's problems in order to leave them behind. While right now, to solve tactical tasks, such as setting up the same advertising campaigns, we again use the Person method.
What is the result
Now we know who, when and for what purposes can use the Works and the entire Jobs to be done framework, and when we can get by with the Person method. But summing up, it is important to emphasize: if you are developing your startup seriously and for a long time, then it is critically important to use the Jobs to be done methodology. We'll have to come to terms with the fact that any business that consists in the production and sale of a product will obviously lose to the business that the user hires to solve his problems. Understanding these differences will move you and your business from being just good to being innovative.