Using Personas to Reduce Risk w/ Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst, SVP and Executive Consultant at Leading Agile, goes deep on Personas in this episode of SoundNotes. During the interview Scott and Dave discuss the difference between Proto-Personas and actual Personas, the importance of empathy maps and how to help management understand that making the investment in developing personas is a great way to reduce risk.
This is the first of several podcasts we are going to be posting on Personas, how to create them and why they are so valuable.

Show Notes

00:08 Podcast begins

00:56 Scott’s background

03:00 Why Scott is so focused on understanding the customer

07:10 Scott explains what a proto-persona is

10:51 Why we need to understand the customer’s problem at a deeper level than they do

13:00 The difference between a proto-persona and an actual persona

19:08 Making the case for taking the time to do personas

20:20 Why we start by making assumptions

24:35 Using empathy maps as a tool to help us test our assumptions

26:48 Personas are an investment in understanding the customer and reducing risk

28:52 Helping executives understand why they need to make this investment

30:34 “You put together a plan and you remove risk and uncertainty from that plan”

31:54 Can you stop at the empathy map and how do you move past it into something more data driven

36:00 Getting the data we need to get to actual personas

39:25 Accepting the risk of not moving all the way to actual personas

43:54 What are the most effective ways to collect the data we need

49:39 Once you have all the data, then what?

52:36 What we’ll focus on in future podcasts about personas

53:25 Contacting Scott

Links from the Interview
Scott’s article (which includes some examples)
Progressively Elaborated Users http://tynerblain.com/blog/2017/09/10/progressively-elaborated-users/

Dave Gray’s updated Empathy Map
https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a
Contacting Scott
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sehlhorst
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sehlhorst/
LeadingAgile site: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/scott-sehlhorst/