User Research
Proto-Persona Development
I spearheaded a 6-week UX strategy and research sprint, developing 9 proto-personas that mapped key decision-makers and influencers across an industrial value chain.
Year :
2021
Industry :
Industrial Packaging and Paper
Project Duration :
6 weeks
Challenge :
The client faced a significant challenge: effectively targeting outreach in a diverse, highly technical market. Their customer base, from board engineers to procurement managers, spanned the entire value chain, each requiring unique value propositions. With the goal to expand reach and position as experts in the industry, it was vital that the team had a shared, research-backed understanding of their buyers and influencers.
Solution :
Proto-Personas would help to align the teams and identify key areas of opportunity.
Approach:
My process focused on rapid insight generation and collaborative validation.
Project Kickoff: Aligned on project goals, success metrics, and key stakeholders.
Rapid Survey: Conducted a quantitative survey to capture role types, responsibilities, decision criteria, and communication channels from existing contacts.
Discovery Workshop: Facilitated a cross-functional workshop to map customer journeys, pain points, and existing assumptions about buying decisions.
Initial Persona Synthesis: Developed 9 proto-persona drafts, synthesizing survey and workshop insights to identify gaps and testable assumptions.
Targeted Interviews: Conducted qualitative interviews with key decision-makers and influencers to validate motivations, constraints, and language.
Validation Workshop: Presented findings, collaboratively refined personas, and identified open questions and evidence strength for each.
Final Delivery: Provided persona artifacts, narrative use cases, and actionable recommendations for next steps.
What the Personas Captured:
Each proto-persona provided a clear profile, including:
Key Role Archetypes: (e.g., OEM, procurement lead, sustainability officer, marketeer, etc.).
Core Motivations: Primary goals, decision criteria, pain points, and preferred communication channels/content formats.
Influence Maps: Illustrating inter-persona relationships within the purchase lifecycle.
Evidence Levels: Tagging insights as validated or assumed to guide future research prioritization.
Deliverables & Outcomes :
Key Deliverables:
9 detailed proto-persona sheets (one-page format with evidence tags and messaging hooks).
Influence diagrams, showcasing end-to-end position and decision influence.
Comprehensive research summary and interview notes.
Workshop artifacts and a prioritized list of future research opportunities.
Strategic recommendations for integrating personas into marketing, sales playbooks, and customer service scripts.
Outcomes:
The project delivered tangible results that immediately impacted business operations:
Enhanced Consensus: Fostered a shared, pragmatic understanding of target buyers and influencers across the team, significantly reducing internal guesswork and aligning outreach strategies.
Immediate Business Application: The personas were immediately adopted, informing targeted email campaigns, refining sales outreach segmentation, and shaping customer service FAQs.
Optimized Resource Allocation: By clearly tagging evidence strength, the client could prioritize follow-up research effectively, saving both time and budget by focusing only where validation was most needed.
Takeaways & Next Steps :
Key Learnings:
"Same industry" doesn't mean "same audience." Different roles across the value chain have distinct decision drivers.
Proto-personas are most effective when coupled with evidence tags, which guide actionable insights and future research priorities.
Small, structured workshops are invaluable for accelerating cross-functional alignment and making research findings immediately actionable.
My Recommended Next Steps:
Execute pilot campaigns tailored to each persona, tracking engagement metrics.
Develop the highest-impact proto-personas into fully validated personas through expanded interview sets.
Integrate persona insights directly into sales enablement and onboarding flows to ensure consistent team usage.
More Projects
User Research
Proto-Persona Development
I spearheaded a 6-week UX strategy and research sprint, developing 9 proto-personas that mapped key decision-makers and influencers across an industrial value chain.
Year :
2021
Industry :
Industrial Packaging and Paper
Project Duration :
6 weeks
Challenge :
The client faced a significant challenge: effectively targeting outreach in a diverse, highly technical market. Their customer base, from board engineers to procurement managers, spanned the entire value chain, each requiring unique value propositions. With the goal to expand reach and position as experts in the industry, it was vital that the team had a shared, research-backed understanding of their buyers and influencers.
Solution :
Proto-Personas would help to align the teams and identify key areas of opportunity.
Approach:
My process focused on rapid insight generation and collaborative validation.
Project Kickoff: Aligned on project goals, success metrics, and key stakeholders.
Rapid Survey: Conducted a quantitative survey to capture role types, responsibilities, decision criteria, and communication channels from existing contacts.
Discovery Workshop: Facilitated a cross-functional workshop to map customer journeys, pain points, and existing assumptions about buying decisions.
Initial Persona Synthesis: Developed 9 proto-persona drafts, synthesizing survey and workshop insights to identify gaps and testable assumptions.
Targeted Interviews: Conducted qualitative interviews with key decision-makers and influencers to validate motivations, constraints, and language.
Validation Workshop: Presented findings, collaboratively refined personas, and identified open questions and evidence strength for each.
Final Delivery: Provided persona artifacts, narrative use cases, and actionable recommendations for next steps.
What the Personas Captured:
Each proto-persona provided a clear profile, including:
Key Role Archetypes: (e.g., OEM, procurement lead, sustainability officer, marketeer, etc.).
Core Motivations: Primary goals, decision criteria, pain points, and preferred communication channels/content formats.
Influence Maps: Illustrating inter-persona relationships within the purchase lifecycle.
Evidence Levels: Tagging insights as validated or assumed to guide future research prioritization.
Deliverables & Outcomes :
Key Deliverables:
9 detailed proto-persona sheets (one-page format with evidence tags and messaging hooks).
Influence diagrams, showcasing end-to-end position and decision influence.
Comprehensive research summary and interview notes.
Workshop artifacts and a prioritized list of future research opportunities.
Strategic recommendations for integrating personas into marketing, sales playbooks, and customer service scripts.
Outcomes:
The project delivered tangible results that immediately impacted business operations:
Enhanced Consensus: Fostered a shared, pragmatic understanding of target buyers and influencers across the team, significantly reducing internal guesswork and aligning outreach strategies.
Immediate Business Application: The personas were immediately adopted, informing targeted email campaigns, refining sales outreach segmentation, and shaping customer service FAQs.
Optimized Resource Allocation: By clearly tagging evidence strength, the client could prioritize follow-up research effectively, saving both time and budget by focusing only where validation was most needed.
Takeaways & Next Steps :
Key Learnings:
"Same industry" doesn't mean "same audience." Different roles across the value chain have distinct decision drivers.
Proto-personas are most effective when coupled with evidence tags, which guide actionable insights and future research priorities.
Small, structured workshops are invaluable for accelerating cross-functional alignment and making research findings immediately actionable.
My Recommended Next Steps:
Execute pilot campaigns tailored to each persona, tracking engagement metrics.
Develop the highest-impact proto-personas into fully validated personas through expanded interview sets.
Integrate persona insights directly into sales enablement and onboarding flows to ensure consistent team usage.
More Projects
User Research
Proto-Persona Development
I spearheaded a 6-week UX strategy and research sprint, developing 9 proto-personas that mapped key decision-makers and influencers across an industrial value chain.
Year :
2021
Industry :
Industrial Packaging and Paper
Project Duration :
6 weeks
Challenge :
The client faced a significant challenge: effectively targeting outreach in a diverse, highly technical market. Their customer base, from board engineers to procurement managers, spanned the entire value chain, each requiring unique value propositions. With the goal to expand reach and position as experts in the industry, it was vital that the team had a shared, research-backed understanding of their buyers and influencers.
Solution :
Proto-Personas would help to align the teams and identify key areas of opportunity.
Approach:
My process focused on rapid insight generation and collaborative validation.
Project Kickoff: Aligned on project goals, success metrics, and key stakeholders.
Rapid Survey: Conducted a quantitative survey to capture role types, responsibilities, decision criteria, and communication channels from existing contacts.
Discovery Workshop: Facilitated a cross-functional workshop to map customer journeys, pain points, and existing assumptions about buying decisions.
Initial Persona Synthesis: Developed 9 proto-persona drafts, synthesizing survey and workshop insights to identify gaps and testable assumptions.
Targeted Interviews: Conducted qualitative interviews with key decision-makers and influencers to validate motivations, constraints, and language.
Validation Workshop: Presented findings, collaboratively refined personas, and identified open questions and evidence strength for each.
Final Delivery: Provided persona artifacts, narrative use cases, and actionable recommendations for next steps.
What the Personas Captured:
Each proto-persona provided a clear profile, including:
Key Role Archetypes: (e.g., OEM, procurement lead, sustainability officer, marketeer, etc.).
Core Motivations: Primary goals, decision criteria, pain points, and preferred communication channels/content formats.
Influence Maps: Illustrating inter-persona relationships within the purchase lifecycle.
Evidence Levels: Tagging insights as validated or assumed to guide future research prioritization.
Deliverables & Outcomes :
Key Deliverables:
9 detailed proto-persona sheets (one-page format with evidence tags and messaging hooks).
Influence diagrams, showcasing end-to-end position and decision influence.
Comprehensive research summary and interview notes.
Workshop artifacts and a prioritized list of future research opportunities.
Strategic recommendations for integrating personas into marketing, sales playbooks, and customer service scripts.
Outcomes:
The project delivered tangible results that immediately impacted business operations:
Enhanced Consensus: Fostered a shared, pragmatic understanding of target buyers and influencers across the team, significantly reducing internal guesswork and aligning outreach strategies.
Immediate Business Application: The personas were immediately adopted, informing targeted email campaigns, refining sales outreach segmentation, and shaping customer service FAQs.
Optimized Resource Allocation: By clearly tagging evidence strength, the client could prioritize follow-up research effectively, saving both time and budget by focusing only where validation was most needed.
Takeaways & Next Steps :
Key Learnings:
"Same industry" doesn't mean "same audience." Different roles across the value chain have distinct decision drivers.
Proto-personas are most effective when coupled with evidence tags, which guide actionable insights and future research priorities.
Small, structured workshops are invaluable for accelerating cross-functional alignment and making research findings immediately actionable.
My Recommended Next Steps:
Execute pilot campaigns tailored to each persona, tracking engagement metrics.
Develop the highest-impact proto-personas into fully validated personas through expanded interview sets.
Integrate persona insights directly into sales enablement and onboarding flows to ensure consistent team usage.