This document provides an agenda for a Friday Agile Coaching session on customer discovery and personas. It includes activities to help participants list known users and details about them, understand the purpose of customer discovery in identifying target users and their needs, conduct interviews to gather information to develop personas, and create personas and user stories from the persona information. The goal is to help product teams understand their target customers in order to prioritize the backlog and develop the right functionality.

1. Friday Agile Coaching
Customer Discovery and
Personas
June 5, 2015

2. AGENDA
 Who are our users
 Customer Discovery – What is it?
 Personas
 Personas to User Stories

3. User Activity
 List your known users
 List anything you know about your users (Title, Interests, How they use the
product, etc.)

4. Customer Discovery – What is it?
If you have a great idea and no customers or users, it is still a great idea???
3 Questions to ask?
1. Who are the customers and users?
2. Why should we develop the product?
3. Where does the backlog come from?
Why is knowing your customers important? The first step to creating a product is
to understand your target users and customers.

5. Customer Discovery Activity
You have just been added to a new product innovation team that is tasked with
developing a brand new product for Amazon. You need to interview your
potential customers to see:
1. Who they are? (Name)
2. What they like to do? (Details)
3. How they use Amazon today? (Details)
4. What problem needs to be solved? (Goal)

6. Personas
Personas offer a great way to capture the users and the customers and their needs. They are fictional
characters that have a name and picture, relevant charactertistics such as role, activities, behaviours,
and attitudes, and a goal which is the problem that has to be addressed or the benefit that should be
provided
PICTURE & NAME DETAILS GOAL
What does the persona look like? What
is its name? Choose a picture and a
name that are appropriate and that
help you develop sympathy for the
persona.
What are the persona’s relevant
characteristics and behaviours? These
may include demographics, job,
lifestyle, spare time activities, and
common tasks.
Why would the persona want to buy or
use the product? What problem should
the product solve? What benefit does
the persona want to achieve?

7. Persona Activity
Based on your interview take the information that you gathered and fill out the
Persona Template.
We will give you 5 minutes for this activity. You can use this Persona template
located on the Agile Sharepoint site here (Documents – Training – Tools –
RomanPichlerPersonaTemplate).

8. From Personas to User Stories…Ahhh!
So you have a Persona now what do you do? Great Question and I am glad you asked!
Using your Persona to create user stories is way to personalize your work. It is a way
for you to truly recognize who your customer is and not just CR 123456
 Derive Epics from the Persona Goals
 Use their goals to identify product functionality – Persona Epics
 These are high-level and rough
 Decompose Epics into User Stories
 Persona Epic User Story
 Users Stories Ready
 DoR

9. User Story Activity
With the information that you gathered, can you write 1-2 epics/user stories?
We will give you 3 minutes to complete.

10. Personas and Customers just one piece
of the puzzle
Obviously there is more to it than just interviewing some folks and creating
personas to develop a product.
But Customer Discovery is the first piece to this puzzle.

11. Lean Canvas – What is it?

12. What can I do with this?
So, this sounds cool and I think it would help our team…next step?
 We have the tools out on Sharepoint.
 Check with your team to see if this would be of benefit
Always feel free to reach out for assistance!