This morning I got an email from Backpack, telling me that my business partner added a new page with some meeting minutes from our late night conversation the other day. I clicked the link, reviewed the page, and quickly rushed off a reply to his email saying that it looked good.
Then I noticed it. It wasn’t his email — it was sent by the Backpack system itself, not my friend. I rushed to my Sent Items, and found an email addressed to him. I was really surprised. I had lost context, focused on the author of the page instead of the email, wanted to respond about the content of the page, and the crew at 37signals just made the right thing happen automatically.
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Personas help focus your work on the needs of real-ish users. In most places I’ve been, I’ve seen that over time the customer kind of morphs into a gelatinous mass of jumbled memory as contact with the actual end user is replaced by a marketing proxy. It’s a common experience, and there’s ways to reinvigorate your bowl full of jelly into something resembling actual users again.
Last summer I attended David Hussman‘s Agile Product Planning: Building Strong Backlogs session at the Agile It! Experience 2008 in Reston. One thing that stuck with me was his goofy graphics of personas, and their alliterative names. Among many things, he talked about smells that creep into your planning process and how these usually indicated a loss of focus on the user. Smells like refactoring or engineering stories becoming common place instead of rare, and people talking about a “thing to do that takes time” instead of telling stories about how this work will help someone.
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