Customer Personas Cards

How well do you understand your end customers? This tool helps you answer that question. By understanding your customer needs, and getting this communicated across to the engineering teams – you can achieve a better product-market fit.

Customer Personas Cards

The Strategic Innovation Canvas gives you and your team the ability to think beyond today in terms of managing your innovation, strategy, or business model portfolio.

Strategic Innovation Canvas

Main Outcomes

Understand Your Customers

Use the Customer Personas Card to understand your customers and how your service might fit to their needs (hint: frequent mismatches occur). Importantly, use the Card to map out many stakeholders and diverse needs on your customer side. Use the Card to gain a deeper insight into all the buyers, influencers, peers, minions, and saboteurs on the customer’s side of the table.

Focus on What Really Matters

With your sharpened insights and understanding, zoom in and focus on what is truly important to your end customers. Can you simplify your service?

Design for Product-Market Fit

Use the newfound insights to review your product, service, and business model. Can you design for a better Product-Market Fit?

Use Case: Global Pharma Company

An aquaculture technology startup had designed a paradigm-shifting solution to a massive industry problem, manually counting sea lice. The team, all engineers, had combined hardware and software innovation to develop new technology and service for the industry. But, struggling with market traction, the Board started to shift the conversation from “product” to “distribution”.

Digging into the customer side of the equation, the team realized they actually had a very limited understanding of the customer’s buying process, their motivations, and most importantly, who the key stakeholders were on the client-side.

Using the Customer Personas Cards, they mapped out the key touchpoints on the customer side, ranging from fish farmers getting their boots wet up to fish health manager, CFO, and CEO. In total, they identified seven different “buyers” on the customer side.

Armed with the Customer Personas Cards, the team then mapped out each of the seven buyers. The process revealed the seven had very different motivations, different jobs to be done, they were vastly different customer types (including one likely saboteur) and, consequently, the company required very different value propositions.

The solution came once the startup founders dug into the customer side more closely, analyzing and understanding, not tech and code, but customer problems, ambitions, and pain points. Combined, this allowed them to design for perfect fit; not company to company, but slightly different to all of the seven “buyers” on the customer side.

Problem It Solves

✓ How to understand our customers better

✓ How to uncover the three levels of customer needs

✓ How to get engineers and builders to listen to and understand the customer

✓ How can we achieve better product-market fit

Who Is It For?

✓ Consultants

✓ Corporate Staff

✓ Business Development

✓ Innovation Teams

✓ Strategy Leadership

✓ Top Management

✓ Startups

✓ Scale-Ups

✓ Accelerators

✓ Incubators

✓ Business Schools

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Thousands of companies, consultants and leaders around the world use Strategy Tools Digital Solutions to build capabilities and deliver business impact. Join them.

Sign Up to Download the Tools

Thousands of companies, consultants and leaders around the world use Strategy Tools Digital Solutions to build capabilities and deliver business impact. Join them.