Switching From Product-Centricity to Customer-Centricity With Personas

What is more important: the product or the customer? It's impossible to say with certainty which approach is better. Microsoft is doing well despite its product-centric focus, whereas IBM, which relies on customer experience (CX), is not far behind. If you don't want to part with potential customers prematurely, the customer-centric approach is the way to go.

Becoming a customer-centric organization is not easy. Personas are collective images of your customers backed up by research. They let you hide any number of people behind a fictitious person and target as many personas as you consider reasonable. Building a persona is an intricate process that requires time and effort, but it pays off with a lot of insights.

Personas help you enter the market with confidence, create and redesign products or services, segment customers, visualize data, find flaws and opportunities in customer experience, use customers' vocabulary, and promote and sell more. Knowing the pains and goals of personas, you can soothe their pain points with your product or service for improved customer experience.