Using Personas to Give Backstories to Your Users

You already know that roles are crucial to any User Story since they help us put context around who a given feature is for.  However, did you know that you can also put context around your roles?  Using a technique called Personas we can create rich backstories for our users to help us better understand not only their role, but also their goals for using the product.

Creating Personas

In my latest Pluralsight course, Creating Effective User Stories, I cover how to create these Personas using the excellent template created by Roman Pichler.  You can see an excerpt from the Personas portion of the course below as well as download Roman's template here.

Personas are an excellent way to better flesh out your team's image of the actual users who will be interacting with the product.  Not only do they help us better understand how a user will interact with the features of our product but, more importantly, they help us understand their motivations for doing so.

And, by better understanding both our users' motivations and backgrounds we can better build products that makes sense for them.