Personas in collaborating organisations
When you’re working up collaborative activity with another organisation, it’s worth thinking about the personas you have on each side.
For example, if you’re a transit agency, you may have bus drivers, tunnel engineers, property managers, station managers, and environmental specialists. Each persona will be driven by different incentives and have particular constraints. The transit agency personas are different than those at a university (such as professor, student, researcher), or a large multinational company (which might have warehouses, call centres, product developers, marketers).
By considering the types of personas that could be involved in your project, you can help locate potential enablers and challenges in working together.
A way to map out different personas in your collaboration is to adapt the Strategyzer value proposition canvas. We might call it the ‘persona proposition canvas.’ On the right side (circle) you consider the relevant persona in your organization:
what are they struggling with and what do they see as ‘gains’ or good results in their work? This persona could, for example, be the bus driver, the call centre manager or the researcher.
what are the jobs or tasks the persona regularly does?
You can create this on a large white board or flipchart sheet and then use sticky notes to add information to each section of this pie.
The left side of the diagram (square) is your collaborative activity—how will it help this persona to experience gain, reduce pain or accomplish their tasks? Your collaborative session can include sketching out one of these canvases for each of the key relevant personas in the project. The result may reveal areas of opportunity or concern.
Next time you’re bringing two large organisations together to explore how they can work together, don’t forget about the personas involved. Have you tried persona mapping in your collaborations?