I will be working along with other Windows SDK team members to define Personas that will represent our customer base over the next few weeks.  The intent is to help us reference our customers when planning for future SDKs.  One of the advantages this will bring is to focus our priorities and resources to specific target audiences.  Some of the day to day decisions are based on assumptions we have about what are customers do with the end result of our work and this project aims to get crystal clear about what exactly customers need from the Windows SDK to do what it is they do.  Before we can provide the right SDK to help customers accomplish their goals we need to first understand what it is our customers “do”.

 

Doing some poking around tonight, to get this think kicked off I ran across the Wikipedia definitions of Persona and Personas and found a couple of excerpts that seem to really capture the spirit of what we are driving at.  “… the Persona is an artifact that consists of a narrative relating to a desired user or customer's daily behavior patterns, using specific details, not generalities…  For more details see Personas.”

 

One aspect of the Persona project that I’m very interested in getting to quickly are high level Scenarios that will be used to articulate what exactly the Personas do with the Windows SDK and how the Windows SDK helps customers develop software.

 

I don’t think we will go as far as the CRM team in documenting our user base but we will capture much of the same information.  Examples of aspects I’m envision are.

·         Bringing an awareness to our team of what exactly is important to our customer base

·         Derive Scenarios and Use Cases that each Persona cares about

·         Provide enough detail to inspire challenges to assumptions about who are customers are and what motivates them

·         Put a face to the name, try to identify community representatives that fit into a given Persona and invite them to interact directly with our team

·         Leveraging Visual Studio Personas and Scenarios as they will closely align with Windows SDK team deliverables

·         Provide another tool for the Windows SDK team to use to determine what are the right Value Add projects to expend time on.

·         Consuming customer data in a format that enables easy translation into Windows SDK Features and Product decisions. 

·         Make this an integral and continuous part of our Windows SDK development product cycle

 

Your comments and thoughts are always welcome.