Do you and your product management team use “Personas” while defining and managing your requirements? If not, personas may be a valuable addition to your arsenal of tools to help you manage your requirements more effectively.

What is a “Persona”?

A Persona is an abstracted representation of a typical user of your product.
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There was an excellent post recently at the Product Management Tips blog by Gopal Shenoy that discusses how the usability of a product is severely affected when you add a lot of features.

Gopal compares his stand-alone GPS unit vs the built-in GPS unit in his new Toyota Camry car, and poses a question:
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Last week, Paul Young at the Product Beautiful blog made an excellent post titled “Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion?“. His post is based on a recent Fortune magazine article titled “The Trouble with Steve Jobs“, and Paul asks the question:

“Is Product Management incompatible with creating products that inspire passion? Product Management’s function is to discover market needs and fulfill those needs with products. But people don’t buy on need alone; they also buy on emotion and other soft factors.”

This is a very thought-provoking topic, and had several insightful comments – make sure to check out Paul’s post. Here are our thoughts on it.
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