The biz of Biz Ops - effective Ops start with this specific foundation
The biz of Biz Ops - effective Ops start with this specific foundation
In this article I present to you the (not so hidden) secret of effective Operations, namely rich understanding of your ICP/Personas
We are sitting in a shuttle, driving from the Marrakesh airport to our boutique hotel. We pass by rows of beautiful houses, all a gradient of orange. We pass by massive structures, with towers and flags, looking majestic over us. It’s getting dark and we see in the distance a bunch of houses, slightly tilted. Our guide points out “You see these? Beautiful but they didn’t last. They were built on shaky sand. There is water running seasonally underneath. No-one bothered to check when they were constructing them. And now from underneath their weight, these houses are slowly sinking. It’s a pity.”
In the biz of Biz Ops series, I speak a lot about building the engine for a company. How to structure, how to analyse business opportunities, how to make an impact. But through this short exchange with our guide it dawned on me that building an engine and forgetting the foundation of why you do what you do, will inevitably, slowly or faster, lead to your demise.
And that foundation my friends is understanding your customer. Also known as your Ideal Customer Profile, and Personas.
Why is it so important to know your customer? Ask yourself if you know what “knowing your customer” means to you. Why do you care? How do you use the information? Who else uses it? How do they use it? When?
As an example, at this point in where our start up is at, it is about prioritising the relevant customer need and not wasting our fancy engineering and product resource on vanity projects. It is about building the best customer experience - through marketing, sales, product, enablement… - through every touch point.
So, how do you build that foundation? To be clear, Biz Ops can be involved in this work in one of two ways: as Drivers of the work, if they have the skill to develop segmentation. Or as Alignment leaders, if they don’t have the subject matter skills. Either way, they need to orchestrate the project to ensure the output can be used by numerous teams.
First, let’s understand what work you need to do as a subject matter expert.
How to develop ICP and Personas
Segment segment segment.
Step 1: understand the basics of your ICP and Persona
ICP - company level; Persona - dramatised story of an individual from your ICP
through your own data, what are the commonalities?
If the data is scarce or doesn’t provide strong signals, move on
Step 2: speak to a selection of your most successful customers
Identify what their background is
Uncover what their frustrations are
Understand why and how they found you and your product
What excites them about it
Step 3: find the common themes
Find homogenous groups, and their correlations
Find groups that talk amongst themselves, or go to the same “places”, that you can target
Find similar ways of thinking, similar frustrations, similar expression of benefits
Second, design and lead the day to day process.
How to run an ICP/Persona discovery process
Journey-led ICP/Persona discovery.
We run this whole process in the TheyDo platform. The benefit is you can plot the whole customer journey, from the time people were hanging out in their garden, through to getting frustrated at work about the then solution of a problem, to finding you, and your product, comparing your company, buying, using... include all the steps you can think of.
In a dedicated TheyDo research discovery Journey, plot the steps customers go through
Then add the first swim lane - “Questions we want to ask”
In a collaboration with all internal teams, collect raw questions from your teams. As many as possible. The value is they will take a slightly different point of view on the journey (e.g. marketing will want to know about channels, product about first impressions and so on) and will ask things relevant to their work. They might add some steps too
Biz Ops consolidates and turns into a workable questionnaire - something to guide your discussion with an ideal customer
Write and store the questions in the Persona template. Keep that template for later use
Conduct interviews, best done by the Biz Ops lead and other team members to support and build empathy with customers
Consolidate the findings in an Insights swim lane. Note pains, gains, observations, and of course quotes. Use the colours to make it pop
Create hypothetical Personas, tentatively called Group 1, Group 2 (if you noted more groups then add those too). Start with small groups of people you noticed sharing common traits or better attitudes
Link the Personas to the Insights based on who mentions these insights
A personal favourite: on your big screen - zoom out. See the whole Journey, with the coloured Insights - pains and gains and observations. You will see the common themes for the Persona Groups. You will see where they overlap and where they have different takes on things. Magic! 🪄
Write up your Personas. Time to give Group 1 and Group 2 a rich story and a decent name. Yes, decent is fine. I leave the name crafting to the experts 😅
Voila!
Now our persona information is traceable to the research and lives in the same platform we use to track customer journeys.
Note the repeatability: We have created a 1) research Journey template, with example raw questions; and 2) a ICP/Persona template, with the interview questions on both ICP and Persona level.
This way the Biz Ops team, or other team members, can pick up again in due time, to repeat the steps and find out new information, new themes, and ultimately new segments.
And it doesn’t end with the external customer. As your organisation grows, you have “internal customers” for your work. Understating who they are, what they care for, and how they work, makes your life clearer, their life easier, and builds camaraderie. I have numerous processes now outlined as internal customer journeys and hey ho prioritising work that takes process pain away helps my “internal customers” help our external customers better!
You know you know your customer when you can say you know them, AND their customer.