UX STRAT Online 2021 Presentation by Angel Brown, Digitas Health
UX STRAT USA 2017: Nalini Kotamraju, "Data and the Persona: An Organizational Romance"
1. Data & the Persona: An Organizational Tale
Nalini P. Kotamraju, Ph.D
Vice President of User Research & Analytics, Salesforce
UXSTRAT, Boulder, CO, USA, September 18-20, 2017
2. Hello, I’m Nalini. I’m a
sociologist by training. I lead
User Insights & Analytics at
Salesforce... And sometimes
I gesture earnestly.
7. Intelligent Customer Success Platform
Lightning
Einstein
Thunder
Data Platform
Applications
Platform
force.com
Heroku
Component
Exchange
Predictive
Analytics
Machine & Deep
Learning
Natural
Language
Processing
Data Management
Platform
CRM Data
IoT & Social
Data
Sales Service Marketing AnalyticsCommunity App
s
Commerce IoT Quip AppExchange
19. WHAT WE ALL KNOW ABOUT PERSONAS
Align organizations
Create empathy
Keep users at the
center
Are the“user” in user
stories
Anchor tasks
Provide a common language for companies
Become stale
Are fun to makeTime-consuming to
create
20. WHAT WE WANTED FOR OUR PERSONAS
Stability ModularityBroad Usage
Able to withstand to
small changes in
features and
product landscape
Used not just by
designers, but by entire
T&P (Technology &
Products) organization
Structured to fit
with other data
sources within
Salesforce
23. Salesforce Sales User Personas
Manage & train reps
Prep for meetings & draft contracts
Hold sales meetings & close deals
Forecast & report
Manage tools for Sales team
Find & qualify leads
Answer inbound leads
Prospect in existing accounts & upsell
Maintain relationships & renewals
Primary job function
Secondary job function
Sales
Leader
Deal
Closer
Data
Expert
Pipeline
Builder
Trusted
Advisor
24. We conducted a large-scale
survey and asked how much time
participants spend on a number of
core sales tasks on average each
day
25. We focused on
what people do in their jobs
... not just what they do in Salesforce
26. ● “How many accounts are in your territory?”
● “How long have you worked in sales?”
● “How many people report to you (either directly
or indirectly)?”
● “How do you get new leads and contacts?”
● “On an average day, how much time do you
spend doing the following….?”.
SAMPLE BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS FOR SALES PERSONAS
27. We ran a factor
analysis on this
reported behavior
data to understand
which sales tasks
tend to
occur together…
30. Assigned a senior researcher,
Yakaira “Kai” Nuñéz as
persona czarina. She
shepherded the personas,
implemented a communication
plan and served as a domain
expert.
CREATED PERSONA CZARINA ROLE
32. We asked executives in each
product area to contribute
survey questions, accompany
us on customer visits, and
gave them naming rights.
SOLICITED EXECUTIVE BUY-IN
33. WE INVITED DATA SCIENCE ON THE JOURNEY
We partnered with our
Data Science team to
compare reported
behavior and product
usage data