Scaling a Product for Diverse Personas

As products evolve, the need to cater to a broader audience often becomes crucial for growth. What starts as a solution for a specific user type, or persona, may need to scale to accommodate multiple personas to expand market reach and increase revenue. However, scaling does not always come with a hefty budget, especially for startups or companies focused on cost efficiency. This is exactly the situation where many Product Owners and Product Managers struggle to find the right balance between feature and value.

Understanding Personas and Their Importance

A persona represents a segment of your target audience with shared characteristics, needs, and goals. With most products, there are some primary personas which satisfy the generic consolidated needs and thus, many products focus on a single persona to establish a strong market position while simultaneously adding a few features that are must haves for other secondary personas. While this solves the primary purpose, it makes scaling difficult as the product becomes customized for the primary persona.

When you decide to scale a product for other personas you now need to look at additional needs that may not suit your primary persona making prioritization difficult. Additionally, the security and compliance requirements might be different for the new personas requiring an overhaul of the existing frameworks and infrastructure.

Imagine a product with primary persona as a GenZ user, and if this product is now scaled to cater to a millennial or a boomer, everything from the functionality to the accessibility to be revisited to make it more relatable to the new audience.

Benefits of scaling to Multiple Personas

Scaling to diverse personas in a product can offer a wide range of benefits enabling organizations to design inclusive, user-friendly solutions that cater to a wider audience while also driving business growth. Some key benefits include:

Increased market reach: By addressing diverse personas, you can tap into new segments.
Diversified revenue streams: Different personas may bring varied monetization opportunities.
Resilience: With a broader user base, the product becomes less dependent on one segment.
Higher customer retention: By addressing diverse needs, you can build trust and loyalty of a larger customer base.
Increased Innovation: Having a larger customer base means you can innovate better according to the unique needs and opportunities presented by the wider audience.

Challenges of Scaling

Scaling from a single persona to multiple personas is not without its hurdles, to start with the whole concept of scaling is daunting and then add the complexity of time and budget to this. These challenges need to be addressed through thorough research and strategic solutioning.

Some of the major challenges in scaling a product are as below:

Increased Complexity: Different personas have unique needs, which can complicate product design and development making prioritization very tricky.
Increased cost and resource requirement: Limited budgets and resource crunch can restrict the ability to cater to all personas effectively. Cost of building with a larger cross functional team comes with its own challenges.
Maintaining Core Value: There is a risk of diluting the product’s initial value proposition by trying to appeal to everyone.
Performance issues: Adding more personas means increased load on the product which was not previously anticipated.
Security and compliance: Scaling exposes product to more vulnerabilities and can lead to data breaches or downtime.
Balancing building vs standardization: Risk of over customizing features for diverse audience can after standardization of product. Also increasing complexity for further scalability.

Strategies for Scaling on a Tight Budget

Despite these challenges, it is possible to scale effectively without breaking the bank. Here are some proven strategies learnt from industry examples.

Lean Approach to Persona Research

Comprehensive persona research does not have to be expensive. Start by leveraging the data you already have:

Customer feedback: Analyse support tickets, reviews, and direct customer communication to identify emerging personas.
Usage data: Examine how diverse types of users interact with your products.
Social media and forums: Monitor discussions to understand broader market needs.

For instance, let us say your project management tool notices increased sign-ups from freelance professionals. A simple survey or quick interviews with these users can reveal their unique pain points and solutioning these pain points can lead to better conversions.

Build an MVP for New Personas

A full-scale product scaling is not necessary when targeting a new persona. We can focus on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—a version that offers just enough functionality to meet the new persona’s core needs – their burning needs.

For example, suppose you are expanding from startups to enterprises. Instead of building an entirely new suite of features, start with essential ones like role-based access control or advanced analytics. Test these features with a small group of enterprise users, gather feedback, and iterate before scaling further.

Reusable Components and Modular Design

To optimize development efforts, adopt a modular design approach. This involves creating reusable components that can be tailored to different personas that can be built and deployed any new personas later.

Take Slack as an example. They initially targeted small teams, its modular architecture allowed easy expansion to enterprise clients by adding features like centralized billing and compliance controls without overhauling the entire product.

Cross-Persona Features

Identify features that serve multiple personas simultaneously. For instance, both startups and enterprises may value a robust task management system. Building such cross-persona features maximizes impact while minimizing development costs.

A fitting example is Canva, which caters to both individuals and businesses. Its core design tools remain consistent, but business users get additional features like brand kits and team collaboration, which do not detract from the core experience for individual users.

Budget Optimization Tactics

When working with a tight budget, every cent counts that is why prioritization will need to be ruthless. Here is how to optimize spending:

Prioritize High-Impact, Low-Cost Initiatives: Focus on features or updates that offer the most value with minimal investment. Use the 80/20 rule by identifying the 20% features that will provide 80% value.

Adapt current features to meet the needs of the new personas instead of building from scratch.
Outsource Tasks: Use resources from other departments, freelancers, or agencies for tasks like market research, design, or content creation that don’t necessarily have to be done by core product team members.
Leverage Open-Source Tools: Open-source software can provide robust functionality without licensing fees. For example, many SaaS products rely on open-source technologies for backend operations.

Measuring Success and Iterating

Scaling is an iterative process. Once new features are rolled out for a different persona, it is crucial to measure their impact:

Adoption rates: How many users from the new persona segment are using the features?
Engagement metrics: Are these users interacting with the product as expected?
Revenue growth: Is the expansion contributing positively to the bottom line?

These metrics will help refine the scaling approach and if the data shows that a feature is underperforming then a detailed analysis of the feedback is needed to be made for re-launch.

Conclusion

Scaling a product from a single persona to multiple personas on a tight budget is a challenging but rewarding journey. By adopting a lean approach to research, focusing on MVPs, leveraging reusable components, and optimizing spending, we can effectively expand product’s reach without overspending.

Remember, the key lies in prioritizing personas that align with your business goals and iteratively refining your product based on data and feedback. With these strategies, even resource-constrained teams can achieve sustainable growth and deliver value to a diverse user base.