This powerful summary serves as a vital asset for the entire company, not just the design team. It serves as a detailed and complete characterization of product users and their needs.
User research is at the center of user experience design. Research can produce volumes of valuable insights about user needs. Distilling research findings into useful artifacts is an indispensable part of the process. Providing well-conceived, informed resources that teams can return to again and again enables them to confidently design and build successful product experiences.
One effective approach I refined recently combines two methods of representing user needs:
Personas - characterize the user as a whole person and provide a foundation for empathy. Include motivations and frustrations experienced by a user as they serve in their role. Individual personas are captured in detail and updated over time based on ongoing user research.
Jobs to be Done - capture the most important functions the user needs from the product. Clarifies specifically how the product enables the user to be successful. JTBD canvases are captured for each user and updated over time based on evolving user research.
Power of the matrix
In practice, separate artifacts are created to represent details of each persona. Likewise a detailed JTBD canvas is created. A powerful combination of these two frameworks can be summarized in a matrix, much like the example below. This powerful summary serves as a vital asset for the entire company, not just the design team. It serves as a detailed and complete characterization of product users and their needs. It also serves as a useful framework for tracking the evolution of target users and their needs.