Team Personas

Most decisions in B2B and enterprise don’t get made by one person… they get made by teams of people and how we’ve always created personas to empathize with users has never quite aligned in that space.

In my last article on virtual personas, I ended with why it might make more sense to look at team behaviors and motivations over individuals. The natural next step in persona design (in the realm of B2B and enterprise) is treating the team as the unit of analysis vs individuals. Before I get too ambitious with those ideas (and I plan to later), I want to make a simple case for them first.

What if a persona described a team instead of a single person? Using the same format, and same scannable structure we’re all become accustomed to, but with a shift from “Sarah the marketing manager” to “the marketing operations team at a mid-sized B2B company.”

Even that small shift could change how you think about who they’re designing for.

Why teams and not individuals?

In B2B or enterprise contexts, the meaningful decision-making isn’t done by an individual. The adoption of your software and features depends on how a team responds to it, not any single individual’s view of it. Who champions it, who resists it, who does the IT review, and who actually clicks the buttons day-to-day all influence the wants and needs in a feature or product. Modeling individual users tells you something about user experience but modeling the team tells you about adoption.