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The musician's story a persona study

What need is your service filling? Do you know? For the team at a small startup based out of Silicon valley, that need had changed. The team needed to rediscover why current users were with them, and what was different for those who had left. When a tech call took an unexpected direction we were met with a serendipitous event. The team needed a service designer, and I needed a new challenge. Together we learned the musician's story, the reasons why the service still meets the needs of many today, and unearthed the opportunities for continued growth and market fit. Best of all it gave leadership an understanding of the deep relational value that the service provides today, and a way to communicate that value with investors.

Overview

After using the new, miraculous, technology in the midst of the worldwide pandemic to continue functioning as musicians, a sizable portion of the start ups user base changed. As life went back to normal for the musicians, the startup found itself at a crossroads. Within the organization there were different ideas of who the users are, and what specifically, is bringing them value from the current experience. Facing questions fundamental to the mission and core of what they do, the team and I embarked on this journey together to discover what the world still needs from their service today. 

Problem

There were different ideas of who the users are

A composer and musicians embraceing the benefits of virtual music making. 

This project was different for me. This was my first time taking on contract work. Everything from the initial project outline, the contract agreement, the subject, the space, the size of the organization, and most importantly the team, where all new to me. My first objective was to get to know the people, and what they needed to know most in order to take their next step.

Approach

Get to know the people

This is the invite from the initial meeting with the product manager and two design developers. It was a lot of fun getting to know them and the problem space.

The team wanted to focus on usability, optimizing a feature they were hoping people would use more. Often though, what a team asks for, may not be where they need to start. So my first  task was to identify their riskiest assumptions. The initial discussion with the two designers and the product development manager was open and honest. The initial scope suggested there are specific problems, which were leading to specific navigational issues. I approached the discussion with curiosity. My focus was to understand what the team knows and how they found that out. Eventually these questions backed us into the purpose of the feature and how it related to their strategy. Naturally, who the users are, or rather, who the team thinks they are, and perceived needs followed.

 A short pre-mortem question helped us hammer out the key outcomes the project needed to consider. I recommended that the team take a step back and rediscover who uses the service today, and if the direction the organization is heading maps to their users needs. After the meeting I worked on a proposed outline for a project improving usability. Meanwhile, the product development manager took our discussion back to the leadership team.
 

Identify their riskiest assumptions

Capturing the things that might make this project fail revealed a lack of alignment over the organizations direction. The shared trust and openess of the group is what made this conversation as productive as it was. 

Before moving on the original scope, a usability study, the project development manager reached out for another sync up, this time with the co-founder. They shared an understanding of the current strategy and challenges, and we all agreed on a new scope focused on understanding current members. I worked on an outline that I later reviewed with them, suggesting our approach to this broader scope of work. 
 

Understanding current members

This meeting invitation changed both the scope of the project and my perception of how willing a start up may be to embrace design processes and outside recommendations.

Now it was time to get to know the larger leadership team and unearth a better understanding of what the research needed to cover. We started the project by co-creating a present-day business model canvas together.

Knowing the importance of trust and conflict when discussing how the current business operates, the PDM helped me work through the dynamics of facilitating a meeting with this group. We asked a fun question to get the group to relate to one another and ease us into the more difficult questions the BMC works through. Unearthing the riskiest assumption is easy when a team has vulnerability-based trust. This team had it in spades! The meeting revealed the questions and some assumptions the team had about their users, including nuances of use, and showed me what is important to learn for each team member, and why.

Vulnerability based trust

The team joked with each other, and me as I scribbled their thoughts on the canvas. The lighthearted, yet frank discussion, reassured me that we would work well together.

The team now knew the jobs to be done, pain points, gain creators, and what differentiates them today with  a section of their core user segment.  This foundational knowledge provided a basis for strategic decisions about where they may take the service next. They also had a new way to share that new understanding within their team and with investors, through 19 video clips of the leading reason for using the service, 26 clips of other needs the service meets, and 5 clips of the most memorable experiences. 

 

Over time I saw a shift in what was prioritized and released into the experience after this discovery work. The team focused on addressing the pain points raised through the interviews and survey, and even just a short time later as someone who uses their service, I have noticed a world of improvements all that are in line with what their core user group values the most.

Results

Knowing the value their service brings
Customer Segment Presintation Slide

Along with the video clips were direct quotes, and insights gained from the group we met with. 

Each section above was a lesson learned, from consulting for the first time, balancing time constraints, and working with a new team, to the approach we took together for research,  synthesis, and sharing what was learned.  I rediscovered how much fun it is to get to know a new team, explore a different context, and dive into discovery with a brilliant group of people eager to discover and understand the people who use their service. This opportunity was better than a match, it was a catalyst for growth, both for the organization and for me. A little trust went a long way.

Lessons Learned

A catalyst for growth

Due to timeline and resource constraints we had to innovate on how we learned what we needed to know and in what order. A deep understanding of jobs to be done normally is archived through a qualitative study, but this group needed to know jobs to be done for those who use the service, those who left, and those who never tried it in 1 month with my limited availability. We decided to go broad and shallow in our understanding first, then going deeper with one segment, using the job as a delineating factor between segments. To do this we needed a new way of understanding jobs to be done. We  created a series of fill in the blank survey questions. Because I had not seen a methodoligy like this before, I also pilot tested the questions in my networks and through another survey done for another group to be sure the nature of the answers would get us what we need. 

The broader team at the startup, including engineers and marketing helped me craft the other questions in the survey. These ended up serving as attributes we used to understand the nature of use, specific needs and character qualities that contributed significantly to the persona mapping. We also included some more specific questions about needs and features because they were important to stakeholders. This kept them engaged with what we were learning.  
 

A new way of understanding jobs to be done

The set of questions we used to understand the jobs to be done and create user segments. It was rewarding to see this tested idea provide fast, easy to tag results. 

The team joined me for each interview taking notes I later assembled into 5 journey maps. I found commonalities in each of the unique stories by distilling the actions into jobs to be done and then finding the shared sequence of jobs. This became the backbone of the journey maps, a short story and the final presentation slides.

Distilling the musician's actions into jobs to be done
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The Jobs to be done at the top of each unique story were easier to find commonalities when color coding similarities as you see on the right.  

While responses were slowly rolling in I began tagging and synthesizing the data to look for trends. I was comparing variables manually. As the responses climbed to 200 it was clear I needed a different approach. The Product Development Manager challenged me to consider using pivot tables to compare the variables, as the leadership team valued data visuals and it would be a faster method for getting to findings. I was eager to learn a different approach and grateful for him sharing his wisdom with me. In the long run this approach was just what the leadership team valued, plus it gave their team reusable charts and tables that could be repurposed with future or more ongoing research. After we presented to leadership the initial findings and adjusted our focus a bit. We had a few asynchronous conversations and zeroed in on what user group wanted to understand more deeply through interviews.

 A different approach

We used pivot tables to look for similarities and differences between different attributes of users to where we saw the the most divergence, especially in Jobs to be done and certain aspects of use, we created segments. 

By using video clips from the interviews I let the people who use the service share for themselves their deep intrinsic needs, the most important moments, and the pain points they were experiencing. This authentic storytelling proved to be a strong way to share the story of value with investors. These videos were a powerful way to show the leadership team some at times painful truths about the experience that would point them in a different strategic direction than they were currently heading.

 

The video clips, that I shared throughout the project also provided a low-time commitment way to share (and experince) the users' stories with the team members that could not be present during the interviews or were less involved with the project.

Share for themselves
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Sharing out findings never took just one form. Throughout the project I would update our slack channel, not just to share but also to get feedback. I

The team and I interviewed 7 musicians to understand their journey with music, and how the service impacted that journey. Five of the musicians were very active with the service, you may even call them their biggest fans. I was surprised to find almost all of the folks we interviewed wanted to meet the team and nerd out over techy music talk. They asked questions only the development team could answer, and because of this, I made space at the end of each interview for open dialog with the team, which was a mix of design, developers, and the project manager. 

Their biggest fans

The team chatting with one of the musicians after the interview.

So that the team could have a memorable example, I created 1 unified story based on the sequence of the shared jobs to be done,  pulling real-life experiences from each of the interviews. I turned this story into a roughly drawn 3-minute frame-by-frame video to share. I also tossed in a well-placed pun, because this group didn’t take themselves too seriously. The fun and rather short video captured the ups and downs of the experience of making music today, the emotional need the service is meeting and the key areas of the service still needing improvement.  

A story emerged
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Rough unpolished character sketches were used for each frame of the story. They captured emotion without being fake or staged, they also made it more clear that the story, though based on real experiences, is made up.

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