A case study of creating
B2B industry personas for
a computer vision SDK product
Introduction
This case study details the design of B2B industry personas for a computer vision SDK product at Mobius Labs, a Berlin-based startup that specializes in computer vision training. The SDK was designed to empower non-code users to create custom computer vision models using their own training data. The goal of this specific project was to increase awareness of who we are targeting with our product and gather the information that will help product and sales teams in the shaping of product vision.
Challenge
The challenge of the project was to gather accurate and comprehensive information about our clients, understand their needs, pain point and expectations, and create industry personas that would guide the product development process and sales activities. This required identifying key information and insights, such as the industries they operate in, the decision-making process during the process of deals, pain points and goals of main roles involved, in order to develop personas that accurately represent our target market.
Solution
To address this challenge, I collaborated with another product designer to conduct interviews with a sales specialist and tech lead, who had in-depth knowledge of all our clients and were constantly in conversation with them. We collected data on industries, past clients, and current deals then analyzed the information and designed industry personas for four main industries "content licensing", "internet to print", "broadcasting", and "marketing".
My role
As the lead product designer on the project, I was responsible for coordinating and organizing the design of industry personas. To accomplish this, I played a key role in planning and conducting interviews with the sales specialist and tech lead, using their limited schedules to our advantage. By recording the meetings me and another designer were able to split the roles: I was a facilitator of the meeting, mostly asking the questions and he was collecting insights in the form of Figma sticky notes. Preparing for the interviews we also collected as much data as possible from our clients' contracts and the Hubspot account, creating an overview of all our clients and identifying the patterns and trends of their interaction with our product on the presentations and decision process through making the deals with our company. Based the collected data we highlighted 4 industries we're currently focused the most (content licensing, internet to print, broadcasting, and marketing) and created the industry personas for each of them. We presented the final outcome to the team and the company, ensuring that the entire team had a clear understanding of our target market.
Results
The project was completed within one sprint of two weeks. As a result of the project, we were able to study the experience of working with Mobius Labs clients over the past 2 years. We generalized the industries and honed in on specific companies, as well as the behaviors of the roles involved in the decision-making process. Additionally, we collected customer feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of our SDK product and services.
Based on the feedback from stakeholders after presentation of personas we decided to focus on 2 industries. To validate how we are meeting the needs of these industries with our SDK product we agreed to prepare a prototype of new landing pages and new demo products as the next steps.
Conclusion
By conducting a simple 2 weeks activity we were able to summarize the work of the company during last 2 years and gather the insights about the needs and expectations of our clients inside their industries using real data from the deals we already successfully closed. As a product design I was able to gain a deeper understanding of the sales prospects and identify potential areas of improvement to better serve our clients.
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