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Another year, another massive, exciting E3 showcase. The biggest names in the video game industry brought out their newest games and hardware, including two console announcements (and controllers) from Xbox and a ton of fresh games from PlayStation w…

Customer personas are fictional characters that product managers create to represent the different, common users of a specific product. They exist to help product managers communicate research about their ideal groups of users — and give human faces to these groups. Personas matter because they represent a product’s core customer demographics.

Product managers must make informed decisions about who their customers are, what they need, and how their products will be the solutions. Personas help product managers make these decisions.

But knowing what personas are and why they matter is just the first step towards bringing them to life. Here are some answers to common questions about customer personas:

How are customer personas created?
Because customer personas must be as truthful as possible, they are often created based on data from customer interviews. This data should include insights such as patterns, goals, needs, and attributes amongst these specific groups.

A product manager may also decide to create several personas — but these personas should be as different from each other as possible. Product managers create customer personas to group different types of people together who use the product. This helps them collectively represent segments of the marketplace. Personas represent the different customer groups that a product manager aims to reach with the product, and help to put a “face” on each customer.

What is the goal of customer personas?
Developing personas helps product managers answer questions like, “Why are we prioritizing this idea?” Or, “Why is this feature being shipped as part of this release?” When product managers can answer the “why” behind their decisions, their product teams become more motivated to build, market, sell, and support them — especially when they know how these decisions will help customers.

What are the benefits of customer personas?
Personas help product managers:

Understand customers
Propose solutions
Give human faces to customer groups

What’s an example of a customer persona?
Let’s use the example of a fictional software product (Fredwin Cycling) and five different personas for five different user types. Here is the product vision for Fredwin Cycling:

Product vision:

To be the #1 social fitness app.

Being the #1 social fitness app will require engagement with several customer personas. Here are Fredwin Cycling’s five different customer personas:

Carl: Competitive Rider
Catherine: Casual Rider
Paul: Pro Racer
Cecile: Cycling Vendor
Chris: Cycling Event Manager

The core goal of personas is to help product managers empathize with their customers. When product managers know who their customers are and what they struggle with, they can view challenges from a fresh perspective.

The key role of a product manager is to serve as a customer advocate. The more they know their customers, the more assurance they gain that they are building what customers want and need.

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Photo: AFP

Peter Balazs is the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary and the former European Commissioner for Regional Policy. He currently holds a Jean Monnet ad Personam Chair at Central European University.

After 1990, Balazs joined the Government and the diplomatic service of Hungary several times. He was a State Secretary for Industry and Trade (1992-1993) and a State Secretary for European Integration (2002-2003). He was nominated Ambassador of Hungary to Denmark (1994-1996), Germany (1997-2000) and to the EU in Brussels (2003-2004). In 2009-2010 he was Foreign Minister of Hungary.

Balazs also acquired experience in various EU positions. He was the Government Representative of Hungary in the European Convention drafting the Constitutional Treaty which has become, after several modifications, the Lisbon Treaty. In 2004 he was nominated the first Hungarian Member of the European Commission responsible for regional policy. On the invitation of the European Commission he coordinates priority projects of the Trans-European Transport Network. Lan Anh Vu sat down with Balazs to hear more about his journey and what he thinks the top three priorities are for the EU in the next five years.

As told to Lan Anh Vu

My Career in Politics, Diplomacy and Education
I am originally an economist. I started working in the export company as a young person. One day, I was invited to the Ministry of Foreign Trade, which was in charge of international economic institutions, including the European communities. They offered me a place to go to the Ministry and to the Union with the EC. I was around 28 years old. I accepted the offer, although it was never my objective to work for the State Administration. I wanted to be an export salesman and travel all over the world.

Later, I was in Brussels for Hungarian representation. When I returned, I was placed in the much larger field of international economy organizations as the head of department. Then came the second the big change; after the turn, the system in Hungary changed in 1992. I was again invited to the Ministry of Industry and Trade to be the State Secretary, so I made a big jump. In 1997, there was a vacancy in Germany, I was asked to go to Bonn at that time it was not yet Berlin to be an Ambassador. Then came the time when I shuttled between government jobs, diplomacy, EU jobs and finally the academic world, which is where I am now.

Most things that happened in my life have been unexpected. There are two moments in my life when I wanted to do something. The first was to be an export salesman, in my very early years, in order to travel the world. The second was to work within the EU. These were two of my objectives; the rest just happened to me and was beyond my control.

Challenges
My challenge was to be the first Hungarian Member of the European Commission because everything else was somehow within the politics of my own country. At the time, I was playing on a much higher level in an organization with 25 countries. I had one of the top jobs, was a member of the European Commission, worked with an international team and handled problems at all the European levels. It was above the national level.

Lessons Learned
I’ve learned that once you do something, you must be devoted to the job and you have to do your best to perform. Never be afraid of losing that job. I frequently got difficult jobs. I was the first person in Hungary to deal specifically with European Integration, so I had to establish a new desk at the Ministry in my younger years. When I was named the State Secretary for Industry and Trade, it was a big privatization time. Furthermore, most of my jobs presented new challenges. It’s a great thing when you are invited to do something new. I was mostly called upon to navigate unknown things, and I like those kinds of job.

My Perspective on Life
You can compare life to a journey by train. When you sit by the window on a train, you can see new things and time passes. On a train, you have the time of arrival with life–you never know when the end of the station comes and where it is. It’s a journey, and you must be open to changes in situations. You should be prepared for undefined, uncertain time frames; you never know when you may come to an end. For that reason, you should have some missions that you want to do, as well as ideas of what you want to achieve, within your lifetime.

My Definition of Success
Success is when other people recognize and thank you for solving their problems. I wouldn’t define success as personal glory, rather as solving problems for other people. In this way, you can contribute something to the world.

Top 3 Priorities for the EU
My first point would be to produce fewer problems, because some problems are self-made problems. Nobody asked us to make the single currency–the Euro; we wanted to do it. Some problems are self-produced problems. We need to put these on our shortlist of questions so we can really solve them and achieve something.

Second, we need to find better solutions to external problems, like the refugee crisis, because these are real challenges–not self-made problems.

Third, we need to be very flexible regarding changes. The EU is a very conservative organization. There are excellent jobs available, and once people get a good job in the Commission or Parliament, they want to maintain the situation. I think they should be very open to radical changes because if a system is not open for changes, it will collapse and disappear.

Advice for Young People
Knowing what is happening in the world is very important. There are many important devices, such as television and the Internet, where you can gather information, but you need time to understand what is happening and learn as much as possible. My best advice for young people is to learn languages and everything possible in order to follow what is happening and keep updating things. In addition, you should have personal plans and be flexible in order to change to those plans if necessary–not just stick to things. In other words, be open and flexible so you can adapt yourself to new situations.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

This post is part of “How I Got There” series, which features people around the world speaking about their journeys. What is the path to success? What challenges did people face and how did they overcome them? Lan Anh and her guests answer all these questions and much more. To view the entire series, visit here.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Eighteen years ago this June, I watched Peter Weir’s The Truman Show at the old Loews Nickelodeon theater in Boston, and was transfixed by both Jim Carrey’s performance and the film’s forecast of a society in which the line between fiction and reality would be obliterated between the lines of a television screen. Four years later, I watched Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report at the AMC Fenway in Boston, and was equally fascinated by what I referred to in an unpublished review of the film as “a world in which advertisements will be able to personalize commercials, asthma inhalers will be used to store liquified drugs, cars will be able to travel along the sides
of buildings, and cereal boxes will feature real-time animation instead of stationary drawings.”

As I read Malka Older’s Infomocracy (Tor Books), I felt the same sense of intellectual elation and fascination with the future I felt watching those two films. Actually, I’d contend as great as those movies were, Older’s novel is even better.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I attended high school with the novelist and international aid relief worker. Older was a visionary spirit back then, and Infomocracy proves that time has only enhanced her excellence; this brilliant book is unquestionably one of the greatest literary debuts in recent history.

Infomocracy takes place two decades after the establishment of an international government. Countries are divided into districts known as “centenals,” which can choose to support one of several parties, some corporatist, others populist. In the twenty years since this government apparatus was established, the corporatist Heritage party has been the dominant political force, but as world elections approach, there is concern among those in power that they may be about to lose it.

Older has crafted three distinct and fascinating characters: Ken, an official with the Policy1st party; Domaine, an activist who loathes this particular world order; and Mishima, an operative with Information, the technological behemoth which oversees the elections, and which has become as essential to life as food or water. The only reason I can’t call the interactions between Ken, Domaine and Mishima the most fascinating aspect of the book is that there is no element of this work that is not fascinating.

If I described all of Older’s technological creations, I’d never finish this review; suffice it to say that I hope Older isn’t deprived of credit for the future real-life versions of the innovations she describes in this book. Older’s prose is detailed, philosophical and at times blisteringly funny (describing a global election debate, Older observes that the PhilipMorris party is “famous for their continued defense of the death penalty”).

As I read it, I couldn’t shake the sense that the world Older has created is coming ever closer to reality–and not just her tech ideas. Haven’t we already seen man-made disasters that claim innocent lives, and efforts to manipulate technology to influence the outcomes of elections? How many years will pass before Older’s book is regarded, like The Truman Show and Minority Report before it, as “science fact”?

Infomocracy‘s sequel, Null States, is scheduled for release next year; as soon as I finished the first book, I wanted the second. Older has so many ideas and so much skill in communicating them that I wished both books had been released simultaneously, so as to have full insight into this coming world.

When–not if–Infomocracy is adapted for the screen, I hope that at least a portion of the boldness and spirit of this book will be retained. This is one of the best novels of the decade–of the last few decades, in fact–and Hollywood should do justice by it. By forecasting democracy’s degeneration, Older has become a defining literary voice for this generation.

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