Define Your Audience

List your segments: Write down the people or groups of people that could directly use or be affected by your solution, challenge, idea, or product. Define their pains, gains and job-to-be done Describe your different segments: Once all your customer segments are on the board, define their main characteristics. *Example: Are you designing or developing a solution for moms, entrepreneurs, or graphic designers? Write down all the groups with their specific characteristics.

With your team, write down all the people who are directly involved in the buying process (or who are decision-makers) and can affect how these groups make the decision about using your product. In some cases, family or friends are big influencers, and in other cases, the user is not the buyer. For example, parents buy toys for their kids, but kids use them. Kids will use the toy and will decide how long they will play with that toy. The decision-makers are the parents, and they are influenced by other parents and parenting magazines. Note: Continue the discussion focusing on the user or buyer depending on the purpose of the session or project. If you are trying to create a marketing strategy, you may decide to focus on the buyer. You may decide to focus on the user if you are developing a product.

Once the discovery stage is done, you can create a list of reasons why they (user, customer, etc.) need your solution or idea.

In this step, dig a little bit deeper and consider the reason behind that need and what negative emotions they are trying to avoid.

Describe in detail what problem you are solving with your solution or idea.

What keeps your customer up at night? Why? Why is this important? What do they fear? What are they trying to avoid and why? What are they passionate about? What moves them? What brings a spark to their eyes? What do they care about? Why?

In this step, with your team, define how the user and the buyer feel without your solution and how they would feel once they have your solution.

With your team, find out they think about the problem the most. Also, consider when they need this solution the most.

Define the space where your user (customer, etc.) uses the solution. Try to be as descriptive as possible and imagine the space and the things around them.

Now that you and your team have defined the main audience, try to define the size of that target market and the rest of the audience. If the team has an approximate idea of the market size of each audience, we recommend adding that information here. You can add that information to the sticky board once you have all the key points and main information defined here.