Meet Mary: Innovating with AI
This is Mary. She’s the person who always helps me to teach the concept of personas - your ideal customers. I personally think the term persona is too technical.
I want everybody to understand that the solution they build isn't the thing to focus on. What matters more are the following questions:
Who’s the frustrated person that we want to focus on? Who’s your Mary?
Why is Mary frustrated? How can we delight her?
These are the questions that I ask in every single innovation workshop.
I don’t want the teams to develop a detailed persona description. I want them to give me real examples for their Maries. I want them to feel Mary’s gaze all the time. I want them to understand it’s all about Mary. I even put the image of the sketched Mary on a chair. As some point they start talking about Mary. They say things like: Mary wouldn't use this term, Mary wouldn't understand this.
Innovation is solving real human pain and creating delight for someone.
How can AI help here?
If you don't have access to your Marys (you should!) AI definitely can help. Optimally use Gemini here, at Google - the company behind Gemini - they seem to know how to create personas.
I'll show you all the steps I use to better understand my "Mary" - additionally to the customer discovery I run constantly - and how to create ideas for content.
Prompt 1:
“I’m creating a user persona for a leaders and executives who are relatively new in their roles and want to make a difference for their customers and their team members. Create this persona.”
Prompt 2:
“Now give me a list of their major fears, wants, aspirations, frustrations”
Prompt 3:
"Now give me 20 ideas for very actionable "how to" youtube shorts i could create."
Before you build a new product ask everyone around “Who’s our Mary here? Whose life do we want to improve?”
This is how human-centric innovation works (and how AI can help).
“It doesn’t matter how amazing your performance or products are, if you target the wrong audience, who don’t recognize, appreciate, or need your value, your effort will be both wasted and rejected.” - “Rejection Proof” by Jia Jiang
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