WK Global Personas

One of my first accomplishments after joining Wolters Kluwer US was to secure a major investment in research-based customer personas. To develop the personas, we conducted a series of contextual inquiry interviews:

• Focused on daily task flow & legal research activities

• Extracted interview data to compare and group user characteristics

• Analyzed users across numerous segments to find common groupings

• Clusters were not market-segment driven

Around the same time, a few other regions were conducting similar research and creating their own personas. Once our research was complete, we compared the findings from the US and Italy and found that there was as much as an 80% overlap in the two sets of personas. Based on that finding, I was asked to co-lead a global task force to evaluate the following hypothesis:

While legal systems and laws may be different, for the most part lawyers have very similar behaviors, needs, goals and workflow

The Global Persona Task Force leveraged existing research from three regions ‐ United States, Netherlands & Italy ‐ to create baseline personas. We conducted a series of workshops, both internally and with customers, to identify commonalities.

The resulting globalized personas have enabled the design of products with a global reach. They have:

• Optimized Go-To-Market messaging and activities

• Expands markets: identify opportunities to sell products in other regions

• Informs pricing / business model (e.g., freemium)