Table of contents TL;DR Context and research objective Research process Research artefacts Tactical and strategic outcomes Reflection and personal learnings
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TL;DR. Project overview
Backbase is an established B2B company that develops banking software. Sales of its commercial business banking product were stalling, and the usual growth levers were no longer helping.
The project began with a tactical request to update personas for designers. But the problem ran much deeper: the company had no shared picture of its end users. A flexible archetype system replaced the unused personas and pulled together fragmented knowledge across product, design, and marketing.
The key insight flipped the product logic: banks were spending money building features for employees who have no access to business banking, while creating no value for those who do.
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Impact for the company
The design, product, marketing, and sales teams gained a shared understanding of end users deep enough to use in their actual work.
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Impact for the product
The key insight and understanding of end users shaped the product strategy.
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Impact for sales
Sales teams began bringing the archetype system into client meetings as proof of expertise.
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1 · Context and research objective
→ The research request came from a design manager:
“look at the existing personas and figure out how to make them easier for designers to work with.”
The company already had personas, however they were rarely used. There were 16 in total, and each persona was tied to a specific role within finance departments. The personas were also grouped by business size and therefore some of them duplicated one another. The information was all there, but the framing was not.
Previously existed personas
I could have answered the request literally, but the more I got into the work, the clearer it became: the problem wasn't the personas. The company had grown in a way that made certain things hard to see from the inside, but they became visible from where I was standing. The product was essentially a set of features pieced together into a tailored solution for each client with no coherent product underneath. Neither design, nor product, nor the C-suite had a clear understanding of who was actually using what they were building.
The system needed rethinking: fewer personas grounded in what unites these people, rather than job titles or roles.
→ original research question:
How do finance teams work and how does that context shift across levels of responsibility?
Solid question, but not enough on its own. The results of such research would describe users but wouldn't explain what the business could do with that knowledge.
→ The strategic gap was right there in the original request, so I added a business question on top:
What will a deeper understanding of these personas give the business? Is there a growth opportunity there?