Am I supposed to use the default Atlassian personas for the Empathy Mapping play?

[Deleted user]

I was interested in running the Empathy mapping play with a number of stakeholders in my organization to get a better picture of one specific target audience for the external website. But I'm a bit confused: Can I only run this play if I have extracted some data-based personas from our own customer research? Or am I supposed to "borrow" a persona from the Atlassian material that you are sharing publicly? If so, how do I know the persona I borrow makes sense in relation to the actual users whom I want my colleagues to empatize with? 

[Bernie Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Jonas,

Many thanks for your enquiry. I'd definitely recommend that you run the Empathy Mapping exercise from the perspective of the specific target audience you mention, rather than any other source. 

The Atlassian User Personas were defined following a significant research effort specifically for Atlassian products and services. You may find some analogies with your product or service, however I'd definitely encourage that you adapt to your needs.

Should you not have researched and well defined user personas you may look for feedback from other sources, such as analytics, customer interviews or user feedback to enable you to understand user sentiment as your users interact with your product or service experience.

One idea would be to build a draft empathy map, listing assumptions and then take this empathy map and assumptions to colleagues and customers to test it's accuracy.

Hope this helps?

Cheers,
Bernard Ferguson