How To Use Jira To Support Your User Segmentation Strategy
It's common knowledge in the world of digital marketing and eCommerce that personalization results in higher conversion rates, more engaged users, and a better overall brand experience for your customers. What's less common is personalization strategies based on purchase history, user behavior, and psychographic patterns identified across your customer base — these are known as user segmentation.
That's just a fancy way of saying that segmentation groups your customers by how they act, think, and feel. If you can identify these patterns, you can begin to anticipate your customers' needs and build personalized marketing campaigns and user flows.
Let’s say you added a first name to an email. That’s a beginning, but there’s a lot more to personalization strategies than using proper names. Developing deeper insights through segmentation allows for a hyper-targeted marketing strategy and more engaged users.
We'll dive into the weeds of user segmentation, give you some segmenting ideas, and show you how you can incorporate user segments into your Jira projects to help with your Sprint and release planning.
Product managers use Jira to plan based on user segments
If you're in product management, you're responsible for creating an organized product roadmap that aligns with the business goals for that time period. Visualizing the target audience represented in each sprint helps ensure you stay focused on the right functionality to meet your goals.
Often, user personas and customer journey maps are created before user segmenting gets underway. Rich personas and detailed journey maps not only provide valuable information to user experience teams, marketers, and product teams. They are the foundation for building different user segments.
Apply user segments to each stage of your customers' lifecycle, starting with their first contact with your brand, through purchase, onboarding, product usage, and eventually to churn. When personalized through a customer journey stage, marketing campaigns and product user flows enrich your customers' experience, ultimately increasing your profits and impressing your boss.
Lucky for you, Jira can help you do that. Here are some simple ways you can use Jira to organize work by user groups:
- Use labels and corresponding card colors identifying specific user segments.
- Add a custom field as a lifecycle or market segment(s) identifier.
- Create separate Jira projects based on segments.
Easy Agile User Story Maps and Personas are Jira add-ons. These Jira add-on apps are specifically designed to integrate Personas and Easy Agile User Story Maps into your Jira environment.
These tools allow Product Owners to better visualize and plan Sprints and releases with the appropriate balance of user stories for each customer segment. Create a persona for each segment within Jira and you can filter your Story Map by Persona.
User segmentation is as simple or complex as you make it
If you're at the “first name” stage of personalization, you've taken the first step toward building a personalized brand. But now, let’s get started on some basic user segmentation.
Before we get started, you need to understand two principles behind customer segmentation:
- There is an infinite number of ways to segment your customer population. You'll need to do a lot of testing to figure out which segments return the best results for you.
- A single customer can belong to multiple user segments. Nope, this isn't going to be a clean, one-to-one matching of customers and groups. But don't worry — we'll give you some tips on how to keep your segments organized.
Let's start by getting on the same page with what we mean by a segment. A user segment is a collection of users who have something in common. That's it.
Take a look at some typical methods of segmenting a user base:
- Geographic segmentation
- Country, region, state, city, or neighborhood
- Demographic segmentation
- Gender, age, race, religion, marital status, or family size
- Behavioral segmentation
- Past purchases, preferred device (phone, tablet, or desktop), responses to marketing campaigns, or in-app feedback contributions
- Psychographic segmentation
- Lifestyles, beliefs, value systems, interests, or opinions
As you can tell from this list, customer segmentation requires a significant amount of customer data. You probably have a lot of geographic and behavioral data already in your CRM or analytics tool.
Collecting demographic and psychographic data requires you to get more creative. While some customers readily offer this information, others are not so willing to disclose their personal details. Enticing those users through survey completion discounts, promising a more personalized experience, and analyzing social media interactions are a few ways to get a more complete demographic and psychographic disclosure from your user base.
Advanced user segmentation strategies
Basic segmentation is pretty straightforward. Once you've got that down, you'll want to move on to more advanced segmentation techniques to increase your targeting and results. This is where segmentation gets fun.
With advanced user segments, you begin to combine customer attributes across segments. For example, you may create a segment of users from Brooklyn Heights who own a specific product and typically purchase from their phone.
Let's take that example a step further. Suppose next, you create a segment of users from Brooklyn Heights who bought a specific product in the last 14 days, made their last two purchases from their phone, and have never responded to an email campaign. This segment seems like a prime candidate for an SMS campaign. Without segmentation, how would you know?
Another more advanced segmentation strategy if you have multiple products is combining product ownership, purchase history, and affinity data to create segments predicting the next purchase behavior.
An example of product affinity data would be customers who bought Product A also bought Product B 83% of the time.
Then, have your analytics team figure out the typical time lapse between the purchase of Product A and Product B.
Now, build your segments based on customers that bought Product A but have not yet purchased Product B. Your segments will include users that purchased A in the last 30 days, 31-60 days ago, and more than 60 days ago. (Your data will tell you the real numbers based on purchase history patterns within your customer base.)
These segments are ready for everything from targeted campaigns to customers most likely to purchase Product B. Trust us, your boss is gonna love this stuff!
We hope you're starting to see how to get more specific and include more attributes as your segmentation strategy gets more complex and more targeted. We recommend you start generally gradually add complexity to your user segments.
Because your segments are basically filters through which you view your customers, the more you segment, the smaller your population becomes. Customizing a campaign or user experience flow for a population of 50 when you have 5 million customers just doesn't make sense. Gradually adding complexity will let you know when you've gone too far and your population is too small.
Quick tip: Derived versus explicit data
When it comes to specific data attributes for your user segments, don't forget to think about derived versus implicit data. Derived data is presumed based on other explicit data.
Let us explain. Say you are building a music app and one of your user segments is jazz music fans. If a customer completes a form and tells you she loves jazz music, you explicitly know that she is a jazz music fan.
However, if a customer hasn't given you that information, but her music purchase history includes repeated purchases of songs from jazz musicians, you can derive that she is probably a jazz fan.
Think of derived data as a way to combine explicit data that allows you to make some actionable assumptions.
Release the power of segmentation through Jira
By now, you can probably see that user segmentation creates richer personalization experiences for your customers, which garners higher profits and better retention. And with Jira at the top of Gartner's list of agile planning tools, you might be able to use these tips on creating a user segmentation strategy with Jira.
Remember the steps to maximizing your customer and market segmentation strategies:
- Create rich personas and detailed customer journey maps.
- Use personas, journey maps, and internal user data to build meaningful customer segments.
- Build personal marketing campaigns and user experiences for specific user segments.
In Jira, you can visualize, organize, and plan your product work with your user segments in mind. Combined with a roadmap app, Jira is a great tool that allows you to measure and report on the value delivered by each of your user segments.
At Easy Agile, we live by our name — making agile easy is our mission. Go ahead and check out our Jira apps: Easy Agile Personas, Easy Agile User Story Maps, and a flexible Easy Agile Roadmaps.
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WorkflowBuyer Personas: The Ultimate Guide
Whether you’re a marketer, a salesperson, a product manager, or even a developer, your work comes back to one thing: the customer.
When you understand who they are, what they want, how they talk, and how they get things done, you can make better products and promote them in the right way to the right people.
One of the most powerful ways to understand your customer better is to create buyer personas. That’s why we’ve put together a comprehensive guide that includes everything you need to know to create, refine, and use your buyer personas.
What are buyer personas?
Buyer personas lay out the typical characteristics of someone who is likely to buy your products - usually on a single page.
Personas aren’t profiles of real people. You shouldn’t use real names, photos, or personal information on your buyer personas. But they should reflect the general behavior and goals of your real customers
You might create a buyer persona for your ideal customer, or several types of ideal customers that regularly buy your product or service. For example, at Easy Agile, we have personas for the most common roles/titles of our ideal customers, like:- Release Train Engineer
- Product Manager
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Developer
You might also create anti-personas for the types of customers you don’t want to attract.
What are some other names for buyer personas?
You might know “buyer personas” by a different name, depending on your industry, department, or how you plan to use the persona. For example:
- User persona (if your product is software and your user is also the buyer)
- Audience persona
- Customer persona
- Buyer avatar
- Customer avatar
- Ideal audience avatar
- Buyer profile
While there are some slight differences between some of these names and how they're used in marketing or product management, they are often used interchangeably with "buyer persona".What are buyer personas used for?
Buyer personas can be used in just about any role or department.
The main purpose of buyer personas is to gain a deeper understanding of your customers. This will help you:
- Improve targeting and reach
- Increase conversions
- Increase ROI and profitability
- Communicate more effectively
- Identify pain points
- Create products that solve problems
- Improve the user experience
- Improve customer loyalty
- Offer the best value to your best customers
- Help the customers who need your product or service the most
Why create buyer personas?
It’s clear that buyer personas are useful for a lot of different things. But let’s take a closer look at the top 6 benefits.
1. Increase revenue
One case study found ROI increased by 124% by using personas as part of a marketing strategy. Another case study found that personas have the potential to significantly increase time spent on a website and could boost marketing revenue by 171%. This makes sense when you consider that the insights from personas can allow you to use your marketing budget to better target and convert customers.
2. Make good decisions fast
Whether you’re a marketer, salesperson, or product manager, you won’t always have time to run a proper analysis, get consensus from your team, or survey your audience before you make a decision. Fortunately, with a clear picture of your audience always at your fingertips, you can make snap decisions with confidence. Buyer personas allow you to anticipate how a feature or change will impact the buyer (and therefore your conversions, retention, and bottomline) by seeing things from their perspective (goals, objectives, fears, and motivations).
3. Understand how people buy
Buyer personas can help you map out the customer journey, showing how your audience goes from the first point of contact with your brand to purchasing your product. Personas can reveal what issues matter to them, what content they’d like to consume, what platforms they prefer to consume it on, and what products they’re most likely to invest in first. When you understand how people prefer to buy from you, you can make this more streamlined by:
- Creating different funnels for different personas
- Showing people the right thing at the right time
- Tackling objections with your content
- Focusing on the most effective channels for your audience
4. Talk directly to your ideal audience
With clearly defined buyer personas, your team will have the data needed to target ads directly to your ideal audience. Not only that, but they’ll be able to use ad creative that talks to your audience pain points and uses language that they can understand. In turn, this should lead to more clicks, more conversions, and more customers that are the ideal fit for your product.
5. Be more consistent
Buyer personas can help your whole team get on the same page about who your customers are and how to target them. This can help you deliver more consistent messaging and support for customers, which will help build customers’ trust, confidence, and loyalty.
6. Stay focused on the customer
One of the top benefits of using buyer personas is that they help keep your team focused on what’s important: the customer. With so much data available these days, it can be easy to get lost in the numbers. And it’s just as easy to go down rabbit holes, chasing features you want to work on without fully considering what’s best for the customer. With customer personas, it’s much easier to remember that real people buy your product - and that your job is to deliver value to them above all else.
How to research your buyer personas
Don’t assume you know everything there is to know about your audience - real data should inform your buyer personas. Here are some ways you can research your buyer personas:
Survey customers
Customer surveys are one of the most powerful ways to gather data. You can create online surveys through tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, then send these to your existing customers or prospects. Use these surveys to ask questions about audience demographics, habits, goals, challenges, fears, objections, platforms, technology, and preferences. This data will directly inform each section of your buyer persona, so make sure you ask questions that are most relevant to understanding your buyer and how they might find, purchase, or use your product.
Interview key customers
One-on-one customer interviews or focus groups are another powerful way to learn about your audience. Unlike an online survey, this format is more flexible. You could start with some questions to help start a discussion, and then dig further based on the answers that come up. It does, however, require more of a time commitment from you and your customers, so be sure to offer a fair incentive.
Review your database
If you already have a list of current or previous customers stored in your database, they can be a really valuable source of information. Look through the list and see what trends and categories emerge. For example, you might find buyers from small, medium, and large companies. Or you might find that most of your customers fit into one of 3-4 departments or roles, like marketing, sales, and project management. Once you can categorize your customer list, you’ll be able to see how different customer types use your product, consume your content, and other useful insights.
Check your analytics
Analytics can be a goldmine for researching your customers. You likely have access to analytics from your product, any social media pages, and your Google analytics. This data can reveal demographic information, typical usage patterns, preferred devices, preferred social media channels for different audience groups, what they search for, and more.
Do social listening
Social listening means monitoring your social media channels to see what your audience is saying. You might uncover valuable feedback, pain points, objections, and topics that your audience is interested in. You could also find this information by looking at competitors’ channels, searching for industry keywords, and even looking at online forums. Sometimes the best way to get to know your audience is when they’re asking for help or recommendations from their peers.
Talk to your team
Finally, ask your team members to share their audience insights. Especially those that regularly talk to customers, like salespeople and customer support. They’re probably familiar with the types of people who buy your product, their biggest challenges, and the questions they need answers to.
A simple buyer persona template
You don’t have to start your buyer personas from scratch. Most buyer personas follow roughly the same format, so find a buyer persona template that fits your needs and goals and start with that. Use the data you’ve collected from your research to fill out a profile for each of your ideal customers.
Let’s go through the above sections on your buyer persona template.
Title and name
The persona title helps you identify the buyer group you’re referring to. Depending on your product, this might be their industry, demographic, job title, aspiration, or something else that helps differentiate them from your other buyer groups.
But sometimes a title isn’t enough. Naming your buyer persona and giving them a photo helps to humanize your buyers. It can help you remember that while the profile is fictional, real people buy and use your products.
Bio
A short bio can help to tell your buyer’s story, summarizing their personality, fears, challenges, and their main goals. While you’ll have all these details listed elsewhere on the buyer persona, putting it in story form can also help to humanize your buyer and make this information more meaningful and memorable.
Personality
The personality section is usually based on one of the popular personality tests, like Myer Briggs, DISC, or Enneagram. This can be helpful to understand tendencies like introversion vs extraversion, decision making styles, and how much information your buyer is likely to need when choosing or using your product.
Motivations and goals
Under motivations, list the things that help move your buyers onto the next step in the buying process. You might include things like fears and goals, but also external triggers like ideas and anything that might help them trust your brand or product.
Your buyers’ goals or objectives might include their bigger vision for their career or life, but also the smaller goals that they want to accomplish by interacting with your brand or buying your product.
Challenges
Challenges should summarize any problems your buyer is experiencing that relate to your product - or the reason they might buy your product. You could also touch on fears and pain points, or create a separate section for these.
Tools and technology
Tools and technology are especially useful if your buyer needs specific skills or integrations to effectively use your product. Or it might just reveal how they prefer to communicate - whether via social media, email, or phone.
You can, of course, add other sections to your buyer persona. It all depends on how much information you need to get a clear understanding of your customer, target them, and have meaningful conversations with them. At the same time, keeping your persona short (a single page is ideal) and straight to the point will make it easier for your team to use.
How many buyer personas should you create?
Most organizations will need around 3-4 personas to cover most of their audience groups. But the right number of buyer personas will depend on how diverse your audience is.
The main point here is that your buyer personas shouldn’t cover every possible buyer - only your ideal prospects. Consider the 80/20 rule - it’s likely that 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales, so don’t be afraid to prioritize the 20%. Including personas that aren’t ideal customers will take the focus away from those that are.
Tip: If you’re struggling to categorize your audience into groups and narrow down your buyer personas, try a card sorting exercise. Create mini profiles for all your audience types on separate cards and then eliminate the audiences that aren’t profitable or ideal customers. Then group the remaining profiles together based on similar demographics, challenges, and goals. When you can’t easily combine any more cards to make groups, stop the exercise. These are your buyer personas.
Start using your buyer personas
Buyer personas are incredibly versatile - any part of your business that interacts with customers or impacts them can benefit from using buyer personas. So, don’t leave them sitting in a folder somewhere… start incorporating them into your teams’ processes right away.
Now that you know just about everything there is to know about buyer personas… now’s the time to create yours and (most importantly) incorporate them into your processes so that you can reach more of your best customers and build a better product for them.
Get a headstart with Easy Agile Personas for Jira
If you use Jira, you can add your buyer personas inside the platform by following this step-by-step guide. Sign up with Easy Agile Personas for Jira and link your personas to issues in your backlog and story map.
In the meantime, we’ve got more articles you might want to check out, like:
And tag us on Twitter @EasyAgile if you’d like to share how your teams create buyer personas and build them into your processes!
ProductHow to create a Jira roadmap using Easy Agile Roadmaps [2021 update]
Creating a product roadmap in Jira can fulfill a few really important roles.
- It can establish a vision for an agile team struggling for momentum.
- It can communicate to the broader business what you’re planning to work on in future iterations or sprints.
- It can help the product manager visually record dependencies between issues.
Bonus: by creating a Jira roadmap you won’t need to track down that one you created in Google Sheets or PowerPoint (or did I create it as a table in Confluence?) 🤷
Sorted. Sold. Show me how!
Ok — this is how you can create a free roadmap in Jira using Easy Agile Roadmaps:
Step 1. Go to the Atlassian Marketplace
Hop over to the Atlassian Marketplace page for Easy Agile Roadmaps.
Step 2. Start and install free 30 day evaluation
Press the yellow ‘Try now’ button to start your 30 day free evaluation. This means you can create a full roadmap and impress your team before you decide if it’s right for you.
You’ll need admin rights on your Jira to start a free evaluation. Or buy coffee for someone who does.
Choose from Cloud, Server or Data Center (whichever Jira hosting type your company uses).
Step 3. Open the roadmap
Once Easy Agile Roadmaps is installed, each Scrum and Kanban board in Jira will have a linked roadmap.
To open it up, look for the Roadmaps icon found in the Project Sidebar for all agile boards on Jira Server and for single-project agile boards on Jira Cloud.
If you’re on a multi-project agile board on Jira Cloud, the roadmap link can be found in the ‘…’ dropdown on the top right of your agile board screen.
Step 4. Add your first item to the Jira roadmap
Your blank roadmap should now be staring at you. ✅
You can add any issue type to a team’s roadmap. To access the issues from a team’s agile board, select the blue button marked either “Issues” or “Epics” in the top right of the roadmap.
Select the ‘Options’ dropdown to check the issue types you would like to appear in your roadmap backlog.
Then, drag and drop onto the roadmap. You can adjust the start and end dates and phasing of each issue by dragging the left or right ends of the coloured boxes.
If you’d like to send your roadmap to someone who doesn’t use Jira, you can export it as a PDF.
Congratulations! You just created a product roadmap in Jira. Now you can show it off to your team and delete your excel roadmaps FOREVER.
There’s a ton of other features that comes with Easy Agile Roadmaps, like Themes, Version Markers and Date Markers.
We’ll cover that in a future post. You can try out all of these in the free 30 day evaluation.
But for now, bask in the glory of your new roadmap.
Sit back and marvel at what you have created. You deserve it.
Try roadmapping today with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira
👉 👉 Read next: Principles of an Agile Product Roadmap
JiraEasy Jira Project Management with Kanban
Scrum isn't the only agile software development methodology out there. 😲 If you're not familiar with Kanban, we promise we’re not going rogue — Kanban is agile. And, Jira project management tools make organizing a Kanban team really simple.
Kanban originates from Lean principles and focuses on eliminating waste and evaluating processes throughout the entire project lifecycle rather than just at the end. The key fundamentals of Lean are purpose, process, and people. Sounds pretty agile, doesn't it?
Jira project management tools help you get off to a great start with Kanban. You can use the default Jira boards or go crazy with customizations. It’s up to you and your team.
If you're not sure whether Kanban or Scrum is right for your company, keep reading. We'll give you some information to help you decide. We'll also share some tips on how to use Jira project management tools to keep your work organized and your team productive.
Which is best: Scrum or Kanban?
Both. Or, neither. Scrum and Kanban are both effective methodologies for developing software. Which is best for your organization is a better way to ask the question. The answer depends on the kind of work or project types assigned to your team.
Scrum is generally recommended when:
- Your project is relatively stable, meaning you can go a few weeks without a major change in requirements, features, or general product direction.
- The majority of your team's work items are complex features or significant product updates rather than small tweaks, bug fixes, or reactionary work from external feedback.
- You can plan your work a few weeks in advance, generally without significant changes in scope or requirements.
- You have a cross-functional team, willing and able to tackle work as a team rather than individually.
If the following sounds more like your software development team, you should consider Kanban:
- Your work is dynamic with frequent changes in priority.
- You're normally working on small updates, bug fixes, or responding to customer demands.
- Your team resources are shared across multiple projects or products.
- Most of your team members work independently because you generally don't need to collaborate.
Finally, you should consider Waterfall 😲 if:
- Your work is predictable or repetitious (annual updates or regularly scheduled upgrades).
- You're 100% familiar with the work, the technology, and the desired outcome.
- There's little chance of scope or requirement changes.
- There is an absolute path from start to finish required by legal or regulatory compliance standards.
Look, we love agile as much as anyone. But we don't let our passion for Scrum and Kanban get in the way of creating the best possible work environment for our teams. The best software methodology and process is the one that best suits your team.
How to get started with a Kanban project in Jira
Atlassian created a great platform to help Jira users manage Kanban teams. Step 1 is choosing the Kanban template when you create your new project. Easy peasy. 🤓
Next, you'll want to set up your Kanban workflow. Jira creates a default workflow for you: Backlog, Selected for Development, In Progress, and Done. The default works great for a lot of teams, but if you want to customize it, click the dot menu in the upper right corner and click “Board Settings.”
The board settings let you go nuts customizing:
- Columns and quick filters
- Swimlanes and card colors
- Card and issue detail views
- Prioritization ranks
- Working days
- Integrating the board with a roadmap.
One of the goals of Kanban is to help isolate areas in your process in real-time that are slowing down the delivery of work. Keep this in mind as you think about each step in your process and decide which steps need a column in the workflow.
To keep from having 20 columns on your board, consider combining related steps or grouping sequential steps that typically happen very quickly.
Let’s talk about WIP limits
Now that you have built your Kanban board, it’s time to set WIP limits. (That's work-in-progress for the novices.) WIP limits restrict you from overloading a stage in the workflow with too much work.
Let's talk about the purpose of a WIP limit. WIP limits help your team stay focused on a single task at a time so they can complete it, deploy it, and move on to the next task.
A lot of items in progress tend to distract people. They work on one task for a little while, then switch to another task, finishing neither and deploying nothing. 😕 That's called context-switching, and it'll suck the life out of your productivity.
WIP limits also show you bottlenecks in your process. Depending on your workflow, you may see work stacking up in In Progress for a particular team member but nothing is moving to Done. You need to figure out why.
If your workflow is more specific, you may see a work overload for the database team while nothing is In Progress for your front-end developer.
WIP limits won’t solve these problems, but they do let you know when you have a problem so you can dig in and figure out a solution.
Tips for using card colors and swimlanes
Agile project management for a Kanban team is all about keeping the team productive without getting in their way, reporting on overall status, anticipating issues, and problem-solving. Card colors and swimlanes give project managers at-a-glance insight into key team metrics.
Card colors and swimlanes represent specific issue attributes or they can represent query results or assignees. We like to think of the card colors as more detailed issue-tracking data, while swimlanes give us a higher-level picture of the whole body of work.
Regardless of how you like to organize your work, consider the flexibility with assigning queries to your swimlanes or card colors. Following are some ideas to query by:
- Type of work: UX, design, front-end, database, etc.
- Label: Create team- or project-specific labels.
- Components: Divide your project into sections and assign each section a component.
- Effort and time-tracking: Anticipate throughput by at-a-glance efforts by work item.
- Business value or reporter: Get organized by stakeholder or business unit.
- Custom fields: View user segment or another custom field that is meaningful to your company.
Kanban and Jira boards can support various project management processes, from project plan to workflow management to stakeholder communications. You just have to explore what's available and get creative with your Jira customizations.
Get organized with Jira project management tools
Regardless of your agile methodology preference, effective project organization and oversight are almost impossible without some kind of project management software. But let's be honest — the last thing your team or organization needs is another tool.
Your software developers love using Jira software. 🤟 You can configure Jira workflows and customizations to meet even the pickiest project management needs with just a little effort. You'll save time and the hassle of integrating an external product or worse - manually pulling project data together for your reporting and stakeholder communications.
The Atlassian Marketplace is a great source to find add-ons for even more functionality to handle your task management and project team needs. Easy Agile created two apps specifically to help project managers: Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps scrum and kanban teams plan and manage their work with the context that a user story map format provides. Team retrospective functionality helps your team focus on continuous improvement.
View team swimlanes, track cross-team dependencies, and keep your focus at the program level with Epic- and Feature-only views with our Programs app.
Whether you're supporting a Kanban or Scrum team, building roadmaps, version planning, and planning program increments in Jira just got easier!