[I have been helping run conventions in my volunteer work since 2001. The goal of this article is to communicate my experiences so that others might benefit from them.]
So, you may be asking yourself at this point, why are we talking about conventions? Well, aside from knowing a lot of folks that need this information, it's an illustration that products are not just things you buy off a shelf, they are just about anything you are trying to sell to a customer. So, as we plan a convention, we can benefit greatly by approaching this as a Product Management effort.
Before we start to roll up our sleeves and really dig into planning our convention, we need to first understand our audience. Any successful product needs a customer base that wants that product. Otherwise, we run the risk of building a convention/product that no one wants to attend/buy.
Personas are, essentially key archetypes of your customer base. By fleshing them out, we can better understand our intended audience/customer, e.g., for a customer-facing healthcare application, one persona might be a patient and another might be a caregiver.
Let's consider what personas we might want to define for a convention.
