Personas in User Stories and Salesforce Security

Meet the Personas

Personas encompass lifelike characters in the stories of solution design, embodying workers' goals, motivations, and pain points. Personas clarify user stories, drive user experience design, bridge the gap between abstract business processes and the tangible human touch, and pave the way for a genuinely empathetic, worker-centric design approach. 

A persona should refer to a domain, typically an organization’s department, and what they generally do. Examples of personas include:

• Marketing communications coordinator

• Operations executive

• Sales representative

• Engineering lead

• Customer service manager

Note that some personas resemble job titles but often imply a broader range of jobs. For example, a sales representative can deal with customer service escalations as well as close new deals.

Persona Dreamin’

Two sessions at Tahoe Dreamin’ 2023 featured personas:

• Write User Stories Developers Love! By Kate Lessard

• These Boots Are Made for Walking: Putting Yourself In Your User's Shoes by Nana Gregg

Kate’s session put personas as the “who” in user stories:

As a persona, I can do a task to fulfill an objective.

Where a persona can do various tasks to achieve their objectives.

The objectives define the persona more than the jobs the persona does.  

For example, a sales representative not only creates customers but retains them by ensuring they’re happy in these user stories:

As a sales representative, I can qualify a lead to advance it in the sales cycle.

As a sales representative, I can receive a notification when my customer’s case escalates to a specified level, so I can contribute to keeping the customer happy.

Nana’s presentation emphasized personas even more. Putting yourself in a user’s shoes requires understanding their goals, motivations, and pain points.

Nana carefully differentiates personas from the jobs they do, which can vary more than their objectives. Separating functions from personas also helps define Salesforce permissions around a persona’s jobs rather than their user profile.

A Double-Edged Tool

Personas play an essential role in user stories and Salesforce administration. Two Tahoe Dreamin' sessions demonstrated that personas, fictional characterizations of workers, provide a vital human-centric approach to solution design. Personas focus on objectives in user stories and user experience design instead of specific job roles. 

Kate and Nana’s presentations further emphasize the need to delve into a persona's goals, motivations, and pain points. Conclusively, the article proposes a shift in Salesforce permission management, advocating for role-based access informed by the persona's function, not their job profile.

Personas humanize user stories and user experience design while simplifying Salesforce permissions created around goals rather than job titles.

Thanks to Nana Gregg for her rich Tahoe Dreamin’ session and accuracy-checking this article.