Research Methods: in-depth 1:1 interviews, surveys, persona, journey map
Developer Personas
Overview
The Software Delivery team creates tools and resources to help developers improve the development process. However, team engineers struggled to understand the entire process of delivering a feature/product.
Research Goal
Engineers are the ones who contribute to the progress and success of our product at Sumo Logic. Their actions, objectives, difficulties, and frustrations greatly impact how they develop and solve problems for the features they create. By comprehending the developers, their duties, challenges, and main priorities, the team can gain a complete understanding of what tools to design in order to meet their requirements and simplify the process. We theorized that the age and experience level of developers may affect their difficulties, objectives, and problem-solving abilities.
Process
We found value in creating personas and journey maps for the engineers. Why? Because how can the Software Delivery team create tools to assist them when they don’t understand the developers and their processes?
We set up 1:1 qualitative sessions with 20 of Sumo Logic’s frontend engineers to better understand who they are, how they got to this point in their career, what a “day in the life” of an engineer entails, how they process and problem-solve within their projects and what are some possible pain points that they may be experiencing in their current role. I also sent out surveys to quantify my findings and better support the data.
As the sessions progressed, we realized their frustrations varied, depending on their seniority and comfort level with the software/coding process. Senior engineers had difficulty executing projects to junior developers and collaborating with cross-dependent teams. Junior engineers however, lacked confidence in their coding and felt they didn’t have proper training and documentation to succeed at the company.
Output
Based on the data we collected, we categorized the personas into senior and junior developers. This helped us understand their goals, challenges, and thought processes. We discovered that junior developers struggle with documentation, knowledge sharing, and understanding Sumo Logic's query language. On the other hand, senior developers find it frustrating to communicate between teams, prioritize projects, and deal with specific technical issues.
Senior and junior developers had different frustrations due to different sources. However, their frustrations were similar but varied in intensity, as shown on the journey map. This helped the Software Delivery team understand the developers' frustration levels during development. By knowing their specific pain points, they created more targeted tools to meet their needs.
The “So What?”
These personas were shared with the Software Delivery team. They helped the team create a structured on-boarding and training program for junior engineers to make coding less confusing. They also made a new communication platform for senior engineers and their managers to encourage more communication during projects. The personas were successful and later shared with the whole company for better understanding of the engineers behind the Sumo Logic platform. Understanding the people who sustain the business is just as important as understanding the users. This creates a more unified and complete approach.
Most of the insights derived from this research is confidential. Please contact zand.helya@gmail.com if you are interested in learning more about the process.