Persona Creation

@ Exabeam

Overview

This is a generative research study aimed to understand a new group of users for Exabeam: individuals that have experience with APIs.

Background

Historically, Exabeam had unsupported APIs that customers would use on a daily basis. With no support or official documentation, customers struggled to keep their APIs up-to-date and running smoothly. As we made our transition to be a cloud-first company, our product team identified a need for enterprise level APIs that included well-defined documentation. The first step was for us to understand the new audience we would begin to support and create a corresponding persona to reflect that group of users. 

Goals

  • Understand the problem their trying to solve with the help of APIs

  • Learn about the motivation for using APIs

  • Understand the pain points the users encounter with APIs

  • Learn the process of when the need for an API is identified all the way to its implementation

  • Learn what tools they use to help them develop/test APIs

Audience - Who typically uses APIs?

There were two main groups of people we needed to talk to:

  • Partners / Customers that use Exabeam APIs 

  • Engineers / Developers that have experience working with and/or developing APIs 

Methods Used

We conducted user interviews with 7 customers and partners. After speaking with them, we found that their technical experience with APIs was limited and they leaned on engineers/developers outside of their Security Operations Center (SOC) teams for support. We expanded to speaking with 5 engineers/developers to get a more holistic view of the problems encountered with and tools used for APIs.

FigJam Board

A screenshot of white boarding and using the AEIOU framework to help create the persona.

Findings

  • Main motivation for using APIs: to connect software to streamline workflows

  • Well-written and organized documentation is key

    • Users emphasized the importance of clear examples and straight forward documentation to help configure and troubleshoot APIs. If documentation was unclear or confusing, it discouraged the user from adopting the use of that API.

  • There was no dedicated “API developer” for most SOC teams. SOC team identified need for APIs, while engineers/developers outside of the SOC team implemented what was needed

    • There were some members within the SOC team that had advanced experience with APIs, but most teams had to rely on a dedicated engineer or the IT department outside their team to help them implement.

  • Partners rely heavily on APIs to have a holistic view of the state of their customers’ SOCs

Based on our findings, we updated our existing Security Engineer persona and created a new developer persona named “Devya”. Devya manages and develops code for her organization including, but not limited to, custom and third-party API integrations. She supports different departments’ needs to integrate with third-party applications that they work with. Her team falls outside of the SOC, but will get requests from SOC team to help integrate security tools.

To see completed persona for this exercise, please contact me at cmvtran@gmail.com.

Research Impact

Increased stakeholder exposure to users

Including the product manager in the user interviews gave them the visibility they needed while also allowing them to hear the users’ needs and expectations.

Elevated UXR Status

  • This was the first persona building research activity that I lead at Exabeam. Going through the process of identifying users, interviewing them, and creating a brand new persona elevated the research practice at Exabeam.

  • Presenting the new persona during a Product Management weekly sync reminded product managers how useful personas can be in conversations with customers

Learnings

  • Expanding your initial audience can help get a better view on how different roles work together on a common goal

  • Using a tool like Figjam for whiteboarding can help organize your thoughts and findings