You should now have a set of rich, meaningful personas that have been validated against real users. Still, you may be tempted to keep refining your personas until they seem perfect. You may feel hesitant about putting them out there for people to see and use. How do you know when you are ready to begin introducing them to your broader team? There are signs that will indicate you are ready. You will notice that the amount of tweaking and reexamination slows down or stops. You may still have some open questions, but you shouldn t have any blank sections in your foundation document that are truly critical to your product domain. The personas will just feel right to you and your core team. In addition, your stakeholders should have signed off on your work. They now agree that no critical audience is missing and that the personas are robust, credible, and in line with your business objectives.

If your creation process took several weeks to several months, it may be that your product planning and design is now underway or worse, that coding has begun. If so, it is likely that your broader team is becoming eager to obtain information about your target audience. They may be asking for you to deliver your personas ASAP. All of these things tell you that you are ready to deliver that the birth and maturation phase should start. Birth and maturation is...