The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas offers a practical guide to the creation and use of personas, which can help product designers, their team, and their organization become more user focused. This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the particular tool or method is the right one.

The book discusses the five phases of persona lifecycle:



Family planning — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help one get organized
Conception and gestation — Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to completed personas
Birth and maturation — Strategic techniques to get the right information about ones personas out to ones your teammates at the right time
Adulthood — Specific tools that will ensure that ones personas are used by the right people at the right times and in the right ways during the product development cycle
Lifetime achievement and retirement — Basic ideas and a few tools to you measure the success of the persona effort and prepare for the next one