Personas

Personas are evidence-informed profiles of target users or buyers — goals, behaviours, pains, and decision context — that keep teams aligned on who they serve. A persona is not a demographic stereotype; it is a composite anchored in research segments.

Good personas name the job, success criteria, objections, and buying dynamics so product, marketing, and sales stop arguing from individual anecdotes.

Without personas, roadmaps reflect the loudest customer or the founder's intuition. Personas translate segment map choices into stories designers and sellers can use daily. They are the input side of VPC and journey maps.

In B2B, personas often include economic buyer vs user vs champion — each with different pains.

Create personas after segment map prioritisation and before VPC/journey work. Update when win/loss patterns shift or when entering a new vertical.

Avoid personas before any customer contact — label assumptions explicitly until validated.

1. Start from a prioritised segment in the segment map.
2. Collect qualitative evidence — interviews, support tickets, sales notes.
3. Draft 2–4 personas maximum for the segment (primary + secondary roles).
4. Capture goals, pains, behaviours, tools, and success metrics per persona.
5. Add buying context — budget authority, objections, alternatives considered.
6. Name personas memorably (role-based, not cute fiction).
7. Link to VPC — one VPC per primary persona.
8. Socialise with rituals — persona referenced in prioritisation and copy reviews.

• Grounded quotes or paraphrases from real interviews.
• Clear primary persona per segment; others marked secondary.
• Distinct pains — not the same bullet list with different names.
• Buying committee represented in B2B (user vs approver).
• Persona count stays small; anti-persona noted when helpful.

• Demographics-only personas ("Marketing Mary, 34, likes yoga") with no jobs-to-be-done.
• Too many personas — team cannot remember them.
• Fabricated detail presented as research without assumption tags.
• One persona for "everyone" after segmentation already chose a focus.
• Personas never referenced in roadmap or sprint reviews.
• Ignoring anti-personas who pull you into bad-fit deals.

Northvale Systems persona: Elena, Supplier Compliance Manager — goals = audit-ready vendor files; pains = email chases across plants; buying = needs CIO sign-off on integration; secondary Raj, Tier-2 Supplier Admin — mobile-first, minimal English.

PulseWell primary persona: Jordan, HR Operations Lead at 800-person logistics firm. Goals: reduce unexpected attrition on warehouse teams; give site managers actionable weekly nudges. Pains: EAP utilisation invisible; board asks for wellbeing ROI without metrics. Behaviours: lives in Workday; trusts peer CHRO references. Buying: champions to CFO with ROI deck; 90-day pilot required. Secondary: Sam, CFO — cares about cost per employee and auditability.

PulseWell stopped building meditation content Sam never funded; doubled manager nudge analytics for Jordan.

Riverstone Legal persona: Priya, Head of People at 45-person fintech. Goals: hire engineers fast without compliance scares; standardise manager scripts. Pains: previous DIY templates caused costly review loops; scared of unfair dismissal claims. Behaviours: Slack-first; wants plain English, not legalese PDFs. Buying: approves retainer under £2k/month with CEO sign-off on first year.

Riverstone tailored onboarding to Slack snippets Priya actually reads.

Clearwater Initiative persona: Amara, Water Committee Chair — goals = safe water for 400 households; pains = no visibility when pump fails; behaviours = WhatsApp-first; secondary District WASH Officer — needs aggregate reports, not raw photos.

Run /personas to render persona-columns with IDs PER-01 fields (goals, pains, behaviours). Links to segment map (/segments), VPC, and customer journey (/journeys). Persona columns cite in strategy pack outputs. Open ⓘ from any persona canvas for research prompts.