Product personas are hypothetical archetypes of your product’s core users.
They should represent real jobs to be done: user needs and friction points to be solved, over demographic characteristics.
By emphasizing user needs by describing their product use case, you can ensure teams understand and remain focused on core user profiles and needs.
They are both design and communication tools when trying to develop and sell new products.
They force prioritization of different needs, and break cycles where product managers identify themselves as the user, by creating clarity about different user types and goals.
In this article we’re going to walk through:
- What product personas are and why they’re a useful tool
- How product personas differ from other types of personas, such as marketing personas
- 11 real examples of product personas: either write ups of how best to design and implement a product persona, or working persona archetypes
These include examples from companies like Google, Spotify, Mozilla, and more.
Let’s get into it now.
What are product personas?
“A persona is a fictional character representing a group of people. They’re based on research collected from interviews with real stakeholders (such as service users and employees). The persona will group together people with similar service needs and common behaviours. They’re different from marketing profiles or segmentation, which usually classifies people according to age, ethnicity, gender or socio-economic status.” – Companies’ House
Personas are useful tools to synthesise learnings from discovery, identify target customer groups, and articulate the use cases for your product. They differ from marketing personas, or brand personas, since they focus on user goals and success criteria, rather than reach or conversion led segmentation and language.
Product personas are often created by designers, rather than product managers. User personas may stand in for product personas, with persona design seen as user research’s job.
This is a mistake: it creates silo’ed thinking, it hampers adoption, and the concerns of researchers and designers may differ to those of product teams.
PMs should work with researchers and designers, but should see persona development and ownership as part of their product strategy work and jobs to be done framework.
The Hustle Badger Jobs to Done Examples & Template Miro Board
Why use product personas?
Used well, product personas act as:
- Decision systems: forcing you to make choices about who you will serve well, and why
- Comprehension and communication tools: an agreed upon user subset, widely understood across organizations can accelerate product development and allow strategies to stay on track
Decision systems
Especially in B2B SaaS, it’s easy to confuse a complex set of decision makers with required functionality. The CFO wants x, the end user wants y, a competitor has x… Personas force you to articulate the needs of all of these different groups, and then make decisions about who you will build for, why and when.
Comprehension and communication tools
Personas help create clarity among teams about who you build for and why. That clarity can be supported and agreed by stakeholders, helping strategies remain focused and roadmaps remain on track.
Finally, not everyone in the business is customer facing or has a discovery budget. Personas help bring some of those insights to life for engineers and management, and foster greater user empathy.
However, product personas are only as good as
- The effort put into discovery: if you don’t interview real users, and shape these based on internal assumptions, they will be flawed
- The subset of users you draw insights from: selection bias can skew personas, and can start with user recruitment strategies
- How you articulate and shape your users: they need to be truly reflective of your target ideal customer profile
- How you use your personas: they need to be embedded into the organization as focal points, updated routinely and validated as the business pivots
Characteristics of a good product persona
Product personas need to be constructed in a way that helps you achieve your goals.
Discovery led
They should be based on real insights, generated by a representative sample of real users. Building those insights requires investment in discovery, careful recruitment, and keeping records of those conversations for analysis.
Specific
Successful personas require making choices: choices about user needs, types, and goals.
By investing in discovery you can avoid generic personas. Ensuring that you cluster users into categories and archetypes, before narrowing down your target personas to 3-5 user types (maximum) creates credibility and focus.
They should always be represented as an individual who epitomizes your persona group.
Believable and relevant
It might sound obvious, but the persona has to resonate. If people have never seen or met the type of customer you describe, you’ll have issues developing user empathy and get push back.
Additionally the way you describe your persona is highly important: details about their characteristics should only be included if they are relevant to the product.
So for example, if your customer is a product manager, you can include this, but if your customer is anyone who buys dishwasher detergent, there’s no need to include their job information.
Follow a need or goal structure
Product personas differ from generic, or marketing led personas by being strategic archetypes that support product visions, and the jobs to be done for each user.
Product personas should clearly articulate the user’s situation, frictions, needs, and the goals they’re trying to accomplish by using the product.
Join discovery to metrics
Various techniques can help build confidence in your personas:
- Clustering analyses: on user datasets or surveys can create robust groupings.
- Natural Language Processing: This can include using LLMs to support on analyses of transcripts all the way through to social listening techniques
- Quantification of groups: sizing your persona groups will help build certainty that these are meaningful user problems to solve
Explain which users are lower focus, and why
The exercise should be a complete one. All your user groups should be clustered, identified and articulated. They should then be segmented into priority personas, and low priority personas.
Don’t cherry pick users you like from discovery. Work through the groups end to end, to be able to explain and articulate who has been eliminated and why.
PMs should be building for the user who uses and advocates for their product, vs buyer personas, or marketing segments. It helps to say so, and within the user group identify those who will become your top evangelists.
Real product persona examples
In this section we’ll bring product personas to life, by sharing real life examples of product personas: best practices, real personas, and product persona templates.
These come from folks like Alan Cooper, the inventor of the persona concept, Spotify, Gitlab, Mozilla, Open Search, Google and more.
Context:
“The users fell into three distinct groups, clearly differentiated by their goals, tasks, and skill levels. Had I been creating the software myself, I would have role-played those users as I had with Ruby and SuperProject, but in this case I had to describe those user models to the Sagent team. So I created Chuck, Cynthia, and Rob. These three were the first true, goal-directed Cooper personas.” – Alan Cooper
Alan Cooper is one of the pioneers of user centred product design, and the original ideator of the persona concept. He first wrote about personas in his first book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, having developed the concept as a communication and design tool while running his own user design agency, Cooper. He’s also the designer and builder of Project and the Visual Basic computer programming language.
What makes this product persona example great:
“When a well-intentioned practitioner would read a blog and learn some bogus “persona” method, they’d soon fail. And reasonably, they would blame personas. Often, they’d realize what was wrong, and recapitulate them under their own name. They’d then write their own blog post saying, “[This thing that isn’t personas that I’m going to call personas] is really awful. But this [personas under some new name] is much better!” – Alan Cooper
As the inventor of persons, Alan is well equipped to identify many of the issues which have subsequently arisen with personas: namely that misuse, poor construction, and misunderstanding of the framework.
The reality is that personas are only useful if they derive from real users, articulate real, big enough, needs, and are goal orientated. Poorly designed, imaginary personas lead to poor products, or worse, fake justifications for internal decision making.
He also articulates another contradiction at the heart of user centred product development: that it is contrary to logic. Logic would dictate that you speak to users and build everything they ask for. But true user centred design involves solving their problems by making choices, and delivering innovation that meets needs in ways users can’t articulate – but find that they want.
Context:
Gitlab keep their handbook online, sharing their approach to jobs to be done, strategy, and personas. These personas sit in the brand and product marketing section of the playbook, but describe users’ jobs to be done, goals and objectives, hence inclusion here.
It’s a good example of product and commercial functions working in alignment to execute, understand and sell to the user.
What makes this product persona example great:
There’s 5 detailed personas here, covering their needs, goals, job titles, place in the Gitlab purchasing journey. Other benefits include a clear understanding of the role different personas have when it comes to buying, evaluating and using an Enterprise product.
Job To Be Done [For Persona Program Management Payton]
- Plan, govern, and oversee the delivery of new capabilities
Summary:
- I’m really motivated by being more effective and efficient
- I’m both an Influencer and Decision-maker
- My biggest challenges are that the transition to DevSecOps is challenging for certain legacy workloads and environments, the need to increase the speed of development, and the disjointed developer experience
Context:
Spotify’s user research team have written up how they uncovered and shaped Spotify’s user personas, used by the product, marketing and sales organizations.
What makes this product persona example great:
The team discuss methodology in detail: a mix of Alan Cooper’s method and the Grounded Theory approach. Their major insight was that listener behavior is more shaped by context driven listening needs or goals, rather than specific user characteristics. For that reason they selected random attributes when assigning human faces to their users, and paired this with abstract depictions.
Learn more about Grounded Theory in our Qualitative User Research Guide
They also discuss rolling out personas in a product culture known for small, autonomous teams. They adopted a workshop approach, coupled with an internal website that explained and demonstrated the personas.
No one was forced to use the personas in their product development cycles, or adopt it in other teams, so the output had to be compelling and useful.
“One of the most powerful modalities for learning that emerged during our pilot workshops was ‘learning by doing’. So the user research team hosted workshops with product teams and helped them to use personas in a way that was relevant to their specific areas.”
Context:
Niamh O’Hora is a lecturer and leader in educational design at TU Dublin. In this open access Miro board she shares a persona primer, persona examples, and a series of persona workshop exercises.
What makes this product persona example great:
From recruitment, to pain point articulation, this is a great off the shelf primer, template and workshop process, fully annotated with pitfalls and tips. If you’re looking to get your organization started with personas and run group sessions to socialize and get buy-in for the idea, this is a great place to start.
Gov.uk’s accessibility personas
Context:
Not everyone finds digital services equally accessible or easy to use. The UK Government’s digital service in these 2 publications shares both their accessibility personas, and how they use these personas internally to improve their services for different types of users.
What makes this product persona example great:
Many persona articulations fall down when they focus on a hypothetical universal customer. The reality is that some users have very specific needs, and those needs are often unseen in the discovery recruitment and ideation process.
These persona examples articulate the experience, the technologies and how to make things easier and more accessible for these users. They make their experience concrete, and understandable for those designing services for them. Finally, they quantify how many people experience the same needs as the persona – which is often sizable.
Next, they talk about how they embed the experience of these users internally. These include
- Persona testing: 1 hour long sessions where members of the team are invited to experience services and sites in the same way as a persona
- Persona mini trainings: sessions designed to be eye opening and convey the challenges these personas face
Context:
Roman shares this simple persona template, plus some persona advice, as part of his product canvas process.
What makes this product persona example great:
It’s been boiled down to 3 lean components to convey the critical information and avoid persona bloat.
The components are
- Picture and name: the persona representation, which must be believable
- Details: specific characteristics which can be validated via discovery
- Goals: the user need the persona is trying to achieve
Roman focuses on relevance and iterability / validation, as part of an agile approach. He has also populated it for his own use case.
Context:
Companies’ House share a two part blog series on their experience of updating and refining product personas as their persona maturity evolved, including a template, learnings and some advice on how to be successful.
What makes this product persona example great:
The article walks through the persona components that the team decided to keep, and what they decided to lose as they refined their persona template.
What they included: a short user profile, the user’s goals and needs, user quotes, their working environment, devices used, and a subject knowledge scale.
They excluded: lifestyle information (like hobbies and marital status), customer journey maps and long narratives about the user’s interaction with the organisation.
They also share learnings from the process, including:
- Generic personas can be a good starting point for organizations new to personas: but have to be iterated and refined to remain useful
- Displaying personas works best on cards or single sided documents: something simple, visual and present
- 16 personas is too many: they eventually shrank down to 9, but arguably that is still a lot
- Hold peer reviews routinely: and assess if personas still remain relevant or need to be updated
As a bonus, they also share a template (populated for a housing association) which you can access here.
Context:
The Mozilla Foundation is the not-for-profit parent organization behind the open source Mozilla project. Its mission is to promote an open, innovative ecosystem which uses tech for good. Mozilla’s open leadership framework is an initiative to encourage open leadership practices based on understanding, inclusion and their ethical principles.
What makes this product persona example great:
There’s 3 concise personas which describe known use cases for the Open Leadership Framework. They’re neatly structured describing the situation, the use case, and how the open leadership framework will lead to positive outcomes for the user.
This structure of situation, use case, how the problem is solved in the future can be powerful for articulating user needs and goals.
Context:
This example covers the development of personas, jobs to be done, and user journey maps for an open source community – and how they were developed and ultimately shared in Figma. It’s a great example of maintaining user and product focus for an open source search and data platform.
What makes this product persona example great:
They’ve templated persona options and user journeys in Figma, designing modular components for their community. They then provide assets to walk them through how they could create their own assets and visualize them as part of their product development process.
Not only do they share some great templates, but it’s an integrated approach: both in terms of how they think about personas in relation to the user experience, and in terms of how they integrate their community into their design practice.
Context:
Jeff Gothelf is a product coach, leading product voice, AI training co-founder and the author of multiple books including Lean UX.
In this blog post on his personal site, he talks through how he ran an executive persona workshop for TheLadders, taking the leadership team through a 2 day process to educate them and shape some proto personas.
What makes this product persona example great:
Jeff shares a step by step process to introduce execs to the concept of personas, move them through a workshop to design some proto personas and how to manage them along the way. The goal was to introduce execs to the concept of personas as a corporate communication tool.
He shares a simple template comprising 4 quadrants: sketch of the individual, demographic details, behaviors, needs and goals. He then shares various exercises: from individual persona drafting, presentation, critiques, and clustering, followed by real time refinement and iteration, plus printing of the outputs.
Finally he covers learnings – from the difficulties involved in keeping an exec team on track, to the need to iterate and validate the workshop exercises, and embed.
Context:
This 2 part Medium article walks through how a Google team built a chatbot assistant to help users navigate the 2018 Google I/O conference. Use cases included how to navigate the conference centre, how to navigate sessions, logistics, such as lunch and coffee breaks, and specific details, such as how to identify and find their room.
What makes this product persona example great:
This is an example of designing a persona for users to interact with, rather than a persona based on user archetypes. It’s a reminder that when creating chat based products that it’s an interplay between two different personalities.
“The goal of creating a persona is not to trick the user into thinking they’re talking to a human, but simply to leverage the communication system users learned first and know best: conversation. We focused on the qualities we wanted users to perceive when talking to our [assistant]”
They carefully ideated and documented this service-led persona, using many of the same techniques as for identifying and ideating user personas. They also included decision trees, and user flows, plus wrote some of the dialogue out to understand the tone and feel of the interactions.
“At this point, we made the mistake of preparing a page-long biography of the persona, including their life story, motivation, and technological preferences. This was overkill; a good persona should be simple enough to keep top-of-mind when writing dialog. So, we cut it down to a short paragraph.”
Wrap up on Product Personas
Product personas are another user focused, strategy technique to keep PMs, teams and stakeholders focused on the right end user, and their core needs. As a result, there’s no right or wrong way to write your persona, so long as it’s specific, focused on needs and goals, and it helps you stay focused. It’s a critical tool for fostering user empathy within busy organizations.
The examples we’ve shared have a host of good advice for how to go from 0 personas, to accepted personas, how to run successful workshops to get buy in, how to ground your persona in validated reality and how to use them as part of your jobs to be done toolkit.
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