| name | user-personas |
| description | Creates research-backed user personas with JTBD, pain points, gains, and unexpected behavioral insights. Use when building personas from survey or interview data, or segmenting users to inform product decisions. Triggers on: user persona, user profile, customer segment, jobs-to-be-done, JTBD, persona creation, user segmentation, target user, who are our users. |
User Personas
Core Philosophy
Personas are not marketing archetypes. They're decision tools. A good persona answers: who are we optimizing for when we have to make a trade-off? If your personas are interchangeable or describe everyone equally, they're useless.
Ground every insight in actual research data. A persona invented in a workshop is worse than no persona — it gives false confidence for wrong decisions.
When to Use
- After user interviews or surveys — to synthesize findings into actionable profiles
- Before defining product scope — to force explicit prioritization of which user to serve
- When roadmap debates stall — to tie features back to specific user needs with evidence
- When user-discovery is complete and needs to feed into a PRD or strategy document
Workflow
1. Gather and Read the Research Data
Before writing anything, read all available inputs: interview transcripts, survey responses, support tickets, behavioral analytics, NPS comments. If no data exists, run user-discovery first — don't create fictional personas.
2. Identify Patterns, Not Individuals
Look for recurring combinations of:
- Goals: What outcome are they ultimately trying to achieve?
- Context: When and in what environment do they use the product?
- Blockers: What consistently prevents them from achieving their goal?
- Workarounds: What do they do today in the absence of a better solution?
- : What causes them to start looking for a solution?
