How2 know if you are in the Persona Paradox… Are Your Customer Profiles Helping or Hurting Your Product?
Every product team believes they know their customers. But when it comes to documenting who they are, what they need, and what they care about, it often becomes a challenging exercise.
Personas are meant to be a powerful tool to align your team, validate your assumptions, and focus your efforts….. Yet, they can easily become a trip hazard. Either too vague to be useful or so detailed and numerous that they become impossible to manage.
This post isn't about giving you a rigid template of what your persona template should like like…. There are millions of them ;) … It's about helping you navigate the most common traps and providing practical tips to ensure your personas are a force for good, not just another document gathering dust.
Why Personas Are a Double-Edged Sword
So here is the real challenge, we have spoken to many of our clients and we often get the same feedback. On one hand, a well-defined set of personas can be a game-changer. They provide a shared language for the team, making it easier to discuss customer needs and prioritise features. They build empathy and prevent you from building for an abstract user. Most importantly, they act as a fantastic tool for validating assumptions: you can clearly see if a new feature or idea truly serves one of your core or target customers.
The pitfall, however, is a common one. Teams often create dozens (we have seen 100 before!") of personas, each with a name, a photo, and a laundry list of hobbies, what colour pants they have on. This leads to what we call "persona paralysis." When you have 50 different customer profiles, who do you build for? The value is lost in the noise, and the personas are forgotten.
How to Start Without Falling into the Traps
The key to creating effective personas is to keep them personal, practical, and scalable. You want just enough detail to be useful, but not so much that they become a burden.
1. Start with "Why," not "Who"
Before you worry about demographics or job titles, start with the core problems your customers are trying to solve. What are their goals? What frustrates them in their day-to-day life? Beginning with motivations and pain points allows you to group people based on their needs, not just their age or location. This naturally leads to fewer, more focused personas.
2. Focus on Breadth, Then Refine
Don't start with 20 detailed personas. Instead, aim to identify 3 to 5 broad, core customer segments that represent the majority of your user base. Use simple titles like "The Project Manager," "The Individual Contributor," or "The Senior Executive." Only add more detail or create new personas when you identify a critical need that a current persona doesn't address.
3. Personas Are for Use, Not Just Display
Your personas should be living documents that are a constant part of your team's workflow. Reference them in meetings when discussing a feature ("How would this impact The Project Manager?"), use them to guide user interviews, and update them as your understanding of your customers evolves. If they're just a PDF on a shared drive, they’re not doing their job.
By focusing on these principles, you can create a powerful set of personas that provides the clarity you need without becoming another piece of corporate red tape.
Ready to Build Your Personas?
Getting started can be the hardest part. If you're looking for a clear, step-by-step guide to document your customers in a way that is practical and scalable, we have a fill-in-the-blank workbook and workshop guide that will give your team a running start. Jump to the “contact us” page below :)