A persona is an invented profile of a product’s typical customer. It’s used to inspire customer empathy and help product managers visualize key characteristics, emotional drivers, and pain points of a specific type of user.

Below we’ve shown an example of a persona named Driven Dorothy.

When you’re ready to create your own persona, copy this doc and use the

Template

as a starting point.

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Example Persona: Product Manager

Name: Driven Dorothy

Job Role

Product Manager at a FinTech startup called Golddex.

One liner of what they do every day

Determines user needs, works with design to create a brief, engineers to ship the product, and marketing to promote across the full development lifecycle.

Demographic Information

Age:

Gender:

Female

Income:

$88k

Education level

: 4-year degree

Where they live

: Paris

Emotional Drivers

Professional goals

Build innovative FinTech products that improve the lives of small business owners

Work with talented engineers, designers, and product leaders

Eventually be Chief Product Officer at a $1B+ company

Motivators

Building products that help small businesses increase their bottom line

Tough engineering challenges

Deadlines

Challenges

Ambiguous product requirements

Working cross-functionally with other teams

Growing professionally; she hasn’t discovered Product School yet ;)

Pain points
0
Pain point
Before our solution
Our solution
How well our product solves the pain
1
Keep key stakeholders informed of progress on a project
Messy email threads that nobody wanted to read
A single Coda doc for thinking, planning, and tracking, and communicating.
2
Gather feedback on design variations
Email threads and notes spread across documents
Voting tables and design embeds
There are no rows in this table

Persona Inspiration

Real customer quotes

“I feel like I’m stuck in a spider web of email threads. There’s no source of truth, and my boss is constantly asking me for the status of my projects. I wish I had one place for my projects, notes, 1-pagers, and communications.”

ー
@Leah Chatman

“The engineers on my team instantly fell in love with the Slack integration!”

ー
@Leo Gill

Actual customers: PM
0
Name
Title
Company
1
Leah Chatman
Head of Product
Groovestreet
2
Leo Gill
Chief Product Officer
Zoomit
3
Maria Randall
Special Projects
Bioplex
4
Clint Dunham
Design Manager
Zumgoity
There are no rows in this table

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Persona Template: How to inspire customer empathy across your team

What is a Persona?