What is a Persona?
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
as a starting point.
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
Education level
: 4-year degree
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
Challenges
Ambiguous product requirements
Working cross-functionally with other teams
Growing professionally; she hasn’t discovered Product School yet ;)
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
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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
“The engineers on my team instantly fell in love with the Slack integration!”
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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
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