Creating User Personas in Design

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making. I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. He can shake off his deep, geeky knowledge of the product and use it like a beginner, like a regular person. You'd be surprised how many product managers skip that hugely necessary step- listening to their customers, gaining insights, empathizing with their needs, then actually using the product in the real world. But for Joz, it's the only way. So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life. We created typical customer personas, then walked through the moments in their life when they used their iPods- while jogging, at parties, in the car. And we showed Steve that even if the number engineering gave us was twelve hours, those twelve hours actually lasted most people all week long. The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context. And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them. It answers the question, "Why will customers care?" And that question has to be answered long before anyone gets to work. - BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs

One of the most effective ways to define your brand is by mapping it to a specific person. Not just a vague demographic, but an actual persona—real or fictional—who embodies everything your company stands for. When I launched my activewear brand, Ellie, we created Amy, a 27-year-old woman from California who represented our ideal customer. Every marketing decision we made was filtered through the question: Would Amy be into this? Amy loved the outdoors, so our ads featured scenic landscapes. She wasn’t too serious, so our content was lighthearted and casual. She had big aspirations but also made time for fun. Getting specific with her persona made our messaging feel natural and authentic. And it worked. When defining Hawke Media’s persona, we landed on me because I am the customer we serve. Before launching Hawke, I built, scaled, and sold e-commerce brands. I know firsthand the pain points our clients face, from tight budgets to inefficient marketing strategies to the constant pressure to grow. That perspective shaped the way we built Hawke Media. We are not a buttoned-up, corporate agency. We take marketing seriously, but we also have fun, challenge norms, and embrace creativity. That personality attracts the right clients and the right talent because it reflects exactly who we are built to serve. Defining your brand’s persona, whether it is a fictional character, a celebrity, or even yourself, keeps your messaging sharp and consistent. It gives your company a voice, a personality, and a clear direction. Without it, your marketing risks being generic and forgettable.

The best customer personas don’t stay static. They need to evolve as your customers do. One of the most valuable practices we’ve adopted at RingCentral is regularly reviewing and refining our personas to keep up with what our customers truly need. It’s helped us deliver solutions that feel more relevant and make a bigger impact. Here are a few practices we’ve adopted as part of this process that have worked well for us: 🔸 Set clear triggers for reviews. Don’t wait for an annual check-in. Plan to revisit personas after specific moments, such as launching a new product, entering a new market, or seeing a shift in customer feedback. 🔸 Look beyond surveys. Tools like RingCentral’s Customer Journey Analytics and AI Interaction Analytics help spot where customers get stuck, ask for help, or drop off. These patterns can reveal what your personas might be missing. 🔸 Listen to your frontline teams. Teams that speak with customers every day, like customer success or sales, can share stories that highlight gaps or changes you might not see otherwise. When your personas reflect the real people you’re serving right now, you’re better positioned to earn trust, solve problems, and grow. #CustomerExperience #CustomerJourney #CustomerSuccess

Yesterday, one of our customers seeing significant winback success with AI Decisioning asked me: "So should we just kill our personas?" They were half-joking, but it’s a great question. My answer? Absolutely not. Personas aren’t dead, but their role in marketing is definitely changing. With AI decisioning agents delivering 1:1 personalization, you aren't orchestrating communications based on personas. Instead, you let AI learn from individual customer attributes and behaviors to decide what each user receives. Don't use a "busy professional" persona to decide that a customer gets a productivity message on Tuesday at 9am. Let an AI agent make that decision using every data point about that customer, like that individual's viewing and email engagement history. I think we need to make an important distinction though: audiences aren't personas. The audiences you create to target campaigns become less relevant with AI Decisioning—as AI finds the right messages for the right individuals. But personas certainly still matter for marketing and creative strategy. Which customer problems should you prioritize? What messaging themes should you explore? What positioning will resonate in your next product launch? These are still questions that require deep understanding of customer types. AI Decisioning handles the “who gets what, when.” Personas guide the "what problems are we solving and how." The best marketers will need to get both right to scale successfully. 

Stop guessing what your persona wants based on a static PDF from 2022. Most marketers treat personas like a creative writing exercise. They give them a name like "Marketing Mary," assign her a hobby like "enjoys hiking," and then wonder why their conversion rates are tanking. The reality? Mary doesn't exist. And your guesses about her behavior are usually wrong. We’ve started moving away from static personas toward Synthetic Audience Modeling. Instead of a flat description, we’re building AI agents trained on actual historical data, call transcripts, and customer sentiment to act as a "Synthetic Audience." We don’t just "think" about how they’ll react to a new creative. We run the creative through these models. We role-play the entire user acquisition funnel before we spend a single dollar on media. The results are brutal and honest. The synthetic model doesn't care about your feelings or your "beautiful" brand colors. It tells you exactly where the friction is, why the hook failed, and what actually triggers a click. Optimization isn't about being a "visionary" anymore. It’s about building better models to simulate reality so you don't have to pay for expensive mistakes in your live campaigns. If you’re still relying on "gut feeling" for your UA strategy, you’re basically just gambling with your client’s budget. Stop guessing. Start modeling. #GrowthHacking #UserAcquisition #AI #MarketingStrategy #SyntheticData #NoBS

Your buyer persona: “Meet Sarah. She’s 35. Drives a Honda. Drinks oat milk.” OK ... But that tells me nothing. I don’t care if she shops at Whole Foods. I want to know: 👉 what does she struggle with? 👉 what triggers her to buy? 👉 what words does she actually use? Most personas are packed with shallow info. Not what actually moves a customer to buy. You don’t need a cute name. Or a coffee order. You need insight. Here’s how to build a persona that actually helps you sell: 1. Do customer interviews 1. Talk to real people. 2. Ask open-ended questions. 3. Capture exact language. And during these interviews ... 2. Capture voice of customer (VOC) VOC are the words your customers use to describe: - their customer journey - your product VOC eliminates jargon. And ineffective messaging. It makes customers think, "They get me." 3. Map customer pain points 👉 What keeps them up at night? 👉 What problem are they trying to solve? 👉 Why have they failed to solve it? 👉 What else have they tried to solve it? 4. Identify search triggers 👉 Why did they start looking for a solution? 👉 What triggered their search? 👉 What makes their search urgent? 5. Document objections 👉 What gives them pause? 👉 What uncertainties do they have? 👉 Where have competitors failed them? 👉 What almost stopped them from buying? 👉 What makes them doubt your product? 6. Find "The Flip" What makes your customer flip from 🧐 “What is this?” ↓ 😍 “This is exactly what I need.” Build your messaging around this moment. ___ This is how you create a messaging guide. Not by guessing. Not with a cute persona worksheet. Knowing Sarah’s favorite podcast? Sorta helpful. Knowing what keeps her up at night? Insanely helpful. ____ ♻️ Repost this if you found it useful 🧐 Follow me (@lizwillits) for more posts 💌 Get VIP insights in my email newsletter

I used to think "write like you talk" was the holy grail of copywriting. The result? Boring copy that sounded just like everybody else. ❌ Copy that was "professional, but relatable." ❌ Copy that I thought sounded good. ❌ Copy that felt natural – to me. Then I realized: My audience isn't me. They're: 👉 CFOs in growing financial firms 👉 IT leaders in healthcare organizations 👉 COOs at logistics and transportation companies 👉 CMOs at eCommerce companies with $50M+ revenue 👉 Information security officers at growing tech companies They don't talk the way I do. And they respond to copy that sounds like them. (Not like a snarky college professor.) So how do you create messaging that actually stands out? Capture how your audience actually talks. And reflect it right back to them. Here's how I do it: ✅️ Talk to your customers Nothing can touch live conversations for getting insight into your buyers' needs, challenges and goals. They're the best way to learn how your audience is talking about your product. ✅️ Creep on their online convos There are so many places you can go message mining: G2 reviews, podcasts, Slack communities, subreddits. Go find out how your audience communicates when no one's watching. ✅️ Define your brand messaging guidelines Distill your findings into a clear brand messaging strategy – so every piece of copy sounds like you're one of them. Make it easy for everyone on your team to get on the same page. With data-driven brand messaging, you're not just writing like you anymore. You're writing like them. And that's how you get readers thinking, "this is exactly what I've been looking for." So don't write like you talk – write like they talk.

Most brands think they’re speaking to their target audience, when they’re actually speaking to a fictional character they made up five years ago. 🙊 And here’s the kicker: that character is still probably shaping your messaging, content, creative, campaigns, and media budget. It’s a common mistake across industries. One fictional “ideal customer” ends up shaping everything. Meanwhile, the real audience has moved on, diversified, or changed entirely. But the playbook stays the same. Take the outdoor industry as an example. I've seen this a few times, but let’s use a bike brand to illustrate. This brand built everything around one rider: the 25-year-old male shredder. He’s up before sunrise, hits the trail hard, and posts his Strava stats before lunch. Hardcore. Gear-obsessed. Lives and breathes the sport. But when you actually look at the data, he’s just one piece of the puzzle. The target audience that's actually tuning in and watching your content, following your athletes, reading your newsletters, visiting your website, showing up at events, exploring product pages, and making decisions today (doing things that actually justify our marketing efforts)? It's not just that 25-year-old muse that you're so proud of. It's also: → Casual e-mountain bikers → Retired dads rediscovering the outdoors → Millennial women who want community and connection These are real, valuable, buying audiences. But if your messaging, creative, and media mix is built for one “ideal customer", you’re likely spending money talking to the wrong crowd. Audience strategy isn’t about guessing who you think they are. It’s about using real behavioral data to understand who’s actually spending time with your brand today and who’s showing signs they might tomorrow. That means throwing out outdated personas and replacing them with something far more dynamic: Start building behavioral segments based on real signals like what people are watching, who they’re following, what they’re clicking, and where they’re spending time. I talked about this on the Backcountry Marketing Podcast with Cole Heilborn. We got into things like: 🤔 The disconnect between who brands think they’re reaching and who’s actually showing up 🧑🧑🧒🧒 Why static personas no longer reflect real audience behavior 🔎 How to identify and prioritize high-value audience segments using actual data If you work in outdoor, CPG, or just care about staying relevant, it might be worth a listen if you can tolerate my voice for an hour 😂

I spent years getting personas completely wrong. Here's what I finally learned about the 3 levels of customer understanding: Level 1: Traditional Personas You know these: "Marketing Mary, 32, enjoys artisanal coffee and weekend yoga with her cat." I used to make these because everyone else did. But they're pure fiction and hurt more than help. They give us false confidence while leading our marketing and messaging astray. Level 2: Quantified Personas  This is where I graduated to next. These are built on real customer data—actual buying triggers, feature preferences, and willingness-to-pay metrics. They are much better than fiction, but they still average data across entire segments. This is good for strategy but less ideal for messaging. Level 3: Representative Customer Profiles This is what I've started using to guide messaging projects. Instead of averaging data across segments, we select one real customer who perfectly represents each segment. Like an expanded case study with rich, specific details about their challenges, buying journey, and success metrics. Here's the key insight: Use quantified personas for strategic decisions, but write your messaging for representative customer profiles. Why? Because great messaging needs to resonate deeply with individuals, not averages. When you write for a real person instead of a fusion of data points, your message becomes sharper, clearer, and more compelling. Stop creating messaging for fictional characters. Stop creating messaging for averages. Start creating messaging for real people.