Persona Development
Personas checked against new evidence, one attribute at a time
About this workflow
Keeping the persona set true to the users who actually exist — every field of every persona card checked against evidence gathered since, every user the team’s specs and stories mention mapped to a persona, and each persona kept, refined, split, merged, retired or added for a stated reason. The work ends in a Persona Refresh that replaces the whole set: the cards, the cast and naming rules, the open assumptions and gaps, a versioned changelog and the events that should prompt the next one.
Its purpose is to stop personas drifting into fiction while artifacts keep quoting them. A set refreshed by feel grows a persona for every loud signal; one never refreshed describes last year’s customer.
The recognizable task
- New research, analytics or support evidence has arrived since the set was written
- Specs and stories describe users the persona set doesn’t recognize
- The market or the product has shifted since the set was written
- Every card field is marked confirmed, drifted, contradicted or no new evidence, with the evidence quoted
- The set stays small, and every change is tied to evidence
- Unchanged cards are carried word for word; retired ones are archived, not deleted