personas

# Personas A persona is a decision tool, not a character study. Done well, it compresses what you know about a real segment of users into the few attributes that change what you build. Done badly, it's a stock photo with an invented name and a coffee habit that nobody ever opens again. This skill helps you build the first kind: grounded in evidence where you have it, and honestly labeled as a hypothesis where you don't. **Grounded in:** *The Inmates Are Running the Asylum* — Alan Cooper: goal-directed personas built from behavior, not demographics. **Go deeper (The Product Channel):** [How to Create a Customer Persona](https://sidsaladi.substack.com/p/week-21-how-to-create-a-customer) The test for every line in a persona: **does this change a product decision?** If it doesn't, cut it. ## When to use this - You have research (interviews, support tickets, analytics, sales calls) and need to turn it into something the team can act on. - You keep saying "the user" in meetings and realize different people mean different users. - You're prioritizing and need a shared, concrete picture of who you're building for. - You're entering a new space with little data and want an explicit set of assumptions to validate — not a guess dressed up as fact. ## Evidence-based vs proto-persona Be explicit about which one you're making. Mixing them silently is how fiction gets treated as fact. - **Evidence-based persona** — built from actual research: interviews, behavioral data, support volum...