Role-based Personas

Objective: To align the teams on our users’ needs by creating a comprehensive set of personas to be used across all 14 products in our portfolio.

Role: Sr. UX Researcher

Duration: 6 months from concept to product; ongoing as they were living and I added to them and updated them frequently

Methods & Tools: interviews, contextual inquiry, workshop design and facilitation, design synthesis, designs in Figma

Participants: ~50, as we both conducted new user research interviews and utilized all prior interviews

Impact:‍ ‍While leadership focused on ROI, the personas helped teams focus on our users’ real problems and pain points. And they provided a great internal reference for how all of our tools in the enterprise ecosystems are connected.

Maybe a photo of me at the personas wall

The problem

The process

In 2022, our UX team was part of a portfolio with 3 products serving internal users on the pricing and promotions teams. And we (another UX Researcher and I) made a set of 5 task-based personas for our team to utilize. Our goal at the time was to create evergreen personas that would remain relevant even as roles shifted.

By 2025, we needed a new set for 2 reasons.

  1. Our portfolio had grown to 14 products that served several teams we were previously unfamiliar with.

  2. And more importantly, we learned that people (product managers, etc.) didn’t really think of our internal users in terms of their tasks. They weren’t thinking about whether that user was doing the task of our “Promoter” Persona; they were focused on what a Promo Analyst vs a Promo Specialist might be doing in their product.

Deliverables:‍ ‍A set of 30 personas shared across teams, printed and posted in the office, and posted to Confluence