Stage 2.3: Customer Persona
🧠 What this stage is about
You can’t design for everyone — and that’s the point.
This stage helps you define your most important customer type so you can design products that truly meet their needs.
🧍♀️ Who you’ll define
- Your primary target user (the “bullseye”)
- Their goals, behaviours, and pain points
- What they expect from solutions like yours
- Context about their environment, habits, and values
🧰 Tools and prompts
- Persona Template – fill-in-the-blank framework to describe your user
- Empathy Map – visualise what your customer sees, thinks, feels, and does
- Jobs to be Done – focus on what they’re trying to achieve, not just what they say
- User Story Prompt – e.g. “As a [user], I want to [goal] so I can [benefit].”
⚠️ Watch out for these traps
- Designing for yourself instead of your user
- Creating personas that are too broad or vague
- Skipping validation with real users or data
- Making up demographics that don’t actually matter
💬 Voices from the field
“We thought our user was ‘tech-savvy professionals’. Turns out, they were overwhelmed buyers looking for peace of mind.”“The persona exercise completely reshaped how we positioned our product.”
🔗 Related stages
🖼️ Visual overview
💾 Download
Capture the needs and traits of your most valuable user.