Pm Personas

Personas (Pragmatic Framework: Planning → Buyer Personas & User Personas)

Rule: Teams that understand personas and their problems build remarkable products. A persona is an archetype built from observed patterns, not a fictional character you invented. Ground every trait in market evidence (interviews, win/loss, support, usage). See ../pm-copilot/references/framework.md for the market-driven basics.

• Buyer persona — the archetypical person who makes or influences the purchase

decision (motivations, barriers, buying process). Guides marketing and sales.

• User persona — the archetypical person who uses the product day to day.

Guides the product. In B2B the buyer and user are usually different people — build one of each. Create a separate persona whenever the problems genuinely differ.

The Interview Matrix (get a balanced cross-section)

Before writing personas, make sure you've talked to a balanced sample. Map who to interview across segments and persona types:

| Segments | Buyer Personas (Economic · Technical · Functional) | User Personas (User 1 · User 2 · User 3) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Segment A | who fills each buyer role | who the day-to-day users are |

Buyer roles: Economic (owns the budget/ROI), Technical (gatekeeps on fit/risk), Functional (uses the outcome, champions internally). Balance interviews across all four market segments: customers, competitors' customers, evaluators (win/loss) and potentials.

Interview the user for inputs (batch questions)

1. Which product/feature and market segment is this persona for?
2. Is this a buyer or a user persona? (Do both if B2B.)
3. What problems/roadblocks does this person have (their words, first person)?
4. What are their goals — who they want to be, what they want to do, how they want to feel?
5. What behaviors shape how they approach those goals?
6. Their background — how did they get to their current situation/outlook?
7. What evidence backs this (how many interviews/tickets/win-loss notes)?

Artifact templates

User Persona

# User Persona — 

**Company:**   ·  **Feature / Product:** 
**Author:**   ·  **Date created:** 

**Name:**   |  **Segment:** 
**Relevant Information:** 
> ""

## Problems
Roadblocks that keep them from achieving their goals (first person):
- "I can't …"
- "It takes too long to …"

## Background Story

## Goals
- **Be:** 
- **Do:** 
- **Feel:** 

## Behaviors
- 

## Evidence
-   · > TODO: 

Buyer Persona

# Buyer Persona — 

**Company:**   ·  **Feature / Product:** 
**Author:**   ·  **Date created:** 

**Name / Role:**   |  **Buyer type:** Economic / Technical / Functional
**Segment:** 
> ""

## Problems & goals (business outcome they're buying)
-   ·  

## Buying process & barriers
- **How they buy:** 
- **Selection criteria:** 
- **Barriers / objections:** 

## What moves them
- **Triggers:**   · **Information sources:** 

## Evidence
-   · > TODO: 

Deliver the artifact

Follow ../pm-copilot/references/artifact-output.md: confirm inputs, ask Markdown or .docx, write the .md, convert to .docx on request via your environment's native document-creation capability. Deliver a buyer and a user persona where relevant. Next stage: use these personas to write pm-positioning (per persona) or prioritized pm-requirements.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: julianoczkowski
• Source: julianoczkowski/product-manager
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.