Making personas work across a global company

As Learnosity’s product offerings expanded and our client base grew more diverse, our product and sales teams needed a shared understanding of who we were building for. Different teams had different mental models of our users, leading to misaligned product decisions and inconsistent client communication.

Project Overview

With a growing product suite serving different educational contexts, our teams lacked a common vocabulary for discussing user needs. Product managers, designers, developers, and sales representatives all had different assumptions about our users, which led to feature decisions that didn’t always align with actual user requirements.

Research and Discovery

I conducted comprehensive research to understand our diverse user base through multiple data sources. This included analyzing existing client interviews, support tickets, usage analytics, and conducting new stakeholder interviews across sales, support, and product teams.

Innovative Card Design

Rather than creating static persona documents, I developed two-sided persona “cards” with an RPG-style design that allowed team members to mix and match different traits. This approach created a more nuanced and flexible representation of our diverse user base, moving beyond traditional personas to represent the complexity of real users.

Collaborative Development

I facilitated feedback sessions with the customer support team, which generated over 50 improvement tasks. The cards were presented to various stakeholders including directors and product teams, with iterations based on cross-team input to ensure relevance and adoption.

Implementation and Measurement

The cards were integrated into our company wiki for easy access across teams. I tracked usage over a 3-month period and conducted follow-up surveys to measure effectiveness and gather feedback for further improvements.

Impact

• Established shared vocabulary across product, sales, and support teams
• Improved onboarding for new team members to quickly understand customer types
• Enhanced product development conversations with user-centered focus
• Created flexible tool that represented user complexity more accurately
• Increased user research accessibility across non-research teams

Key Learning

This project demonstrated the power of making user research data accessible and engaging through thoughtful design. The success wasn’t just in creating accurate personas, but in developing a format that teams actually wanted to use and found valuable for their day-to-day work.