Persona Library | Requirements and Use Cases

[j12y]

If you had a perfect persona already pre-designed and available for your company / product / organization / project, how would you use it in your day-to-day work? What would the ideal persona library provide you of value so that you would use it?

Add and vote up use cases in the comments.

[robearlam]

I would use the personas as starting point, and customise them to create my own which match my industry

(edited to make each suggestion individual comments for voting)

[j12y]

this came up in the monthly call as well (#43) being important for a lot of folks

[j12y]

I'd use the persona to identify events that my ideal customer attends

[j12y]

I'd use it to identify tools that my ideal customer uses in their day-to-day work to identify integration or co-marketing opportunities

[cliff-simpkins]

Agreed. I would suggest tools be expanded to software tools, websites, and communities.

For example - which of my personas tend to attend GDGs/meetups? Which are more likely to attend Re:Invent? And which are more likely to use which OSS frameworks?

[j12y]

I'd use it for internal communication so that when we're making a cross-functional decision, we'd have a shared understanding of whether a choice would be a good one for bob, harry, and/or sally

[j12y]

I'd use it to help teach go to market teams to better understand the persona of different roles they may not commonly engage with so they can avoid missteps and faux pas

[cliff-simpkins]

This can be great for both in-person and online guidelines for do's and don'ts and to anchor primary/secondary/non-target personas for various campaigns.

[anajsana]

Perhaps a sub-group of this, I'd use it to educate internal stakeholders (c-level managers, decision-makers, investors) to demonstrate the value of allocating the right resources and budget to adapt product features accordingly based on the pre-designed persona expectations, language, and pain points.

[j12y]

I'd use it to create a content strategy of technical guides that would be useful for that specific audience and help my team create and share them appropriately

[j12y]

I'd use it as an authoritative source rather than my individual opinion to help sales or marketing groups better understand how a commercial message might be negatively received by certain personas

[j12y]

I'd use it to understand the total available market (TAM) of a persona that is the target of my program

[j12y]

I'd use it to better understand a market segment to decide which technical areas of specialization i should focus my priorities on

[j12y]

I would use them in conjunction with my content calendar to ensure I'm addressing all of my Target Audiences

credit: Rob

[cliff-simpkins]

Related to this, I'd also like to use persona(s) by DevRel channel - e.g., which personas are primary/secondary targets for blogs or videos or Bluesky or TikTok or events.

[j12y]

I would tie it in with my performance tracking to see whether my content is addressing each of the personas individual needs

credit: Rob

[cliff-simpkins]

In an ideal world, you should be able to look at any piece of content and understand which persona(s) the content will resonate with.

[j12y]

understand your audience is such a pertinent idiom, but until recently i never thought about explicitly mapping that to personas to make sure i'm catering to varied perspectives rather than imagining a single uniform audience

[cliff-simpkins]

Use case - I would use the personas as inputs for Marketing/PLG groups and agencies that they may employ. The persona(s) would allow for them to write better website copy, email nurture mails, and would help for Brand design.

[j12y]

good idea, even if there is internal alignment, personas could be a good means of communicating with third-parties, referencing the foundations persona library for a common reference point and terminology

[cliff-simpkins]

Requirement - The persona(s) should include core motivations and pain-points (aka 'bridges and barriers'). What do they hope to achieve? And how can I/we help enable them to achieve that goal?

[cliff-simpkins]

Requirement - The persona(s) should be able to align with Field/Sales and Marketing Operations.

As a litmus test, can the Marketing Ops personas (how they segment their CRM/Salesforce contacts) align to DevRel's personas - whether at an individual persona level or at a higher-level 'aggregate' persona. This allows me to measure the effectiveness of registrations (e.g., events, webinars, office hours, hackathons) and also measure return and LTV by persona.

For example, a Dev Decision Maker persona may align 1:1 with their Salesforce persona, while 2-3 DevRel personas may all align with their 'Developer' Salesforce persona. In a prior company, this was sone simply by job title; in another prior company, this was done by job title and company type (e.g., game company vs consultancy vs bank vs SaaS). This also allows me to separate short-term pipeline (e.g., customers) from longer-term pipeline (e.g., students).

[cliff-simpkins]

Similarly, this would allow you to see how different personas turn into active users, and which content/events tend to activate them best...or reactivate them.

[palermo4]

Regarding personas, I would like to see these evolve to map to the real world - even the programming world. For example, imagine having a Persona abstract class in code. Not only could we inherit from that class into other broader categories, we could also implement interfaces for niche needs. These days, I feel a "developer" wears many hats. What if a developer who is broadly described as "Web Developer" is also responsible for a measure of script automation. What if a full-time corporate developer is responsible for maintaining internal apps & SDKs, is also highly passionate about no-code/AI solutions?

Sometimes I have seen marketing use personas to drive for precise messaging and method of outreach. This is good, but I think it could get better. I would like to see the "hat" a developer wears become a target as well. Some who do not regard themselves as developers may wear a developer "hat" when needed. Some devs are decision makers, some are not. Some are decision makers but not devs. And not all decision makers have the same motivations.

So pardon the verbosity, but I suppose I am suggesting we think of a person wearing "hats" that describe what they do in a given moment, instead of trying to categorize that person into a mold of a persona. Might be a spicy take, but hoping it may invite other thoughts on the matter.

[cliff-simpkins]

I don't think it's a spicy at all - it's an important point, and one that is completely valid and reflective of the real world. It's a critical use case to keep in mind for companies developing for a diverse developer community.

What I'm hearing you say is that an individual can inhabit multiple personas depending on their situation and mindset at the time.

To build upon and explore the example in your first paragraph, their 9-5 'daytime persona' is a corporate developer persona anchored in corporate developer motivations and fears (stable, reliable, 'best of breed', well documented, etc.), but their 5-9 'nights and weekend persona' (or even 9-5 'what's next' persona) is anchored innovation-led motivations and fears (FOMO, do-more-with-less, experimentation).

Based on my experience, I would recommend that you/we call out those two mindsets ("hats") as individual personas to balance specificity with quantity, but that thought is likely PTSD from having colleagues' eyes start to cross once I've gotten past 3-5 personas.

[j12y]

If you have a moment, take a skim here:
https://dev-rel.org/blog/2025-05-25-persona-library-incubation

Would you say that the initial take on the Persona Library aligns with some of the ideas you both shared here?

I am suggesting we think of a person wearing "hats" [traits] that describe what they do in a given moment

For example, a “Senior Backend Engineer” might be an individual contributor today but an architecture decision influencer tomorrow. They could be evaluating your API for a side project while simultaneously recommending against it at work due to compliance concerns. Inexplicably, knowing a job title is both helpful and meaningless at the same time. It was a short-cut to create a definition but a distraction when it comes to executing on it. By treating personas as structured data with rich behavioral traits...

imagine having a Persona abstract class in code

Defining personas based on a data schema gives us a number of advantages:

• inherit traits from other personas to customize them
• validate and transform personas for different use cases
• merge, split, and share with other organizations
• extract and load persona data with other systems of record

https://github.com/DevRel-Foundation/persona-library/blob/main/docs/guides/getting-started.md#structured-syntax

[j12y]

This is very timely discussion btw as its time to start figuring out the scope for what a 2.0 milestone of the persona library looks like, including perhaps breaking changes to what was created in this first instance and/or extending it to increase its value.

#116