Personas Workshop
Understand what your users are thinking and struggling with, so you can provide the most value.
What is this workshop?
Personas are only useful if your team actually believes in them. This workshop helps you build personas from real insight — combining existing research, team knowledge, and structured empathy exercises — so you end up with characters the whole team references when making product decisions. Not as a box-ticking exercise, but as a genuine shared understanding of who you're building for.
What's included
- Empathy map canvas
- Persona profile template
- Jobs-to-be-done section
- Assumption vs. evidence tracker
This is for you if…
- Product teams building for users they don't deeply understand
- Teams where different members have conflicting assumptions about who the user is
- Anyone whose product decisions frequently stall over 'what users want'
How to access this template
How to run this workshop
Tips for first-time facilitators
- Pre-populate the board with any existing user research before the session — blank boards produce imagination, not insight.
- Explicitly label everything as 'assumption' or 'evidence' throughout. It matters for credibility later.
- Cap at 2–3 personas. More than that and the team can't keep them in their heads when making decisions.
Frequently asked questions
How do I copy this template?
Create a free Miro account at miro.com. Open the link, click the board title in the top-left corner, then click 'Duplicate board'.
What if we don't have user research yet?
Run the workshop anyway, but explicitly label everything as an assumption. A persona built on team intuition is still useful — as long as everyone knows it's a hypothesis to validate, not a fact.
How many personas should we create?
2–3 is the sweet spot. One primary persona, one secondary, and optionally one 'anti-persona' (someone you're explicitly not building for). More than three and the team can't keep them in their heads.
How do we stop personas from being ignored after the workshop?
Make them visual and keep them visible — poster on the wall, pinned in Slack, top of the product spec template. Every time someone asks 'should we build X?', the answer should start with 'which persona does this serve?'
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