evaluation

Persona creation as a marketing/product exercise has it uses for refining product thinking, but it’s generally left at the ideation stage and isn’t brought forward as any part of success criteria. Testing, on the other hand, does play a part in acceptance criteria, but it generally dwells in the abstract—it’s “triple distilled” from specific customer desire, laundered through organizations that by virtue of their siloing don’t colocate customer success with test definition. I think AI is going to desilo organizations or their would-be replacements quicker than we think, and so I think it’s time to ask the question: what if we could design personas that could actually tell us what they thought of our product? Literally, give them a test account and ask them for their thoughts?