Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Pre-PMF Fieldnote, after 12 interviews with technicians: Ana and Karim consolidate the field technician persona.
What the team took away
The persona ruled out a typing-heavy form: the first version became photo-first with voice notes, and the 30-second rule became a design principle.
How to run it
Preparation
Invite the people who talked to users in the last month: design, PM, support. No one who has never met a user.
Send the interview notes or recordings two days before. Ask everyone to arrive with 5 verbatims highlighted.
On the board: one empty persona canvas per hypothesized segment (2 or 3, no more), plus a parking area for the raw quotes.
Print or pin the segmentation you already use in marketing or sales, so the personas do not contradict it.
Agenda
10 min
Frame State the segments you are building personas for and why. Remind everyone: a persona is a synthesis of interviews, not a character we invent.
20 min
Quote dump Everyone posts their verbatims as stickies in the parking area, one quote per sticky, with the interviewee code. Silent work.
20 min
Cluster by segment Move each quote under the persona it belongs to. Quotes that fit nowhere start a new column: that is a segment you missed or one you should drop.
40 min
Fill the canvas In pairs per persona: goals, frustrations, behaviors, context, tools. Every block must cite at least one quote. If a block has no quote, leave it empty.
20 min
Read-out and challenge Each pair reads its persona in 3 minutes. The others ask: which interview backs this? Remove anything that survives only on opinion.
10 min
Name and pick the primary Give each persona a name and a one-line summary. Decide which one the next quarter is designed for first.
Pitfalls
Do not add a stock photo, an age and a hobby: it makes people design for a cartoon. Keep the quote and the context instead.
If you have fewer than 5 interviews per segment, call it a proto-persona and mark it as a hypothesis on the board.
Never let two personas share the same goals and frustrations. Merge them, or you will build the same feature twice.
Afterwards
The primary persona goes on the wall of the team room and at the top of every PRD. It feeds the customer journey map and the How Might We session. Revisit it after each research round.