Imagine building without a blueprint

You’re buying a house, but you’re not sure who will live there, how you’ll use it, or even what you can afford. You keep looking, second-guessing, moving, and wasting money. Now picture the architect also guessing. They’ve added a tiny 2×2 “feature room” because it looks cool, not because anyone needs it. That’s what product teams do when they build without behavioural personas: lots of effort, very little fit.

TL;DR Buyer personas tell you who someone is. Behavioural personas tell you why they act, how they solve problems today, and what will genuinely move them to action. They focus on goals, context, alternatives, motivations, and struggles (not age, title, or salary). Use them to align teams, prioritise the right features, and write copy that converts. Skip them and you’ll ship pretty features that nobody uses (we’ve all been there).

Why this matters now (and hurts if you ignore it)

When you don’t anchor decisions in real behaviour:

• You chase “the average user”. Spoiler: they don’t exist.

• You add features that look good in slides but die in the wild.

• Marketing feels generic. Clicks without conversions.

• Roadmaps drift. Everyone has a favourite idea, nobody has evidence.

• Sales cycles lengthen. Prospects can’t see themselves in your solution.

• Churn creeps up. The product never quite fits the job for which it was hired.

If any of that stings even a little, behavioural personas are your fix (and your filter).

Buyer vs behavioural personas

Buyer personas
Great for media buying and targeting. They include:

• Demographics and firmographics

• Budget authority and purchasing cycles

• Surface pains and objections

Behavioural personas
Great for design, product, and conversion. They capture:

• Goals: what success actually looks like to them

• Reality: how they cope today, step by step

• Alternatives: previous tools, current workarounds, near-miss competitors

• Motivations/Meaning: what’s at stake emotionally and professionally

• Struggles: friction, constraints, anxieties, conflicting incentives

(If you know GRAMS METHOD™, you’ll recognise the above structure.)

What a good behavioural persona includes

Keep it lean, evidence-based, and practical:

• Name the outcome they want (“Ship confident releases every Friday without firefighting”)

• Context snapshot (team size, pace, constraints, compliance, devices)

• Journey summary (how they try today; 5–7 steps max)

• Trigger moments (what starts the search; what starts the switch)

• Decision drivers (must-haves vs nice-to-haves; in plain language)

• Hidden anxieties (career risk, time cost, “I’ll look incompetent”)

• Switching costs (data migration, stakeholder sign-off, learning curve)

• Language bank (verbatim phrases you can reuse in copy)

• Anti-goals (things they actively want to avoid)

• Evidence trail (interviews, call notes, analytics, tickets)

Tip: one page per persona. If it won’t fit on a single PDF, it won’t fit in anyone’s head.

How to build one step by step (GRAMS METHOD™ inside)

1. Collect signals

• 10–15 short stakeholder chats, 5–8 customer interviews per segment, support tickets, win/loss notes, basic funnel data, on-site search terms.

• Capture verbatim quotes (yes, the exact wording).

2. Code the data

• Tag notes to GRAMS METHOD™:

  • Goals (what they’re trying to achieve)

  • Reality (current process and feelings)

  • Alternatives (past and possible approaches)

  • Motivations/Meaning (why it matters; what they gain or fear)

  • Struggles/Solutions (frictions to remove; first fixes to deliver)

• Group recurring patterns into 4–7 themes.

3. Draft the persona (again, use the GRAMS METHOD for that ;)

• Write in the customer’s voice wherever possible (“I need…”, “I hate…”).

• Add a mini-journey showing where you can add value fastest.

4. Validate fast

• Playback to 3–5 real users and 2 sceptical stakeholders.

• Ask, “What’s wrong or missing?” and fix that (not the bits they like).

5. Operationalise

• Attach the persona to stories, acceptance criteria, design briefs, sales decks, and ad concepts.

• Add a “What this persona never says” box to kill pet features politely.

6. Keep it alive

• Quarterly check-in: did any drivers change? If yes, update the card, not a slide show nobody reads.

Quick example (condensed)

Persona: Overloaded Ops Lead
Goal: Ship stable releases weekly without 2 a.m. rollbacks.
Reality: Manual smoke tests, hand-stitched spreadsheets, “who owns this?” pings.
Alternatives: Jenkins jobs, Notion checklists, a failed trial of Tool X.
Motivations: Sleep, credibility, fewer escalations, happier team.
Struggles: Flaky tests, approvals bottleneck, zero rollback strategy.
First wins: 1-click rollback, visual deploy checklist, Slack approvals.
Language bank: “I just want it boring,” “I can’t risk a Friday deploy,” “Please don’t make me chase people.”

Now you know what to build first, what to say in the hero line, and what not to promise.

Using personas to drive real work

Product & UX

• Prioritise backlog by impact on struggles and speed to first win.

• Design micro-flows around trigger moments (not generic flows).

• Write empty-state copy from the language bank.

Marketing & sales

• Headlines mirror goals (“Release every Friday with zero drama”).

• Proof points mirror struggles (“Rollback in 1 click”).

• Objection handling mirrors meaning (“Protect your team’s credibility”).

Success & support

• Onboarding maps to the persona’s first 3 hurdles.

• Help centre organised by job to be done, not feature names.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Demographics masquerading as insight (“35–44, lives in London”).

• Too many personas (three strong is better than eight weak).

• Fiction over evidence (nice photo, wrong story).

• Stale artefacts (personas that never meet new data).

• Vague phrases (“values quality”) without examples.

• No trade-offs (real humans always trade time, money, or control).

Measuring impact (because somebody will ask)

Track leading and lagging indicators per persona:

• Leading: time to first value, task completion rates, activation %, demo-to-trial rate, reply sentiment.

• Lagging: retention, expansion, reduced support contacts on targeted flows, win rate vs. specific competitor, NPS themed to that persona.

• Tie each uplift to a shipped change linked to G/R/A/M/S (yes, put it in the changelog).

FAQ

How many personas do we need?
Usually 2–3 primary (you can add secondary later). If your roadmap cannot serve a persona in the next two quarters, park it.

Where do we get data if we have few customers?
Interview churned users, prospects who said no, and people hacking together alternatives. Support forums and Reddit threads count too.

How is this different from Jobs-to-Be-Done?
They overlap. Behavioural personas add motivations and meaning explicitly and keep a live link to alternatives and struggles (very handy for copy).

What if stakeholders just want the old buyer personas?
Keep them for media buying. Pair each buyer persona with one behavioural persona so planning stays aligned (and political).

Your next steps

• Run 5 interviews this week and tag notes to GRAMS METHOD™.

• Draft one single-page persona and share it with the team for a 15-minute playback.

• Pick one high-friction flow and redesign only what the persona struggles with first.

• Update your homepage hero to echo the persona’s goal, not your feature (“Ship confident releases every Friday” beats “AI-powered pipeline manager”).

If you want a hand, I’ve got a Miro template that walks you through the build, plus a free masterclass where I show live examples and common traps to avoid (bring a real brief and we’ll map it together).