Ideation Validation Games & Tools
Lean Experiment Design

Customer Persona Framework

A persona template to break your real and potential customer base into smaller, more useful groups. These groups are defined by various behavioral characteristics, which will help you determine which customer personas your business should focus on first.

When to Use It

Use this persona template to define your early adopter customer segment before starting customer discovery or  product development.

  • When getting team alignment on your target customer segment
  • When identifying assumptions your team has about your customer segment
  • When preparing to run customer discovery interviews
  • When synthesizing customer discovery insights
  • Before transferring a project to a new team


Who Should Use It

Customer personas are an amazing tool for doing customer development. They are the clearest form of hypothesis, test, and learn For designers that translates to "think, make, do." For lean startups, it means "build, measure, learn."

How It Works

Identify and sketch your persona. Write down their behaviors, demographics, needs, goals, and main problems. Give this person a name and a face.

  • Picture:
    The quality of the drawing doesn’t matter. It's just a device to help you recognize your customer persona as a unique human being.
  • Demographics:
    Customer demographics include all the good stuff that marketers like to have as a basis for targeting personas.
  • Goals:
    Goals are what everyone thinks they know, but probably has wrong.
  • Behaviors:
    The best behaviors to list are things related to how the persona solves the problem that they have.
  • Added benefit:
    One of the side benefits of doing personas is that it makes it easier to discuss product / market fit or use cases.
    (See https://kromatic.com/blog/customer-personas-for-customer-development)

Related resources

Customer Discovery Note Taking Template
Customer Discovery Note Taking Template (Google...
Customer Validation under Lockdown
How Asking Works: A Crash Course in Customer Di...
What a Journalist Can Teach Lean Startups about...
How Do I Know When I’m Done with Customer Disco...
Customer Profile Template: Cheat Sheet
The 4 Types of B2B Persona
Customers and Causality – Customer Analysis
Customer Personas for Customer Development

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