Personas are stale. Segments are too broad. New approaches to the *question of who* uses your product are key: our approach.

Conventional personas were built for consumer products decades ago; your users are complicated, hard-to-find, overlapping, part of a team, or guided by supervisors. These three approaches offer alternative ways to approach the question of WHO in your product or marketing strategy.

The debate over the usefulness of personas to product development continues to rage. Do we divy them up in terms of demographics (young vs. older users), proficiency (proficient vs. novice), region (US vs. UK users), lifestyle (Family vs. single users)? There are so many ways to slice and dice potential pools of users, the art of determining personas gets muddy and inexact – and can lead to real risk for product leaders. Even seasoned social scientists can get lost in the details.

Asking the question of who uses your product, and where those use cases vary, may not involve conventional personas at all