Co-creating personas brings users and stakeholders into the persona development process rather than presenting finished personas to them. By involving the people who will use the personas — product managers, engineers, marketers, customer service staff — in building them, the method produces characters that the whole organisation believes in and refers to. The participation process itself builds organisational empathy in a way that reading a finished document never does.
What It Is
Co-created personas are developed in a workshop setting using existing research data as the raw material. Participants cluster the data, identify archetypes collaboratively, debate which differences matter most for design, and build the persona profiles together. The researcher's role shifts from author to facilitator — ensuring the personas are grounded in evidence rather than assumption while empowering stakeholders to own the outcome.
How to Run It
- Complete your user research first — co-creation workshops need evidence to work with, not speculation.
- Prepare printed or digital research excerpts: quotes, observations, and behavioural patterns on individual cards.
- Facilitate a clustering exercise where participants group the data by theme and pattern.
- Ask: 'Who are the distinct types of person we see in this data?' — let archetypes emerge from the clustering.
- Build each persona profile collaboratively: name, goals, frustrations, behaviours, and context.
- Close the workshop by asking each participant what this means for their specific work.
When to Use It
Co-creating personas is most valuable in organisations where previous persona work has not been adopted — where a beautifully designed deck sits on a shelf unread. Involving stakeholders in the building process creates investment and accountability. It is particularly effective for cross-functional teams and large organisations where design artefacts need to travel far from the team that created them.
Tips for Success
- Ground every workshop decision in research data — the facilitator's job is to redirect speculation back to evidence.
- Ask participants to defend persona characteristics with specific data points: 'What in the research leads you to say that?'
- Cap the number of co-created personas at three to five — more than that and the workshop loses coherence.
- Assign persona stewards after the workshop: each persona should have a named person responsible for keeping it current.
