Bringing teams together to understand our users better
Persona alignment workshops help teams move away from assumptions and towards a shared, realistic understanding of users. Instead of relying on fragmented or outdated knowledge, these sessions create a collaborative space to map user roles, behaviours, needs, and motivations.
In complex product ecosystems, different teams often interact with different types of users.
Without alignment, this leads to inconsistencies in features, gaps in requirements, and unclear priorities. These workshops act as a foundation before designing journeys, flows, or features, ensuring everyone is building with the same user in mind.
Across multiple products, I noticed a recurring pattern. Knowledge about users was scattered.
Some teams understood super users deeply, while others only interacted with operational staff. In some cases, teams had no direct exposure to users at all. This created disconnects in decision making and led to inconsistent product experiences.
A persona alignment workshop became the simplest and most effective way to:
• bring together existing knowledge in one place
• validate assumptions and challenge biases
• identify gaps in understanding
• co-create updated and realistic personas
• align the team before moving into design and development
Facilitating these workshops became one of the most impactful parts of my process.
I typically lead the session end to end. From setting the context, guiding discussions, and asking the right questions, to keeping the energy in the room active and inclusive. My focus is on making people feel comfortable enough to share openly, while still steering the conversation towards meaningful outcomes.
These sessions are not just about personas. They are about unlocking perspectives.
They help surface insights that are rarely documented and give me a deeper understanding of the product from multiple angles. They also create a shared language across teams, which makes collaboration smoother in later stages.
An unexpected but valuable outcome is team bonding. People who usually communicate through Jira or Teams finally sit together, discuss real user problems, and build alignment in a more human way.
To support these sessions, I designed a structured yet flexible Miro template that guides teams through the entire persona alignment process.
It includes:
• user role mapping
• behaviour and motivation prompts
• assumption vs validation sections
• gap identification
• persona synthesis
Over time, this template evolved into a reusable framework that I’ve applied across multiple workshops with different teams and products.
Instead of starting from scratch every time, this template helps teams jump straight into meaningful discussions and stay focused throughout the session.
• People contribute more when the environment feels safe and informal
• Clear prompts reduce hesitation and drive better discussions
• Cross-functional conversations uncover insights that are rarely documented
• Co-created personas drive stronger alignment than top-down deliverables
• Simplicity in structure leads to better participation
• The quality of early alignment directly impacts requirement clarity later
• Visual, interactive exercises are far more engaging than traditional meetings
