Personas - who the product is for

SDLC Studio has two distinct casts, and it is worth not confusing them. Design personas are who the product is for - the users and stakeholders it serves. The Three Amigos are who builds and reviews it - your team. This page is about the first.

Cooper-style, goal-directed

A persona is a specific, goal-directed person the product serves - defined by its goals, not its demographics (Alan Cooper’s model). “A 34-year-old urban professional” is a market segment; “someone who needs to reschedule three overlapping meetings from a phone on a train” is a persona. The second one tells you what to build.

Every user story names the persona it serves, so the work always answers for whom.

The full cast

Personas are not just the one obvious user. SDLC Studio models a cast, because a real product serves and affects more people than the person clicking the button:

Role	Who they are
Primary	The single precise individual the interface is designed for. One Primary per interface (Cooper’s rule).
Secondary	Served by the Primary’s interface, but with one extra need.
Supplemental	Uses the product, but their needs are already met by serving the others.
Negative	The anti-persona - explicitly not who you are designing for. Naming them stops scope creep.
Customer	Buys or authorises the product but does not use it.
Served	Affected by the product without using it at all.

Only Primary and Negative are mandatory; the rest are there when the product warrants them. This is how you model both the people using the product now and the ones who will - an aspirational Primary for where the product is going is a first-class persona, not an afterthought.

Stakeholders and their veto lines

Beyond users, a distinct stakeholder card models the people who can block a release without ever opening the app - the economic buyer, a compliance or regulatory authority, ops and support, groups served but not using. Each stakeholder card carries:

• Veto lines - what makes them block a release outright.
• The evidence they read - what actually moves them.
• A built-in arbitration rule: a stakeholder’s goals never override the Primary persona’s interface. The person the product is for wins the design argument; the stakeholder wins the release argument.

Generating the cast

/sdlc-studio persona create                 # interactive, or --from-archetype <seed>
/sdlc-studio persona generate --from-prd     # a cast from the PRD
/sdlc-studio persona generate --stakeholders # the stakeholder panel

Note

Archetypes are seeds - a role plus a one-line disposition - not fifteen ready-made characters. persona create grows the full, project-specific persona from a seed on demand, so your cast is about your product, not a stock library.

A well-formed persona has a fixed shape - Quick Reference, Who They Are, ordered End Goals, Experience Goals, Behaviours & Context, Frustrations and a Scenario (its context and the key path the persona takes; validation scenarios live in the test specs, not the card). “Well-formed” is structural, not evidential: SDLC Studio checks the persona is complete, not that you did field research - that part is still your job.

Where to next

• The Three Amigos - the team that builds and reviews the work these personas define.
• PRD - the requirements the personas’ goals justify.
• The two-backlog model - how a persona’s goal becomes a sized story.