I led the research for three new GitLab personas. This was part of the objective to develop personas for all of GitLab’s product areas. The previous personas were mostly focused on software developers, but the product had expanded to include workflows for many operations roles since they were produced. I independently gathered feedback from PMs and designers on the existing personas, researched how other companies present their personas, conducted 30+ interviews, and wrote reports on each before writing the final personas.
Several key asks came out of the feedback meetings. The previous personas were written in a long narrative form, making them difficult to absorb. This format also led PMs and designers to feel uncertain about how to update the personas. As a result, I delivered personas that would fit on one page, contained mostly bullet points, and used the JTBD framework.
While personas are somewhat controversial, and many on the product team aren’t convinced that they need personas, the insights discovered in the interviews won over some skeptics. In particular, the findings about DevOps engineers have been highly interesting to PMs - those users recieve notifications (“every damn way you can think of”), and they struggle to document their efforts and justify the time they spend supporting developers with “invisible” work. These findings have influenced the ongoing conversation about our operations dashboard feature, which was highly satisfying feedback as a researcher.
As part of our emerging security product area, I also investigated “security-aware” software developers, but their challenges and motivations proved no different from developers who did not indicate a security awareness in our screener. They have their own report, but were absorbed into the general software developer persona.