Creating user personas to align gross-functional teams

The Challenge

one.com serves a wide range of customers, from small business owners and hobbyists to professional web developers. However, product and marketing teams lacked a unified understanding of these diverse user groups. This made it difficult to prioritize features, tailor messaging, and align around a clear user experience vision. Without well-defined personas, teams risked building solutions that didn’t fully meet customer needs or missed growth opportunities.

The goal was to develop actionable personas that accurately represented one.com’s key customer segments, fostered empathy, and provided practical guidance for product and marketing decisions.

My Role

As lead UX researcher, I worked closely with executives to deeply understand the company’s strategic direction and business needs. Part of my role was to help shift leadership’s mindset from a primarily product-focused view toward a stronger user-centric approach, emphasizing how understanding customers drives better business outcomes.

I collaborated across teams to design and execute research that would uncover meaningful user segments. I led the entire process from initial data gathering through persona development and validation, and facilitated workshops to embed the personas into the organization’s ways of working.

What I Did

  • Facilitated a cross-functional workshop with Product, Marketing, Customer Service, Development, and Business Excellence teams to surface existing knowledge, align on key research questions, and build a foundation for collaboration throughout the project.

  • Conducted qualitative research via in-depth customer interviews to identify patterns and motivations across segments.

  • Synthesized findings into clear personas that included goals, pain points, behaviors, and attitudes relevant to web hosting and website building.

  • Created compelling persona profiles and visual cards to make the personas memorable and easy to use across teams.

  • Partnered with stakeholders to embed personas into product development and marketing strategies through ongoing workshops, documentation, and practical guides.

The Outcome

  • Shifted executive and team mindset towards prioritizing user needs alongside business goals, strengthening user-centered decision-making.

  • Aligned cross-functional teams around a shared understanding of customers, which improved communication, collaboration, and focus.

  • Guided product and marketing priorities by targeting features and campaigns that resonated deeply with key personas, improving sales.

  • Established personas as a living resource used for onboarding new hires and evolving product strategies as the market changes.