User Persona
A user persona is a research-based, semi-fictional profile of a target user — their goals, behaviors, context, and needs — used to keep product decisions grounded in real people rather than assumptions.
A persona is not a demographic label; it captures what a user is trying to achieve, the context they operate in, and the pain that gets in the way. Good personas come from real research — interviews, data — not imagination.
Personas keep a team aligned on who they are building for, which makes requirements and trade-offs easier to reason about: "does this serve our primary persona's job, or a nice-to-have edge case?"
Instead of "users aged 25–35," a persona says: "a solo founder who needs to turn a vague idea into a plan they can hand to a developer, without a PM team."
ArcPM generates personas from research as part of its flow, and carries them forward as grounding for requirements — linked in the Connected Product Graph so requirements trace back to the users they serve.
See ArcPM