Understanding Customers (Personas)
Overview
One of the first initiatives after establishing Fluent Commerce's Design Thinking practice was creating a shared understanding of our customers. Customer personas are much more than design artefacts—they're strategic tools that align organisations around who they are building for and why.
Before creating anything new, I reviewed the existing work, interviewed stakeholders across Product, Engineering and Customer Success, and assessed how customer insights were being used in product decisions. While previous persona work provided a useful foundation, it lacked validation, consistency and adoption. With too many personas and no shared ownership, they weren't influencing product development or strategic decision-making.
This presented an opportunity to create a simpler, validated and organisation-wide customer framework that became the foundation for customer-centred innovation.
Business Objective
Support Fluent Commerce's company-wide objective of customer obsession by establishing a shared, validated understanding of its two primary customer groups: business users and implementation partners. The goal was to align product strategy, delivery and customer success around real customer needs while creating a common language across the organisation.
Customer Challenge
Teams lacked a consistent view of who their customers were, how they worked and what success looked like for them. Without a shared understanding of customer behaviours, goals and pain points, product decisions were often driven by assumptions rather than evidence, reducing confidence and increasing delivery risk.
Design Challenge
Develop a customer framework that aligned stakeholders around a concise set of validated personas, customer journeys and key responsibilities. The framework needed to simplify complexity, embed customer thinking into everyday product decisions and create a repeatable foundation for research, prioritisation and solution validation.
Outcomes & Impact
Consolidated more than 25 fragmented personas into a concise, validated customer framework adopted across the organisation.
Established alignment between Product, Engineering, Customer Success and leadership on Fluent Commerce's primary customer groups and their needs.
Created a shared customer language that became embedded in product discovery, design discussions and strategic planning.
Identified representative customers for ongoing research, usability testing and solution validation.
Embedded personas throughout the Product Development Framework, ensuring customer needs informed prioritisation, design and delivery.
Strengthened customer-centred decision-making by replacing assumptions with shared, evidence-based customer understanding.
Credits
Product Name: Personas (Fluent Commerce)
Role: Head of Product Design
Website Link: https://fluentcommerce.com/