What are personas?

A persona represents a type of user who interacts with your product. Each persona has a name (the role, e.g. "Organization Admin") and an optional description that explains what that user does, their goals, and their level of technical expertise.

When personas are included during story slicing, the AI selects the appropriate persona for each story's "As a…" clause rather than using generic terms like "user" or "the system".

Example personas

Organization Admin

Manages user accounts, roles, billing, and organization-level settings. Typically a non-technical business owner or IT administrator.

Project Manager

Oversees project scope, sprint planning, and stakeholder reporting. Needs visibility across all features and stories without needing to edit them.

Developer

Implements features based on approved stories. Focuses on acceptance criteria clarity and technical constraints.

QA Engineer

Reviews and generates test cases. Needs structured acceptance criteria and clear preconditions for testing.

Managing personas

Go to Settings → Personas to create, edit, and delete personas. Personas are shared across all projects in the organization.

  • Click New Persona, enter a name and optional description, and save.
  • Edit or delete personas at any time — changes take effect on the next slice.
  • Personas are not required. If none are configured, the AI will infer roles from context.

Persona discovery wizard

Instead of creating each persona manually, you can use the persona discovery feature available in the project setup wizard and in Settings. Storymate analyzes your project's domain context, reference documents, and feature descriptions to suggest relevant personas automatically.

  1. 1

    Open persona discovery

    In the project setup wizard (step 8) or in Settings → Personas → Discover, click Discover Personas.

  2. 2

    Review suggestions

    Storymate presents a list of suggested personas with names, descriptions, and the reasoning for each suggestion. Each suggestion includes a confidence indicator.

  3. 3

    Accept, modify, or reject

    Select the suggestions you want to keep, edit any descriptions, and discard irrelevant ones. Accepted personas are saved in bulk.

Persona discovery supports multiple suggestion strategies: content-based (from documents), role-list-based (from org charts), and questionnaire-based. The discovery dialog shows which strategy produced each suggestion.

Using personas during slicing

When you trigger story slicing, the slice dialog shows a toggle to Include Personas. When enabled, all defined personas are passed to the AI as context. The AI selects the most appropriate persona per story based on the feature description.

Tip: Write persona descriptions that include their goals and pain points, not just their job title. This gives the AI richer context for writing more empathetic and accurate story descriptions.