We spent weeks creating beautiful, detailed personas. They had names, photos, quotes—the works. Now they're printed on the wall, and everyone ignores them. They feel disconnected from our actual sprint work. How do you make personas living documents that teams actually use daily instead of just a pretty artifact?
Classic problem! The beauty is often the trap. The most common mistake is making personas based on assumptions or making them "too perfect." Real users are contradictory and face blockers. To make them useful, they must be grounded in real research—interviews, survey data, support tickets. Then, you use them to settle debates: "Would this feature help our persona, Sarah, on her chaotic commute?" I recommend this guide on personas UX—it has a whole section on common mistakes and how to validate personas. The key is to treat them as a hypothesis to test, not a final deliverable. We review and tweak ours every quarter with new data.
