Some weeks back, I gave a talk at the Hatch Conference. I shared how our Mews Design Ops team, where I work as a Senior Strategic Service Designer, turned a failed attempt at implementing personas into a powerful lesson on introducing design frameworks into complex organizations.
At Mews, we’ve made deliberate choices to become more customer-centric. It starts with how we organize ourselves (mirroring how properties operate) and and extends to how we plan product experiences — each designed with the user’s role in mind. To align design with real customer insights, we embedded personas into our strategy, and that’s why we still use them today.
The process wasn’t easy, so we wanted to share our journey: how we use personas, what went wrong during the first rollout, and how the team rebuilt a framework that actually works.
Personas: A Controversial Tool
Personas are controversial. Many in the industry see them as outdated, but their value depends entirely on how they’re used. To me, they’re a powerful narrative tool — one that helps build empathy, shows stakeholders how real users feel, and tells inspiring stories about possible solutions. Context is everything: in the right moments, personas can be invaluable; in the wrong ones, they can feel irrelevant.
In DesignOps, we were thrilled when our leadership started using the term. It showed they were thinking design-first — that they understood the importance of not just offering different experiences, but designing the product around users. The real challenge then became how to shape this tool so it actually worked for our teams. We knew it needed a tweak. And that brought to mind a moment early in my career.
Learning from Experience
At a previous company, I worked with an incredible service designer and close friend, Carol López. She was full of spark and creativity, always finding ways to get customers to articulate their real needs. One day, I saw her filling in a canvas and asked which framework it was. She smiled and said she’d just invented it. I was stunned, but then she shared advice I’ve never forgotten:
“At some point, you’ll be able to build and use your own tools.”
That advice has stayed with me throughout my career, shaping how I grow as a designer. Our personas at Mews reflect that same wisdom. They keep the essentials of the traditional framework but are adapted with the tools and methods we believe make them truly valuable:
- Based on Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
- Connected with journeys, touchpoints, and capabilities
- Fed with insights that help PMs, designers, engineers, and teams outside R&D make better decisions
- Enabling marketing, GTM, and sales teams to understand which product elements matter most and how to surface these insights in deliverables
- Recognizing segmentation nuances across property types, user roles, and business maturity levels
Making Personas Work in Practice
To bring these personas to life, we’ve powered them through Glean, our internal AI knowledge tool that reads from Confluence — Mews’ official documentation source. Anyone in the company can ask conversational questions in natural language and get meaningful, contextual answers grounded in real persona data. It’s a bridge between research and everyday decision-making, and it was one of the stories that resonated most at Hatch.
AI and Design: A Paradigm Shift
In recent years, design conversations have shifted. While past conferences focused on process, soft skills, and sustainability, the last two years have been dominated by AI, and rightly so. AI isn’t just the future of design anymore; it’s shaping how we design today.
What We Heard at Hatch
At Hatch, Jenny Wen from Claude delivered a talk about not trusting the design process anymore. Yet there’s a paradox: to break or redefine the design process, you first need to know it intimately. Hatch attracts a senior audience, and this idea resonated deeply. But to be fair, it’s easier to say when many of us have spent years mastering design step by step.
Jenny emphasized the importance of trusting our intuition. She also shared a brilliant line with a caveat: “Intuition is not guessing.” I love it because it captures the core idea: foundation enables freedom. Once you know the rules, you can bend, remix, and ideate effectively.
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This mirrors Carol’s wisdom from over a decade ago. Once you understand what is needed, you can play around creatively to save time, improve outcomes, and generate new solutions.
The closing talk, by Cameron Worboys from Cash App, built on this idea: good judgment is essential in an AI-driven world. AI can generate endlessly, but our ability to curate, prioritize, and decide what truly matters is what shapes the final outcome.
That’s exactly where our work at Mews continues. Cameron’s point, that discernment defines quality, is at the heart of how we built, tested, and refined our personas. It’s not about generating more frameworks, but about evolving the right ones through collaboration, feedback, and focus.
Personas at Mews: Combine, Adapt, Evolve
That principle guided our work with personas at Mews. We didn’t just adopt a template. We:
- Combined different elements to create meaningful personas
- Adapted them to the realities of diverse teams
- Evolved them as teams requested additional insights to maximize impact
- Powered them through AI — using Glean and LLM logic — to give colleagues natural, conversational access to aggregated and complete persona information
That was the essence of my Hatch talk: to be practical, share examples, spark discussion, and show how to do it — and how not to. Too many talks stay conceptual. I wanted to demonstrate an end-to-end case. It seems that it worked, because shortly after the conference, I received an email from Stephen Brisley at UserTesting summarizing the key takeaways brilliantly:
- The importance of getting early champions and adopters aligned internally to prove the value of refined personas early on
- How executives increasingly care about the voice of the end user, making it a true strategic focus
- A reminder that research tools are just tools — they only work if the wider team buys into their underlying value
Intuition, Experience, and Iteration
I firmly believe that intuition only works when supported by literature, experience, taste, confidence, and team support. Without that foundation, intuition is just guessing. But if you have it? Hell yes. You can build your own processes, design your own tools, iterate, pivot, and keep growing.
The Hatch talk was an opportunity to reflect on that journey and share it with a broader audience. It was about learning from mistakes, embedding user-centric thinking, and using tools like personas as instruments of empathy and strategic insight. Ultimately, it was about proving that growth in design — and in organizations — comes from learning forward, not getting it right the first time.
If you’re curious, the talk is now available here:
