Fixing User Personas

Agree. Good tools like personas, JTBD, or whatever are a result of well-done research, not assumptions. As soon as assumptions enter the mix, the tool (and therefore decision-making) is biased and will give you the wrong information.

Yeah, there's the same kind of problem with pretty much all "mental frameworks for improving the quality of X".

If you follow the steps mindlessly, you get nothing. Potentially less than nothing, since now you appear to have more authority than if you had not.

If you use it to think better, i.e. to expose your blind-spots or do something more carefully than normal, the steps barely matter - the goal was achieved, you're thinking better.

Every system can be "gamed" / undercut if you're determined or lazy enough. The goal of these systems is to break people out of that habit (whether they're aware of it or not), they can't guarantee it's done.

The article touches a bit on this in terms of "proto-personas" and suggests an alternative method (assumption maps). To me, there's a point that you can build products from assumptions. You'd be trading risk (less validation) for speed and perhaps focus, which isn't inherently wrong. But most importantly you shouldn't pretend it's unbiased, user-driven, or that there aren't blindspots. And you shouldn't use personas as the tool of choice in that case. The distinction is rarely made though and problematic.

This is how I use them too. Personas are the idea or target, you validate the persona against the data collected related to segments/cohorts, etc. Drift of cohorts from personas shows a change in behavior that needs to be understood.

I know what you're saying, and I think this is why lots of people are abandoning personas in favor of things like JTBD. But I think personas (or something similar) can be useful for those other parts of the process, especially if they're based in research and aren't "imaginary".

For example, thinking about how a particular user flow would work for a specific relevant persona/JTBD is useful for design decision making. It helps you see things from a user archetype's eye, rather than through your own designer eyes or through the eyes of "the user" which isn't specific or helpful.

This is all assuming, of course, that you're building personas correctly, which in my experience is rarely done.