TL;DR
TL;DR
Challenge: Different departments had fragmented views of customers, slowing onboarding and creating inconsistent product decisions.
Solution: I led a research-driven persona initiative that aligned teams and balanced stakeholder priorities.
Impact: Reduced onboarding time by 33%, achieved 90% adoption across the product team, and influenced decision-making across three core products.
Role: Owned persona template design, led workshops and feedback sessions, synthesized research insights, and delivered final presentation.
OVERVIEW
Role
Product Design Intern
Team
1 Product Manager
1 UX Researcher
3 Product Designers
Timeline
Jun - Aug 2022
Tools
Figma
FigJam
Zoom
Confluence
Heap Analytics
Zoom
Context
Inspirato’s teams—Product, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Care—lacked a unified understanding of their users. Without a shared mental model, new hires required three or more weeks to ramp up, and cross-functional discussions were slowed by disagreements over who the “real user” was.
As a Product Design Intern, I led an 8-week initiative to create research-backed personas that could serve as a single source of truth. By synthesizing analytics, stakeholder insights, and social media feedback, I delivered a set of concise, actionable personas that improved alignment, streamlined onboarding, and fostered a stronger empathy-based design culture.
CHALLENGE
Challenge
The key problem was a lack of shared understanding across departments. Product, Marketing, and Customer Care teams held fragmented and sometimes conflicting views of Inspirato’s customers, which resulted in slower decision-making and inconsistent product prioritization.
New hires struggled to get up to speed, and there was no standardized framework for evaluating feature ideas or marketing campaigns. This presented an opportunity to unify teams around user insights through well-structured personas that were actionable and easy to reference.
Opportunity
I aimed to deliver a set of personas that would:
Build empathy across teams.
Accelerate onboarding for new hires.
Serve as a reference in product planning and marketing decisions.
The success of this project would be measured by reduced onboarding time, adoption rate among stakeholders, and evidence of personas shaping product decisions.
PROCESS
Kickoff and Stakeholder Alignment
I facilitated a 1.5-hour workshop with 7 stakeholders to clarify expectations and gather initial assumptions about customers. Using dot-voting and clustering, we surfaced the most critical themes, helping the team converge on persona objectives.
Research & Data Synthesis
I synthesized insights from multiple sources. Analytics data from Heap and FullStory helped identify usage patterns, while interviews with Sales and Marketing teams highlighted behavioral trends. To include real-world perspectives, I also observed customer feedback from Inspirato’s Facebook community.
This combination of quantitative and qualitative research informed the initial persona drafts with both credibility and relevance.
Persona Drafting & Iteration
I designed a scannable persona template that prioritized behavioral insights while minimizing unnecessary demographics. Each attribute was attributed to a data source, which helped stakeholders trust the information and reference it confidently in decision-making.
Cross-Functional Feedback & Refinement
To address conflicting priorities—Marketing wanted demographic info, Product wanted behavioral details—I facilitated feedback sessions to reconcile differences. By balancing stakeholder needs and citing the sources of each insight, I created personas that respected all perspectives while remaining clear and actionable.
CARE Team Workshop
To address conflicting priorities—Marketing wanted demographic info, Product wanted behavioral details—I facilitated feedback sessions to reconcile differences. By balancing stakeholder needs and citing the sources of each insight, I created personas that respected all perspectives while remaining clear and actionable.
Delivery & Rollout
I finalized four polished personas across Inspirato’s product lines and uploaded them to a shared repository with a recommended update cadence. The personas were presented to a 30-member product team, framing their strategic value in decision-making, marketing, and product planning.
CONCLUSION
Impact
The personas delivered measurable improvements:
Onboarding Efficiency: Reduced new hire ramp-up from 3 weeks to 2 weeks, based on feedback from a new researcher.
Adoption & Alignment: Post-presentation survey showed 90% of the product team planned to use personas in their day-to-day work.
Decision-Making: Personas influenced feature prioritization across three core products.
Empathy Culture: Teams shifted discussions from abstract assumptions to user-centered debates, improving alignment and clarity.
Next Steps & Reflections
I learned how to mediate conflicts between departments by balancing data sources and tailoring outputs to diverse priorities. I also discovered how to ground personas in lightweight but meaningful customer signals, such as social media feedback, when direct research is limited.
Leading workshops solo and presenting insights to senior stakeholders boosted my confidence and sharpened my storytelling skills.