Define: Customer Persona

This skill turns a filled-in Product Offer into a sharp, evidence-backed Customer Persona by guiding the user, section by section, through the persona framework — researching the target customer, proposing hypotheses, critiquing weak answers against the framework's own "good vs bad" criteria, and producing a finished persona document.

The goal is not to fill in 12 sections quickly. The goal is to make the user a stranger to their own product for an hour — to force them to describe a real, recognizable human with specific tools, communities, prices, and frustrations, rather than a fuzzy demographic ("millennial founders") or an aspirational caricature ("tech-savvy decision-maker"). A sharp persona is the foundation of everything downstream — positioning, copy, growth channels, pricing — so the time spent here pays back many times over.

Session length: Designed to be completable in 45–75 minutes of conversation. All research is Claude's job during the session — named tools, subreddits, anchor prices, verbatim pain language. The user's job is to talk through their idea, confirm or correct Claude's research-backed proposals for each section, and approve the rewrite at the end. A research-backed draft with some sections tagged for live validation is a successful output of this skill — customer interviews are a normal next phase, not a precondition for being done.

Inputs

Before starting, locate three files in the ProductOS folder — productos/ at the app repo root, or the current folder in a standalone ProductOS checkout. Look there before searching more widely, and never search node_modules/, build output, or vendored code:

1. The Product Offer — usually 1-Product-Offer.md. This is the required input. If sections are blank or vague ("our customer is small businesses"), stop and ask the user to tighten the offer before proceeding. A persona built on a fuzzy offer inherits the fuzziness, and you will spend the whole conversation re-deriving the offer instead of building the persona.
2. The Customer Persona template — usually 2-Customer-Persona.md. This defines the exact output structure to follow, and it is also the file the skill rewrites in place at the end (see step 5).
3. The Customer Persona examples — usually BONUS-Customer-Persona-Examples.md. Read this once at the start to internalize what "good" looks like across business models (B2B SaaS, agent-native app, AI-enabled service, consumer subscription, developer tool). Use them as calibration, never as templates to copy from — the user's persona must be their own.

If any of these files are missing, ask the user where they live before continuing.

Workflow