Although this article talks about them from the perspective of UX, personae are fundamentally a marketing concept. They are simply a handy abstraction to help n

Although this article talks about them from the perspective of UX, personae are fundamentally a marketing concept. They are simply a handy abstraction to help non-experts reason consistently about market segments. This is like using the idea of "selfish genes" to help people reason consistently about natural selection. We don't think that genes are actually selfish, any more than we think that all customers fit into a few neat buckets. It just tricks the mind into adopting a different perspective. It matters for product UX because your product will only serve the people who experience it, and people will only experience your product if you market it to them. (This is often where developers, who tend to look down on marketing and PR, fall off this wagon. But it is largely true.) If you want a basic concrete example of the value of personae, then compare the bathrooms at an elementary school vs a bar. You're not going to position the fixtures the same way in both. But in order to reason about that, you need to first know who is coming into the respective establishments, and why.