principle · person-first
Person-first
Name a person, not a category.
The chain begins with someone whose life will change. Not teachers. Not graders, age 30–55, time-pressured. Dina. Tel Aviv. 34. Six classes a week. Sunday morning, 7:15 am, opening the LMS with her first cup of coffee.
The named person is not decoration. The name is the constraint. We are building this for Dina leads to a different decision than we are building this for teachers — every time, in every cycle, on every contested call.
What naming does
Three things, all load-bearing.
It forces specificity. A persona is an aggregate. Time-pressured teacher describes nobody, so the team can build for an average that nobody experiences. Dina, named, has Sunday-morning constraints, four classes she teaches in Hebrew and two in English, a son who needs collecting at four. The brief that begins with Dina's day cannot end with a generic feature.
It exposes the unwitnessed. When the brief says Teachers want easier planning, no one notices that no teacher has been observed planning. When the brief says Dina's Sunday morning planning currently takes ninety minutes, the question do we know that? answers itself. Either someone watched Dina, or the number is a guess.
It survives political weather. Six months in, an executive will reframe the work in terms of user segments and adoption funnels. The brief with Dina's name on it is what the team brings back to the table. The conversation can change altitude; the named person holds the chain to honesty.
What goes wrong without it
The corpus has seen the failure shape often enough to name it.
The team writes a brief about the user. Discovery proceeds as interview, not observation, because there is no specific person to sit next to. Stories get written in the same vocabulary; QA writes Gherkin where the Given describes a system state, not a moment. Six weeks later, the feature ships and the customer's actual graders do not adopt it. The postmortem traces the failure to we built for the wrong segment — but the deeper trace is to the moment in Discovery when no one was named.
What to do instead
A working rule, the corpus's strongest:
Every brief begins with a named person whose life will change. If you cannot name the person, you have not finished Discovery.
Aggregation has a place — but downstream, after the named cases compound. Observe several named people doing the same activity, write each of their stories, surface the patterns, build the persona with footnotes pointing back at the named cases. A persona that cannot be reduced to a list of named people will drift; six months later, it has different concerns from the people it was meant to summarise, and no one can tell why.
See also
- Canon — Before We Build · Person & Moment
- Practice — Writing predictions
- Clinic — A brief that didn't witness