[michaelrichards]

I disagree. The concept of personas is useful for abstracting the user's previous experiences and habits formed, not their current goals. It's a useful abstraction that should be considered an abstraction and not a concrete example. When discussing 'stay at home moms', we're encapsulating the past experiences of such personas.

[harryf]

I think therein lies the real reason why personas (often) fail - no one establishes the connection from the personas to the types of user / customer segments companies will have already established, from analysing their sales data and usage analytics.

By contrast to something like A/B testing, which can produce actionable results, in my experience personas frequently end up as nothing more than MeetingWare, so that everyone attending "can be on the same page"