Over the course of my career, I have long had a love/hate relationship with personas. Through work with large companies and start-ups, I have seen how they can be really useful tools in building empathy and cohesion among stakeholders in terms of how they think about their users. I have also seen poorly designed personas being used to defend product decisions that don’t really represent the interests of a real user. My work has taken a different approach to looking personas not only as representations of individuals, but as a guide to how they interact and collaborate with each other.