Persona Development & Strategic Integration

Roles:

  • Research Chapter Lead, Spark NZ

  • Manager, Customer Insights, Seequent (Bentley Systems)

Overview
I have led the creation, validation, and refinement of persona frameworks across multiple organisations, ensuring they serve as living tools to guide strategic decision-making, product development, marketing, and customer engagement. My work has spanned large-scale telecom, enterprise geoscience software, and global SaaS environments, embedding personas into company-wide processes and influencing product roadmaps.

Spark NZ – Persona Refresh

As Research Chapter Lead, I oversaw a complete re-validation of Spark’s six primary consumer persona groups.

  • Re-validated each persona category through fresh qualitative and quantitative research, ensuring relevance in a rapidly shifting telecom market.

  • Synthesised persona insights with consumer product tribes (Broadband, Mobile, Digital Services) to ensure alignment between customer needs and product strategy.

  • Delivered personas across 100+ agile squads, ensuring accessibility and adoption company-wide.

  • Championed persona use through workshops, playbooks, and roadshow sessions to embed them in the daily decision-making process.

  • Balanced timeliness and cost-effectiveness by leveraging in-house research alongside prior agency work with TRA.

Seequent & Bentley Systems – Global B2B Persona Framework

At Seequent, a Bentley Systems company, I developed and refined personas representing geoscience and engineering professionals across diverse industries (mining, civil engineering, geothermal, and environmental sectors).

  • Conducted global research across 5+ regions, using interviews, surveys, and behavioural analytics to define persona segments based on workflows, decision-making styles, and software usage patterns.

  • Integrated persona insights into the Customer Experience Bowtie Model, linking emotional drivers and drop-off points across the customer journey.

  • Partnered with marketing, product, and customer success teams to adapt messaging, feature development, and onboarding flows for each persona type.

  • Ensured persona frameworks aligned with Bentley Systems’ broader market segmentation strategies while retaining Seequent-specific depth and context.

  • Produced high-fidelity persona documents, including needs hierarchies, capability matrices, and emotional motivator maps, which were adopted in executive planning and global go-to-market strategies.

Impact Across Roles

  • Established personas as a shared language between research, design, marketing, sales, and leadership.

  • Improved targeting accuracy for campaigns and product launches.

  • Increased cross-team efficiency by aligning squads around a unified understanding of “who our customers really are.”

  • Enabled measurable improvements in NPS, retention, and product adoption by tailoring experiences to persona-specific needs.