Avast
Persona Sprint
How well do we actually know our users? At Avast, our design team ran a workshop on Business Hub personas, building each one alongside its opposite to separate what we knew from what we assumed.
MUNI
Interview
University
Design Thinking
The premise of the workshop
As part of our internal design alignment at Avast, our team gathered for a focused workshop centered on Avast Business Hub. The goal was deceptively simple: each designer would build and defend a persona representing a real segment of our B2B users. But there was a twist alongside the "classic" persona, we each had to construct its opposite, a counter-persona designed to challenge our assumptions and surface blind spots in our product thinking.
Sourcing the evidence
The most valuable part came during presentations. As each designer walked the team through their personas, we tagged every claim with its source. Was this a hypothesis we were carrying forward from instinct? Was it backed by quantitative data from our analytics? Did it come from a single sales call, or had we heard it across multiple customer interviews? Or was it second-hand something a colleague mentioned in passing?
We ended up with three categories on every persona: hypothesis, validated by data, and heard through someone. Seeing the ratio for each persona was sobering. Some of our most confidently held beliefs about Business Hub users turned out to be almost entirely hearsay.
What changed afterwards
The workshop didn't produce a single "winning" persona. It produced a map of what we knew, what we assumed, and what we needed to go verify. For the weeks that followed, the hypotheses became a research backlog each one a question waiting for a real customer conversation to answer it.
