Retire Your Personas, Keep the Research

Emily Goligoski, qualitative researcher and audience strategist (The Atlantic, Charter, the Membership Puzzle Project at NYU, Columbia Journalism School), on why most of what companies know about AI adoption is what people think they are supposed to say.

Donna Scarola and Stela Lupushor get into:

• The chocolate croissant script: how Emily opens every focus group to get the actual answer instead of the impressive one
• Why the employee personas guiding AI rollouts are closer to fiction than research, and "personas plus" as the fix
• User needs and jobs to be done as the lightest-lift replacement
• The no surprises policy: show people what you did with their feedback
• Her Charter x IRC4HR finding that women, workers of color, and workers over 55 are at higher risk of being disadvantaged by workplace AI, and why that has continued
• The caregiving burden as the hidden variable in who gets time to experiment with AI
• Cloudflare's AI-washed layoffs, Bolt deleting HR, and who is making these decisions
• Measuring AI impact with diary studies and longitudinal research instead of time saved
• Questions worth stealing: the most embarrassing prompt, manager questions applied to AI, "when did AI last do a great job by you?"
• Executives failing out loud, vibe coding at Columbia, and the disclosure rule
• What leaders will regret three years from now: believing AI intelligence lives at the senior levels

References from the episode:

• "Kick out your personas" by Emily Goligoski (Medium)
• "Using AI in Ways That Enhance Worker Dignity and Inclusion" (Charter x IRC4HR, 2023)
• "AI in the Workplace: How Companies and Workers Are Getting It Right" (Charter, 2024)
• Cal Newport, "Deep Work"
• Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"