When to load this mode
You have raw material (interview transcripts, sales-call notes, support tickets, churn surveys) and need to turn it into segments the team can write to, price to, and channel to. Or a teammate handed you a demographic and asked for a persona.
Runs after jtbd-interviews.md. If you don't have interview data, stop and go get it.
The premise
Don't segment by age, income, or job title. Segment by job — the progress someone is trying to make in a specific situation. Two 42-year-old marketing directors can be in different segments — one is firefighting, the other is laying foundations. Demographics correlate; jobs cause.
The procedure
1. Read every transcript twice. First pass: listen for the shape. Second pass: pull verbatim quotes into a sheet with five columns — trigger event, push, pull, anxiety, habit.
2. Cluster by job, not by person. Group transcripts where the trigger event is structurally the same — same kind of moment, same kind of breaking point. A grad student and a retiree might both have hired the same productivity app to recover an hour of cognitive space after a draining commute.
3. Name each cluster from the customer's words. Not "the time-strapped professional" — that's marketer-speak. Try "the Sunday-night-bracing-for-Monday person." If you can't picture the moment, the name is wrong.
4. Write a one-page segment card per cluster. Required fields:
- Job (a verb phrase: "Help me get the kids out without yelling")
- Trigger event (one specific moment)
- Push, Pull, Anxiety, Habit — two lines each, one verbatim quote per Force
- Hired and fired (what they're switching to / from)
- Where they look (only what they said, not what you guess)
- Three of their own sentences you'd put on a wall
5. Stamp the segment in TEAM_MEMORY.md under ## Research. Don't make Copy and Sales dig.
Decision rules — validate vs. discard
Validated when:
- At least 5 transcripts cluster onto it (3 = hypothesis).
- Trigger event is concrete and named the same way by multiple people.
- All four Forces have verbatim quotes — not paraphrases.
- You can name what they would have bought instead, and why they didn't.
- A copywriter could draft the first sentence of an email to this person without asking you anything.
Discarded when:
- Defined by demographic alone with no consistent trigger.
- Trigger is abstract ("growth," "success") with no specific moment.
- You can't name the alternative they were weighing. (No alternative = no decision = no buyer.)
- The Forces sheet is mostly your inference, not their words.
- Two team members read the card and picture two different humans.
Anti-patterns
- Don't build personas from imagination. "Marketing Mary, age 38, drinks oat milk lattes" is fiction. Fiction generates plausible-sounding strategy that doesn't move the needle.
- Don't segment by ICP firmographics alone in B2B. Two CFOs at identical-looking companies can be in different jobs depending on whether the board is happy with them this quarter.
- Don't over-segment. More than 5 segments and the team quietly collapses them back into one.
- Don't lead with channel. "We need to reach moms on TikTok" is a wish. Where they actually go when the trigger fires is what you put on the card.
- Don't reverse-engineer segments from a campaign that worked. Survivorship bias — you re-find existing buyers and miss the segments you're not reaching.
Before / after
Before (demographic persona, imagination-built):
"Sarah, 34, suburban mom of two, $90k household, follows wellness influencers. Wants to feel more put-together. Pain points: time, stress, mom guilt."
Team writes "feel more put-together" copy, runs Instagram ads, gets 0.4% CTR, blames the algorithm.
After (JTBD segment card, transcript-built):
Segment: "The 5pm-handoff parent." Job: "Get me from end-of-workday to bedtime without losing my voice." Trigger event: Walking in the door and one kid is already crying. Named in 6 of 8 transcripts. Push: "I'm running on fumes by 5." | "I yelled at him over a juice box. Felt like a monster." Pull: "Something I can hand to my partner and they'd do it the same way." | "Less in my head." Anxiety: "Another app that wants my email and never gets opened." | "No time to learn a system." Habit: "We've been winging it for four years." | "My mom didn't need an app." Hired: Shared calendars, meal kits, parenting podcasts. Fired: Their own planning brain at 5pm. Where they look: Reddit r/Parenting at 11pm. WhatsApp groups with three other parents.
Now Copy has the first line. Channels knows where to be. Sales knows what to de-risk. Offer knows what "no setup" is worth.