Your customers aren't personas. They're characters with codes — forged by experience, invisible from the outside, and governing every decision they make about your product.
I own three pairs of the same Air Jordans. I have the same pants in five different colors. If you asked ChatGPT to generate a persona of me as a consumer, it would never — could never — predict that. It would give you something rational, evenly distributed, demographically plausible. It would describe a person who doesn't exist.
Real people are specific. They're contradictory. They're irrational in ways that make perfect sense once you actually talk to them.
But right now, across thousands of product teams, someone is typing "create a persona for a B2B procurement manager" into ChatGPT, getting back a polished, entirely fabricated profile, giving it a name, putting it on the wall, and building a roadmap around it. Without ever talking to a customer.
This isn't a technology problem. It's a curiosity problem. And the technology just made it frictionless to stop being curious.
Omar doesn't rob civilians — ever. That's not a demographic attribute. It's not a psychographic segment. It's an internal logic system that governs every decision he makes and every interaction he has.
If you were building a product for Omar's world and you didn't understand his code, you'd build for the wrong person entirely.
When Jonathan Hickman established Krakoa, he didn't just create a nation — he established its operating system. Three laws. Three codes that an entire civilization would run on:
And then immediately, every character's individual code started grinding against those collective laws. Magneto's code evolved from separatist to statesman. Xavier's code — always about integration — somehow led him to build the very separatist nation he once opposed. And Apocalypse — the character whose code is literally "survival of the fittest" — became a diplomat. Hickman showed that codes aren't static. They're living systems that evolve under pressure.
In East of West, Death's code is built around a love that literally defies the apocalypse. Wolf's code is survival through loyalty to a system that betrayed him. Hickman uses these personal codes to drive an entire geopolitical narrative — proving that codes aren't just personal attributes, they're structural forces that shape systems.
The tension between Killmonger and T'Challa in Black Panther tells the same story. Same goal. Codes forged by completely different lived experiences. Opposite strategies from the same stated intention. The intergalactic run takes it further — the code evolves as the context changes, but it never becomes generic. It stays specific.
These aren't personas. They're operating systems — built from specific experiences, specific wounds, specific beliefs about how the world works. They evolve. They contradict themselves. They produce unexpected behavior that makes perfect sense once you understand the code beneath it.
Your customers are the same.
Your customers aren't personas. They're characters with codes — and the job of discovery is to crack them.
This is what the persona conversation keeps missing — in both B2B and B2C. The mechanical frameworks of persona creation — demographics, psychographics, jobs-to-be-done — are scaffolding, not the building. The building is the code. The internal logic. The thing that only reveals itself when you sit with someone long enough for them to trust you with the story behind the behavior.
Early in my career, I worked in financial services. I sat next to the people who ran the processes — the operations teams, the back-office staff, the ones who actually moved money through systems every day. And I learned something that reshaped how I think about product work: the people running the processes were not the bankers making the deals.
Ask ChatGPT to describe a "user at a financial services firm" and you'll get a persona that looks like a banker. You won't get the person who's been at the company for fourteen years, knows every edge case in the settlement workflow, and has opinions about which fields in the legacy system are lying to you.
Every macro someone builds to work around your product is a feature request they've given up on filing. Every defensive architecture a sysadmin builds is a trust signal about your organization. These are codes in action. None of them exist in training data.
"Sarah is a 38-year-old Director of Procurement at a mid-market SaaS company. She manages a team of 5 and is responsible for vendor evaluation, contract negotiation, and cost optimization. Her key pain points include lack of visibility into spending and fragmented approval workflows."
"Honestly? I spend half my day in Slack convincing engineers that the vendor they want isn't SOC 2 compliant. My 'approval workflow' is me texting my CFO from the parking lot. I built my own tracker in Notion because nobody else's tool matches how we actually buy things."
This isn't an anti-AI take. I spend my days building AI-powered analysis tools. But the most dangerous thing you can do with a powerful tool is use it to skip the work that actually matters.
Asks ChatGPT to create a persona. Replaces the work. Generates from nothing.
Feeds fifty interview transcripts and asks it to surface the contradictions between what customers say and what their behavior shows. Amplifies the work.
When everyone asks the same model the same question, everyone gets the same answer. Every product starts to look the same. Meanwhile, the team that actually cracked their customers' codes is building something nobody else can copy — because nobody else did the work.
When everyone asks the same model the same question, everyone builds the same product. The competitive moat isn't AI. It's the quality of your inputs.
You haven't adopted a product operating model.
You've automated the appearance of one.
Customer understanding is slow. It's expensive. It's messy. Sometimes you sit through forty-five minutes of someone talking about their day before they offhandedly mention the thing that reshapes your entire product strategy. You can't prompt-engineer your way to that moment.
That's where the codes live — in the offhand comment, the workaround, the story they tell about the time the system failed them.
Talk to your customers. Sit next to them. Watch them work. Record it. Transcribe it. Then use AI to help you find the patterns you missed.