I think you're reading too much into it. Gitlab's "personas" just seem like a slightly cutesier version of the bog-standard "user story" technique[1]. They've also been around for about 30 years (from a search, I wasn't aware of this before)[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)

You can also combine them to then have stories like

As <persona> I can <capability>, so that <receive benefit>

Which improves the story a bit imho because you have a clearer picture on what "role" does or can also divide them up (according to familiarity/usage frequency of the tool e.g.)

Personas are a popular tool in "design thinking" and are useful for helping product owners, designers, and developers consider the needs of a "known" set of user archetypes. The point is to see your app through their eyes, priorities, frustrations. Certainly there are users who don't fit any particular persona, but for the happy paths of your app, it's helpful to give a name to a few known "classes" of user.

This isn't an original thing. The concept of personas is a common approach to doing UX testing and design. I learned about them in my university human-computer interaction course.

Random article from Google for example: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-per...

These are buyer and user persona, not the actual role of the people working at GitLab. Personas are a regular tool used in product development or sales, where you create an idealized profile of the person and then use it to model behaviors.

These are product marketing personas describing general roles that exist in companies that they want to sell to. They aren't personas for who should be GitLab employees, they're a design and sales tool.

In product design, Personas are a way to agree on jobs to be done, scope the work and help find new ideas for features.

In Marketing it helps to brief agencies and to talk about a big group of people in a less homogeneous way.

One person can be in multiple persona categories, and personas can change or evolve over time.

I don’t see the “dystopian” aspect in it, nor do Insee it demolish any idea.

It’s just a tool.

> I could never imagine a company getting off the ground with this kind of system.

Well, many companies do this.

This is a common tool for aligning around user needs.

Don't worry no one will ever use it except sometimes and the one time you forgot to use it but it could have been useful and someone will point out how you forgot to use it and it could have been useful and you will beat yourself up about it realizing that you will never get a promotion now! Haha jk.

It's exactly because humans contain multitudes that teams use personas. You can't design your ridesharing app around the needs of Marco, the policy coordinator in Washington, DC who loves longboarding and doesn't own a car, who needs a way to occasionally get to his aunt's house in Frederick, MD and also to get home after a wild EDM show - that's way too specific. What if Marco only wants to ride in American-made cars? Other people who need transport might not care about that.

Instead, you can design your app around "person who lives in the city, doesn't own a car, and needs transport for trips outside the city ~3x/month," and "bar/concert patron who needs transport for trips within the city ~5x/mo and may be intoxicated when trying to purchase that transport."

A "persona" is a shared part of the human experience that your product interfaces with, and using that abstraction lets you create products that fit neatly into many people's lives.

First, this is standard practice in marketing, nothing special here.

Second, I find this quite the opposite what you are describing. Instead of just coming up with too generalistic terms, ideas, the marketing team tries to imagine a potential, REAL customers and trying to prepare ways to talk to them. I find this not only effective, but more polite with everyone's time.

Writing a marketing essay (like the one I prepared with the aid of https://topwritingreviews.com/ reviews) demands research, thought, and a firm grasp of the material at hand. It has a definite, well-ordered structure. In the essay's body, you'll find not just text but also facts, statistics, graphs, and charts. The writer is tasked with creating a marketing plan using the supplied data.

> Why does this seem so dystopian? I’m trying to figure out why this rubs me wrong.

For me it is being reduced to "Sasha (Software Developer)", she does not seem quite like me and I dont like to be categorized like that..

I understand why this is useful to gitlab, but from the external point of view it seems strange to be talked about in this way. Its almost as seeing the internal discussion of how to target you with ads.

But at the end of the day pretty much standard practise and is nothing more than an elaborate answer to "who uses our products and why." So kudos to gitlab to being open about it.

I don’t understand why people are taking these so personally. The point of them is to be an example of someone. They are characters, in a story.

Because they are stereotypes. And we all have negative experiences being stereotyped, because inevitably very few people fit the stereotype on all points.

No, user personas have names because they represent an individual. Not all software developers are Sasha, but Sasha is Sasha.

Nobody fits stereotypes on all fronts. Nobody is perfectly average, but that's not the point of personas.