CRAFT Blog · Behind the Personas
Most products are designed entirely from the creator’s side of the table. Leo exists to put a believable customer on the other side — so CRAFT’s decisions get a buyer’s reaction before they ship.
Why a simulated customer?
When you build a tool, you know too much. You know why every feature exists, so you stop seeing the friction a first-time buyer feels in the first thirty seconds. Leo is our antidote to that blind spot: a time-constrained Claude power user, burned by half-baked AI tools, who won’t sign up for anything that doesn’t pay him back within two weeks. He produces reactions, objections, and specific asks — never artifacts — and he’s consulted, never authoritative. Richard decides, Cat orchestrates, Leo reacts.
Because Leo is a simulation, we never use his voice as a testimonial or as social proof. He’s a stress-test, not a quote.
How we built him — the recipes
Leo wasn’t hand-waved into existence; he was built with CRAFT’s own persona machinery:
- Persona design spec (CD-030). Every Official CRAFT Persona — Leo included — is defined against the same standard: identity, audience, a distinct Big-Five profile, communication style, and explicit ethical boundaries.
- Create-a-persona recipe (RCP-CWK-062). The recipe that turns a brief into a structured, reusable persona card, so Leo is consistent every time he’s called.
- Brand grounding from the Branding & Identity Cookbook (CD-024 · brand-context init). This is the part that made Leo real — more on it below.
- Wired into the working loop (RCP-CWK-030 · RCP-CWK-031). Leo plugs into CRAFT’s Creator/Validator workflow and orchestration, so he can be routed into a review alongside Cat, Fernand, and the others.
- Carried across projects faithfully. Leo was imported and generalized from his original project into the shared Admin roster without changing who he is — same identity, same voice.
The crucial part: the Branding & Identity Cookbook
Here’s the piece that actually got Leo right. Before we finalized Leo, we used CRAFT’s Branding & Identity Cookbook to finalize the CRAFT brand itself — the positioning, the audience, the real pains we solve, and the values we stand for. Leo was then based directly on those brand results.
That’s why his reactions feel like a specific person rather than a generic “user.” His validated pains (session amnesia, prompt drift, juggling Claude across projects), his profile (the operator / analyst / solo-builder), and his values (“skip the marketing varnish,” “tools prove themselves in week two”) all came out of the brand work. Without that cookbook step, Leo would have been a guess. With it, he became a consistent, useful mirror of the exact customer CRAFT has to win.
Where Leo has made CRAFT better
A few real examples from building CRAFT — all cases where Leo’s reaction changed what we did:
- The personalization default. When we had to decide whether CRAFT should turn personalization on by default — and how active it should be — Leo was the customer-side reviewer. He reacted to whether default-on would feel helpful or creepy to the operator/solo-builder he represents, which directly pressure-tested the recommendation before it shipped.
- The first-run experience before release. Acting as a first-time-user proxy during release testing, Leo rated the “nothing’s hidden” first-run experience only 64/100 without cleanup (versus ~90/100 once it was re-wired). That gap pushed a cleanup pass before the starter materials went out — catching a rough first impression we’d stopped being able to see.
- Keeping the marketing honest. Leo’s “customer-promise” lens was used to tie CRAFT’s public claims back to what the recipes actually do — so the outward promises matched the real product instead of drifting into hype.
Want to use Leo yourself?
You can copy Leo’s full persona from his persona page and use him in your own work. Two honest caveats, though:
He’s most useful inside CRAFT development. Leo was built to react to CRAFT’s customer-facing decisions. Downloaded and used on a generic task, he’s far less powerful than he is in the context he was made for.
He needs the brand to react against. Leo’s perspective is grounded in the CRAFT brand results from the Branding & Identity Cookbook — and those results don’t travel with the persona download. Without them, his reactions can feel a little out of context or even confusing. He shines when he has a brand to push on; on his own, he’s a sketch of a customer rather than the full picture.
That’s the honest read: Leo is a brilliant internal collaborator for building CRAFT, and a fun thing to study — but he was never meant to be a drop-in “customer” for any project off the shelf.
