Who is it for?
Role, life stage, or context. “First-time PMs in their first 90 days” beats “product professionals.”
This is the “I” and the “R”
Two letters of CIRCLES live here: Identify the customer and Report their needs. We combine them on purpose. You can’t describe a need cleanly without first naming who has it — and once you’ve named the right person, the needs almost write themselves.
Specificity beats reach
The instinct of a first-time founder is to make the customer description as wide as possible. “Everyone who…” “Anyone who…” “People who…” This is exactly wrong. One well-described user beats a generic everyone — partly because it’s easier to design for, but mostly because if you can’t name a single specific person who has this problem, you don’t have a problem yet.
If you can name one real person whose Tuesday afternoon you’d make better, you have a product. If you can’t, you have a hope.
The four-question customer profile
Answer these four questions in plain language. No marketing speak.
Who benefits when it’s solved?
Sometimes the user and the buyer aren’t the same person. Worth noticing.
Defining characteristics
Three traits that separate this person from a casual lookalike. Specifics, not adjectives.
Behavior worth knowing
What do they do today instead of using your thing? That’s your real competition.
Then: write user stories
Take what you know about the person and translate it into a stack of user stories — one per need, in priority order. The format is old, dating to extreme programming in the late 1990s, and survived because it works:
User-story template
As a [user], I want to [verb], so that [outcome].
Two notes on form:
- The verb matters. “Track” is fuzzy. “See last month’s spend in one screen” is a feature.
- The so that is the real point. If the outcome doesn’t change anything in the user’s day, the story isn’t worth shipping — even if it’s technically true.
Three is plenty for v1
Don’t write fifteen user stories. Write three. Order them by priority. The one you’d ship if you could only ship one is your real product.
Operator story · Lesson 2
From Alon’s notebook
A time the customer profile was wrong, and what changed when it got rewritten. Suggested hook: a SimilarWeb-era or workshop story where the team’s assumed user turned out to be the wrong person, and the moment you realized it changed the prioritization.
[OPERATOR STORY — Lesson 2]Tonight’s assignment
Section 02 of the workbook. Pick the problem you wrote down at the end of Lesson 01. Write a customer profile for the person who has it — not the broadest audience, the most specific one. Then write three user stories in priority order.
Assignment · Section 02
Define your customer
Sign in to save your answers.Four-question profile for the specific person. Three user stories in priority order.
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