Reading a persona
Open the detail panel, read each of its sections, and decide whether a persona is the right reader for the draft in front of you.
You are about to run a draft against a persona and want to know what you are pointing at. The detail panel is where one explains itself: who the reader is, what narrowed it, and what it has done with your drafts.
Opening it
Press any row in the library and the panel opens on the right. The icon button in the page header toggles it, with a tooltip reading Show persona detail or Hide persona detail; ⌘J (Ctrl+J on Windows) does the same.
This panel shares one open or closed setting with the right-hand panels on Documents and Knowledge Base, so closing it on a document closes it here too. If pressing a row seems to do nothing, it is collapsed rather than broken.
Before you pick anything it reads "Pick a persona to see how it reads, what narrowed it, and what it did with your drafts."
The header
Pinned to the top, and true of every persona: the avatar and the role as Role · Scenario, the Researched badge when the persona came from a research build, the facet line of job function, company size and industry, then a sentence for this reader's situation and a sentence for how they read incoming messages.
Those two are the persona in miniature. If they describe someone other than the person you are writing to, stop there — nothing below fixes a mismatched reader.
Where this segment sits
Researched personas only, and only when research placed the segment somewhere. Four axes, each a row of states:
- incumbent — the segment's relationship to the tool it already runs in this category
- market — where the thing you are pitching sits in this segment's sense of what is normal
- attention — how much outreach of this shape has already reached this seat
- switching — what it would cost this segment to move off what it runs now.
The (i) beside an axis name opens What it asks, Order, Where it comes from and Why it decides things. States run in order along the row, and Order names which direction.
The (i) beside the section heading opens How to read a cell:
| Fill | What it means |
|---|---|
| Dominant | Several findings point at this state. The fill is a count of findings, never a score. |
| Live | One finding points at it, or segment logic reasoned it there rather than finding it. |
| Ruled out | Something looked and excluded this state. An outline, because it is a positive claim with a source behind it. |
| Never looked | Nothing wrote to this state. Not the same as ruled out, and nothing was invented to fill it. |
Two states of one axis can be lit at once, deliberately: "Neither is resolved away — the reader is run across both, because a segment is allowed not to agree with itself."
What narrowed them
Also Researched only. One row per finding, in three parts: on the left the placement it made, an axis and a state, with "not" in front when the finding excluded that state; on the right the class of source; underneath the finding and its support.
The source classes are signal source (something you asserted under What you've seen · optional), peer discussions, review aggregate, job ads and inbox pressure.
Read this when a persona surprises you. A reader harsher than expected usually has its reason here.
What they did with it
The last section gathers this persona's completed Simulations, one card per draft, newest first, with the draft count beside the heading.
Each card holds the lines the reader reacted to, in the draft's own words. Lines past the point where they stopped are dimmed, and the last line they reached carries a stops here marker. Below that is what they said at that moment, then a counted caption: "read once, went to delete" for a single read, or "6 of 20 reply, 11 park it, 3 delete" once there are several, plus a clause like "3 of 20 stopped at step 2 of 3" when some reads fell short.
The section stays empty until the persona has been used in at least one completed simulation, reading "Nothing yet. Run a draft against this persona and what it did with it shows up here." The lines are its record of the message as it stood when it read, so editing the draft afterwards does not move them. While it loads you see "Reading this persona's runs…"; if it fails, "Couldn't read this section. Retry" — the sentence is the button, and the rest of the panel still renders.
Is this the right reader?
Does the header describe the person you are writing to? A close-enough role with the wrong company size reads as the wrong kind of buyer.
Is it narrow enough? A persona with no facets reads as the most probable person in that role: right for a mass message, wrong for one account.
On a Researched persona, check the attention axis. It says how much outreach of this shape this seat already gets, and so whether your opener is read or recognized.
Look at what it already did. A similar draft it deleted at the second line tells you something before you spend a run.