The persona nobody owns

Most teams nowadays have a persona doc somewhere. Someone (or a team) made it, probably in a workshop with genuinely good intentions and in my experience, a lot of sticky notes. That document then gets shared around and is usually received pretty well by others in the org, but the issue is that it probably gets filed into a folder somewhere and forgotten about. At this point most people don't want to take ownership of it. So what usually transpires is that nobody really owns it, which I suppose is another way of saying the customer or user it describes has been drifting from reality for a while.

Whose job is it

The reason this happens is not typically laziness, but that a shared understanding of the customer doesn't (and shouldn't) sit inside any one team. Marketing is meant to run the campaigns and Product is meant to own the roadmap. Every function has its own slice of the customer and is measured on that slice. In most cases, none of those slices is wrong per-se, only incomplete. The whole company-wide sense of who you are serving can potentially exist in the gaps between those functions. Gaps between functions are missed because teams aren't measured here. In most cases a PM is judged on actual shipped features, not on whether the company still understands its user, so the read on the customer that matters most (the shared and current one) is the thing that is nobody's deliverable. Everyone uses it and no one maintains it, kind of like an English road.

Giving it to someone

The obvious fix is to give it an owner. For example, put the persona with the research team, or with a PM, and make it theirs to deal with. That helps less than you would think, and now and then it makes things worse. Once the customer understanding is clearly one team's document, everyone else stops feeling responsible for it. It becomes research's thing, or the PM's thing, and the sales team reading it may just accept it and carry on with the version exists within their own head. You have now traded a doc that disintegrates because no one tends it for one that is tended but that no one trusts. What needs an owner isn't the file, so much as whether the file is still accurate. Someone whose job it is to keep asking whether the company is still right about its customer, and to make noise when the answer starts to decay or drift from reality. That is a different thing from being the person who keeps the actual document updated, and it is much rarer.

Keeping it honest

None of this is solved with a template, but a couple of things help: The first is to make the decay visible. A persona should carry the date it was last checked, and what it was checked against. Then a doc built on a two-year-old study looks as old as it is, instead of carrying the unearned authority of something typed up and formatted. The second is to name the person, not the team, who keeps that date recent. Not to own the artefact, but to own the upkeep. The trouble, and the reason this rarely happens on its own, is that upkeep is invisible work. Nobody is going to be promoted for keeping the customer understanding current. You will, however, get promoted for shipping the thing built on top on the knowledge gained from this, whether or not it was pointed in the right direction. So the picture almost always tends to drift or decay. The org keeps building on top of it and the person who might have said "hang on, is this still true?" was never given the job of asking the question.