Congratulations. You've created a persona. It's alive.

All right, let's not get carried away, but Dr. Frankenstein is right about one thing: A persona is alive. And as a living thing, the persona has to grow and change to reflect shifting markets so you're never truly finished with it.

That said, there comes a day to unveil your creation. The crucial thing is to make the persona available to everyone on your team. Sales and marketing people, designers, developers, customer service, quality assurance testers, everyone. Because you want everyone to feel that this is the person or persons that they are trying to serve. You want all of them investing in refining and adding to the character.

After you've shared your persona, ask your team for feedback. Listen to what they have to say. In their experience, does the persona truly represent your users? Is it compelling?

And here's a great spin-off from asking for feedback. Just doing it forces your team to think about the actual users of your product, which is your main goal. Personas are really only useful if your designers and developers are able to easily sort through their attributes.

Here, design and presentation matter. Use graphics and call-outs to highlight the information most relevant to them, such as key purchase motivators, goals, frustrations. The stories and the human touches will pull them through their first read, but they should also be able to dip into the document to extract particular facts.

One firm places a copy of the persona on top of every marketing document they distribute internally to remind their employees who it is they're working for.

A persona is not meant to be prescriptive. Rather, it's about inspiring creative approaches to satisfy user needs. If it's both compelling and clear, your team will refer to it time and time again. The more they use it and the more they add to it, the more valuable that tool becomes.