When to create personas

Ideally, you should create personas as early as possible in the process. Personas should be based on research data, not on your assumptions or expectations of an ideal user. Thus, you might include persona creation in the research phase for a product or feature before the design stage starts.

You can use data derived from user interviews, field studies, surveys, card sorting, or other user research methods to create a persona that accurately represents your actual end-users.

As your product evolves, your persona(s) should be updated. The persona creation process might start early, but the document can be adjusted or eliminated later as you gain more data about users.