Personas

[Joachim Kohlhammer]

Hi all,

when developing new features for GoldenCheetah, my first thoughts currently put myself in the center: How Do I use the tool, what am I missing, what could help me?

To better understand the needs of you, the users of GoldenCheetah, I tried creating three personas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)):

Marcus (47) — the family father is also a masters athlete focused on longevity, making his time constraints not just about busyness but about training smarter as he ages. His GoldenCheetah use is intentionally simple: PMC, fatigue signals, and long-term trends.

Lena (24) — the young ambitious athlete is a full triathlete, not just a cyclist. Her sports science background lets her engage with GoldenCheetah at a deep level — custom charts, CP modelling, and data exports — which differentiates her clearly from Marcus.

Stefan (38) — the coach brings a perspective neither athlete persona can: he needs GoldenCheetah to work across athletes, not just for himself. This also naturally surfaces a real product gap (no native multi-athlete view) which makes the persona actionable for product development.

What I want to gain from this is to have

• a better common understanding who the users and their needs are
• an easier alignment on new features and the future direction of the project (is it worth developing this feature? what is missing?)

I would very much welcome a discussion on my proposal: Do you find yourself in one of those personas (or a combination thereof)? Should one persona be replaced? Do you want to add aspects or an additional persona?

As soon as we can align on an initial version, those should be published in the Wiki and considered living documents.

All three personas were created with the help of AI.

Cheers,

 Joachim

P.S.: Personally I am closest to Marcus but love analyzing data