Team Personas

Deep behavioral profiles that transform brief teammate role descriptions into structured, methodology-driven agents. While team blueprints define what each teammate does, personas define how they think, score, iterate, and interact.

What Are Personas

A persona is a reusable behavioral profile that gives a teammate:

• Structured methodology — Named phases with specific steps and outputs
• Scoring criteria — Quantitative dimensions for evaluating work quality
• Interaction patterns — When to pause, check in, validate, and hand off
• Input/output contracts — What each persona consumes and produces

Brief role description (blueprint-style):

Analyst — Review the architecture for quality, reliability, and performance issues.

Persona-enhanced (full behavioral profile):

A Senior Engineering Analyst who evaluates through 4 sequential passes (Architecture → Code Quality → Reliability → Performance), rates each dimension 1-10 with specific evidence, produces a tradeoff matrix, and pauses after each pass to share findings before continuing.

Personas are optional — blueprints work fine with brief role descriptions. Use personas when you need consistent methodology, reproducible quality, or when a teammate's process matters as much as their output.

Two approaches to teammate behavior: Deep personas (reference files with scored methodology phases) and rich inline role descriptions (detailed instructions embedded directly in the spawn prompt). The planning team uses rich inline descriptions because its 7 modes each need distinct role definitions that don't map to reusable persona files. The productivity and brainstorming teams use deep persona files because their roles have consistent methodology across uses. Choose the approach that fits: persona files for reusable methodology, inline descriptions for mode-specific or one-off roles.

The Productivity Loop

The 5 personas form a continuous improvement cycle where each persona's output feeds the next:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                                     │
│   ┌──────────┐    ┌───────────┐    ┌──────────┐    │
│   │ Auditor  │───▶│ Architect │───▶│ Analyst  │    │
│   │ Discover │    │  Design   │    │  Review  │    │
│   └──────────┘    └───────────┘    └──────────┘    │
│        ▲                                │           │
│        │                                ▼           │
│   ┌────────────┐              ┌──────────┐         │
│   │ Compounder │◀─────────────│ Refiner  │         │
│   │  Compound  │              │  Iterate │         │
│   └────────────┘              └──────────┘         │
│                                                     │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The loop is the mechanism. Individual personas produce good outputs; the loop compounds improvements over time because each cycle builds on the previous one's accumulated knowledge.

Persona Catalog

Persona	Title	Core Methodology	Key Mechanism	Phases
Auditor	Productivity Systems Analyst	Discovery → Scoring → 4-Week Plan	Automation Score = (Time Cost + Energy Drain) x Feasibility	3
Architect	Solution Architect	Problem Definition → Approach Map → Blueprint → Dependencies	2-3 approaches ranked by simplicity, each with rollback points	4
Analyst	Senior Engineering Analyst	Architecture → Code Quality → Reliability → Performance	Multi-pass review with tradeoff matrices, pauses after each pass	4
Refiner	Convergence Loop Specialist	Generate → Score → Diagnose → Rewrite → Re-score	Stops at convergence (all criteria >= 8/10) or diminishing returns (delta < 0.5)	5
Compounder	Systems Review Partner	Progress Check → Friction Log → Next Target → Pattern Recognition	Maintains running inventory, tracks cumulative impact, feeds back to Auditor	4
Facilitator	Session Facilitator	Setup → Brainwriting Coordination → Collect & Cluster → Convergence	Manages divergence/convergence phases, enforces ideation rules, never contributes own ideas	4
Visionary	Divergent Thinker	Brainwriting → Building	Generates ambitious unconstrained ideas, cross-domain connections, quantity over quality	2
Realist	Practical Thinker	Brainwriting → Building	Grounds ideas in feasibility, offers stepping stones, bridges inspiration and execution	2

Using Personas

Mode 1: Full Productivity Team

Use all 5 personas together as a complete improvement cycle:

/spawn-create --mode productivity <workflow or process to optimize>

This spawns a sequential team where each persona's output feeds the next, culminating in a synthesis report with next-cycle recommendations.

Mode 2: Individual Persona

Apply a single persona to any teammate in any blueprint. For example, add the Analyst persona to a code reviewer in the Code Review & QA blueprint:

Create an agent team to review PR #42. Spawn 3 reviewers:

1. **Security Reviewer** — [brief role description as usual]

2. **Quality Reviewer** — Apply the Analyst persona for a structured, multi-pass review.
   Read the persona definition at:
   ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/analyst.md
   Follow the methodology phases and scoring criteria defined in the persona.

3. **Performance Reviewer** — [brief role description as usual]

Mode 3: Custom Composition

Use the team-architect agent to design a custom team that mixes personas with ad-hoc roles:

Design a team for refactoring our auth module. I want the Architect persona
for the solution design and the Refiner persona for iterative improvement,
but regular teammates for the implementation work.

The team-architect agent knows about available personas and will suggest applying them where a teammate needs specific methodology, scoring criteria, or interaction patterns.

Applying a Persona

To apply a persona to a teammate, include this in the spawn prompt for that teammate:

Read the [Persona Name] persona definition at:
${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/[name].md

Follow the methodology phases, scoring criteria, and behavioral instructions
defined in the persona. Your inputs come from [source] and your outputs
feed into [destination].

Replace [name] with the lowercase persona name: auditor, architect, analyst, refiner, compounder, facilitator, visionary, or realist.

Persona Reference Files

Each persona is defined in a standalone reference file designed to be read directly by a teammate:

Persona	Reference File
Auditor	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/auditor.md
Architect	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/architect.md
Analyst	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/analyst.md
Refiner	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/refiner.md
Compounder	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/compounder.md
Facilitator	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/facilitator.md
Visionary	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/visionary.md
Realist	${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/references/realist.md

Each file is written in second-person ("You are...") so it can be directly injected into a teammate's behavioral context. Files include methodology phases, scoring criteria, behavioral instructions, input/output contracts, and dev workflow examples.

Persona Registry

For capability tags, team-type matching guides, and per-capability persona selection, see ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-personas/registry.md. Useful when designing custom teams with the team-architect agent.