[...] I’ve talked before about how designers use personas to capture user needs, behaviors and motivations. If you were ever wondering how those insights help guide the product design, this pretty much says it all: [...]

Anyway, you raise a good question about personas: When the design team grows and new people are introduced, how do the designers who did the initial research communicate that experience to the new team members? The answer, I suppose, is that for a development cycle in which a product is under constant development, persona research should be conducted constantly as well.

All that being said, I think this is a slippery slope, too, transforming a concept for a useful but disposable design exercise (personas) into something that needs to replace or be an integral part of a formal research policy. I am skeptical of formalizing or fetishizing personas too much. I see them as an ad hoc exercise, akin to brainstorming, designed for rapid assimilation of user information with the goal of bridging the gap between data and design.

Perhaps the answer is that you, Whitney, should go over the data Liya and Arti had and make your own personas from scratch. Then compare the two sets. Should make for an interesting and enlightening — and, design-wise, inspiring — conversation.