1 min lesson
The persona map: who owns what, who fears what
Describe what "Every persona owns a stage, guards a fear and responds to a different headline" changes in practice.
Step 1 of 3
A lifecycle is run by people.
Every persona owns a stage, guards a fear and responds to a different headline. Pitch the same Cursor message to an IC dev and a release manager and you lose one of them. Memorize this map. The fear column is where deals are won or lost.
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Advanced table
Reference table
- Persona
- IC developer
- Owns
- Writing the code
- Fears
- Drudgery, context-switching, getting blamed
- Cursor headline
- Stay in flow; the agent does the toil, you keep judgment
- Persona
- Tech lead
- Owns
- Code quality, the PR queue
- Fears
- Review backlog, inconsistent patterns
- Cursor headline
- BugbotCursor's automated PR reviewer that posts inline findings and can push fix commits from isolated VMs. Press Enter for the full definition. triages PRs; standards enforced via .cursor rules
- Persona
- Eng manager
- Owns
- Throughput, team morale
- Fears
- Missing dates, burnout, churn
- Cursor headline
- Measurable throughput lift without adding headcount
- Persona
- Architect
- Owns
- System integrity, ADRs
- Fears
- Architectural drift, undocumented decisions
- Cursor headline
- Agent reasons over ADRs via MCPModel Context Protocol. A standard that lets an AI agent pull in context from outside the repo, like Jira tickets or internal docs. Press Enter for the full definition. - drift goes down, not up
- Persona
- QA lead
- Owns
- Test strategy, coverage
- Fears
- Flaky suites, escaped defects
- Cursor headline
- Generate tests, kill flakiness, close coverage gaps
- Persona
- Platform / DevOps
- Owns
- Pipelines, golden paths
- Fears
- Pipeline sprawl, non-standard setups
- Cursor headline
- Agents adopt the golden path; allowlists keep it governed
- Persona
- SRESite Reliability Engineering. The team and practice that keeps production reliable: monitoring, on-call and incident response. Press Enter for the full definition.
- Owns
- Reliability, on-call
- Fears
- Toil, alert fatigue, MTTRMean Time to Restore. How long it takes to recover service after a failed change or incident. Press Enter for the full definition.
- Cursor headline
- Faster incident triage; corrective changes drafted fast
- Persona
- Security
- Owns
- Risk, controls, compliance
- Fears
- Data leakage, ungoverned AI, supply chain
- Cursor headline
- ZDRZero Data Retention. A contractual guarantee that the model provider won't store your code or train on it. Press Enter for the full definition., Privacy ModeCursor's setting that guarantees code data is not used for training by Cursor or its model providers, and that an admin can enforce org-wide; data-retention terms are a separate, contractual layer. Press Enter for the full definition., SSOSingle Sign-On. One company login (usually via SAML or OIDC) instead of a separate password per tool. Press Enter for the full definition./SCIMSystem for Cross-domain Identity Management. A standard for automatically creating and removing user accounts when people join or leave. Press Enter for the full definition., audit logs, allowlists
- Persona
- Release manager
- Owns
- The release, CABChange Advisory Board. A group that reviews and signs off on higher-risk production changes before they ship. Press Enter for the full definition., rollback
- Fears
- Bad change in prod, blast radiusHow much breaks if a change goes wrong; the scope of potential damage. Press Enter for the full definition.
- Cursor headline
- Cleaner change records; corrective changes are well-scoped
| Persona | Owns | Fears | Cursor headline |
|---|---|---|---|
| IC developer | Writing the code | Drudgery, context-switching, getting blamed | Stay in flow; the agent does the toil, you keep judgment |
| Tech lead | Code quality, the PR queue | Review backlog, inconsistent patterns | BugbotCursor's automated PR reviewer that posts inline findings and can push fix commits from isolated VMs. Press Enter for the full definition. triages PRs; standards enforced via .cursor rules |
| Eng manager | Throughput, team morale | Missing dates, burnout, churn | Measurable throughput lift without adding headcount |
| Architect | System integrity, ADRs | Architectural drift, undocumented decisions | Agent reasons over ADRs via MCPModel Context Protocol. A standard that lets an AI agent pull in context from outside the repo, like Jira tickets or internal docs. Press Enter for the full definition. - drift goes down, not up |
| QA lead | Test strategy, coverage | Flaky suites, escaped defects | Generate tests, kill flakiness, close coverage gaps |
| Platform / DevOps | Pipelines, golden paths | Pipeline sprawl, non-standard setups | Agents adopt the golden path; allowlists keep it governed |
| SRESite Reliability Engineering. The team and practice that keeps production reliable: monitoring, on-call and incident response. Press Enter for the full definition. | Reliability, on-call | Toil, alert fatigue, MTTRMean Time to Restore. How long it takes to recover service after a failed change or incident. Press Enter for the full definition. | Faster incident triage; corrective changes drafted fast |
| Security | Risk, controls, compliance | Data leakage, ungoverned AI, supply chain | ZDRZero Data Retention. A contractual guarantee that the model provider won't store your code or train on it. Press Enter for the full definition., Privacy ModeCursor's setting that guarantees code data is not used for training by Cursor or its model providers, and that an admin can enforce org-wide; data-retention terms are a separate, contractual layer. Press Enter for the full definition., SSOSingle Sign-On. One company login (usually via SAML or OIDC) instead of a separate password per tool. Press Enter for the full definition./SCIMSystem for Cross-domain Identity Management. A standard for automatically creating and removing user accounts when people join or leave. Press Enter for the full definition., audit logs, allowlists |
| Release manager | The release, CABChange Advisory Board. A group that reviews and signs off on higher-risk production changes before they ship. Press Enter for the full definition., rollback | Bad change in prod, blast radiusHow much breaks if a change goes wrong; the scope of potential damage. Press Enter for the full definition. | Cleaner change records; corrective changes are well-scoped |