Presentations

Customer persona slide templates

Nine layouts are filed under the persona purpose, and they are not all the same slide. Three are persona cards, two are empathy maps, two are journeys, and the rest sit between. The fields decide which one your research actually fits.

Create a presentation with OneCraftNine persona layouts and the fields behind each one

Nine layouts, three shapes

The persona purpose covers three different slides. A persona card carries a name, a role, a short bio, traits and goals, and comes as a headshot card, a detail grid of six traits, an editorial half portrait or a quote spotlight. An empathy map splits the page into quadrants, either full or compact. A journey runs five stages, or six with a sentiment rail underneath. Choose by what your research produced: a description, a set of feelings, or a sequence.

What a persona card holds

The name is capped at twenty four characters and the role at forty eight, which keeps them to a person rather than a job description. The bio takes two hundred and twenty characters, roughly two sentences. Traits are a list with an icon, a label and a description each, and goals are their own list of plain lines. There is a separate meta list, icon plus label plus value, for the demographics people expect: age, location, tenure, budget.

The portrait is optional, and never generated

A persona headshot is a profile image, so image generation skips it the same way it skips a real team photograph. That leaves you two honest options: upload a stock portrait you have licensed, or leave the box empty and let the card stand on its fields. The second is usually better. A face on a persona invites the room to argue about whether that is what the customer looks like, which is never the conversation you wanted.

Empathy maps and journeys carry different fields

An empathy map uses the quadrants list, four entries with an icon, a label and a description, and the labels are yours to set rather than fixed to says, thinks, does, feels. A journey uses the stages list, where each stage has a number, an icon, a label, a description and a sentiment value, and the sentiment is what the rail under the six stage layout draws. If your research has no sentiment reading, use the five stage layout rather than inventing one.

Write a person, not a segment

The fields are short on purpose. A persona whose bio runs to two hundred and twenty characters and whose traits are five words each forces the specific detail that makes a persona useful, and starves the demographic padding that makes them useless. If you cannot fill the goals list with things this person is actually trying to do, you have a segment rather than a persona, and the slide will read that way.

How it works, in three steps

Step 1
Pick the shape first
Card, empathy map or journey. Filter the library to the persona purpose and the nine layouts come back grouped by those shapes.
Step 2
Fill the fields you actually researched
Name, role, bio, traits, goals. Leave a list empty rather than padding it; the layouts hold their shape without it.
Step 3
Skip the portrait unless you have one
The box is never filled by generation, and an empty one reads better than a stock face nobody recognises.
Step 4
Add the meta line if the demographics matter
Icon, label and value each: age, location, tenure. Put them here rather than inside the bio.

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the guide Make a pitch presentation with AI.

Limits worth knowing

Nine templates carry the persona purpose.
Persona name is capped at 24 characters, role at 48 and bio at 220.
The headshot is a profile image, so it is never filled by image generation.
Only the six stage journey layout draws a sentiment rail; the five stage one has no sentiment.
Empathy map quadrant labels are yours to write; nothing enforces the classic four.

Questions people ask

How is a persona slide different from a team slide?

A team slide makes a claim about real people who work for you, so its photographs are never generated and its names are checkable. A persona is a research artefact about an invented representative customer. Using a team layout for a persona is the mistake worth avoiding, because it reads as a claim about staff.

Should a persona have a photograph?

Usually not. The box is there and it will never be filled by generation, so any face on it is one you chose deliberately. A stock portrait pulls the discussion towards what the customer looks like and away from what they are trying to do. The card works without it.

How many traits or goals fit?

Each is a list with a label and a description per entry, and the layouts are built around a handful: six in the detail grid, fewer in the card. The practical limit is the reader's, not the template's. Four goals somebody can remember beat nine nobody reads.

What goes in the sentiment on a journey?

A reading of how the person feels at that stage, which the six stage layout draws as a rail under the steps. It is only worth using when your research actually measured or observed it. Inventing a sentiment curve to make the slide look complete is the persona equivalent of a made up statistic.

Can I use the empathy map for something other than says, thinks, does, feels?

Yes. The quadrant labels are fields you write, so nothing forces the classic four. Teams often use gains, pains, jobs and blockers instead. Whichever you pick, use the same four across every persona in the deck, or they cannot be compared.

How many personas should a deck carry?

Two or three, each on its own slide, with the same fields filled in the same order so a reader can scan across them. A deck with seven personas is a deck that has not decided who it is for, and the room will notice before the presenter does.

Make your own presentation

The button opens the generator with this use case already described. Change the wording to match yours, generate, then edit anything you like.

Create a presentation with OneCraft

Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked 31 August 2026.