The Team Within a Team: How to Discover Your User Roles with AI

Here's the bottom line for data-driven understanding of teams within your product:

Relying on self-reported job titles collected during onboarding can be misleading; you're building your growth strategy on a foundation of dangerous assumptions, not reality.

Every team is an ecosystem of distinct behavioral roles, such as the Champion who starts it all, the Creator who builds, the Collaborator who contributes, and the Consumer who observes.

Using a data-driven process allows you to automatically discover these true roles, enabling a personalized product experience that drives deep adoption, retention, and stickiness.

In the complex world of collaborative B2B SaaS, it’s dangerously easy to fall into the trap of the "monolithic user." We see a new account sign up, look at the job titles they provide, "Product Manager," "Engineer," "Analyst", and build our entire product and onboarding strategy around those flimsy labels. We create a single, one-size-fits-all experience and then scratch our heads when engagement is shallow, key features are ignored, and promising accounts churn for reasons we can't quite pinpoint.

The truth is, a team is not a homogenous group of identical users. It's a complex, living ecosystem of individuals with different responsibilities, motivations, and levels of engagement. The user who calls themselves a "Product Manager" might only ever view dashboards. The "Engineer" might spend all their time in the team collaboration features, leaving comments and feedback. A generic experience that tries to be everything to everyone ultimately ends up being perfect for no one. This clash between a user's true needs and your assumptions creates friction that silently kills adoption and breaks the very collaborative loops your product needs to succeed.

The key to unlocking deep, sustainable team activation is to move beyond the labels and understand the distinct roles users play and the specific "job" each of them is trying to get done.

Beyond Job Titles: The Four Archetypal Roles in a Collaborative Team

While the specifics will vary by product, a consistent set of behavioral archetypes emerges when you analyze how successful teams use collaborative software. These roles are defined not by what's on a user's business card, but by how they actually interact with your product.

1. The Champion (or Admin)

This is your point of entry, the person who discovers the product and sparks the initial adoption. The Champion recognizes a problem in their team's workflow and sees your tool as the potential solution. They are the ones who create the account, configure the initial settings, and most importantl, send the first wave of invitations to their colleagues. Their primary motivation is to improve their own and their team's overall effectiveness and tooling. They often take on administrative responsibilities, managing billing, user permissions, and workspace settings.

2. The Creator (or Power User)

This user is the primary engine of value within your product. They are the ones who spend the most time actively creating and managing the core assets that the team collaborates around. In Figma, this is the designer building the wireframes. In Asana, it is the project manager architecting the project plan. In Notion, it's the person building the team wiki. Their success is tied to the product's power, flexibility, and efficiency for their specific craft. They are your most engaged users and the ones who push the boundaries of what your tool can do.

3. The Collaborator (or Contributor)

This role is typically invited into the product to contribute to assets created by others. Their engagement is often asynchronous and task-specific. They dip in and out to provide specific input, such as a developer leaving technical feedback on a Figma design, a marketing specialist updating the status of their tasks in an Asana project, or a legal team member suggesting edits in a shared document. Their primary need is for a low-friction way to provide their input and stay in sync with the team, without a steep learning curve.

4. The Consumer (or Viewer)

This user's interaction with the product is primarily passive. They log in to view progress, review final deliverables, or stay informed about the status of a project. This role is often filled by stakeholders, executives, or even clients who need visibility without being involved in the day-to-day creation process. Their core requirement is a simple, intuitive, and often read-only interface that provides clear information at a glance, requiring zero training.

A successful collaborative product is one that elegantly serves the distinct, and sometimes competing, needs of all these roles. An interface optimized only for the Creator will overwhelm and alienate the Consumer, breaking the crucial feedback and approval loops your product is designed to facilitate.

The "Why" Behind the "What": Applying the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework

To truly understand these roles, we need to go deeper than just describing their behavior. We need to understand their underlying motivations. The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework provides a powerful lens for this, shifting our focus from demographic attributes ("who the user is") to their functional and emotional goals ("what job they are trying to get done"). Each role "hires" your product to perform a distinct job:

The Champion's JTBD: "When my team is struggling with inefficient workflows, I want to find and implement a tool that makes us more collaborative and productive, so I can be seen as a valuable and effective leader."
The Creator's JTBD: "When I need to produce high-quality work, I want to use a powerful and efficient tool that allows me to create, manage, and share my work seamlessly, so I can get feedback from my team and deliver on my responsibilities."
The Collaborator's JTBD: "When my input is required on a project, I want to quickly access the relevant information and provide my feedback with minimal friction, so I can contribute effectively without disrupting my own workflow."
The Consumer's JTBD: "When I need to understand the status of a key initiative, I want to easily view the latest progress and outcomes in a clear, digestible format, so I can stay informed and make strategic decisions without getting bogged down in details."

From Guesswork to Science: A Framework for Data-Driven Role Discovery

Identifying these roles within your product should not be an exercise in guesswork. It requires a structured, data-driven process that combines quantitative behavioral analysis with qualitative user research. This is where AI becomes a transformative tool. As we detailed in our hands-on guide to discovering what your users really do with AI, you can use machine learning models to analyze your product usage data and find these personas automatically. Here is a repeatable framework for this process:

Hypothesize: Start with your team's internal knowledge. Workshop with your product, sales, and customer success teams to brainstorm a set of potential roles and their corresponding Jobs-to-be-Done. This gives you a set of initial hypotheses to test against the data.
Quantitative Analysis: Use your product analytics data to find distinct clusters of users who interact with your product in fundamentally different ways. By analyzing feature adoption rates, session frequency, and key actions taken, clustering algorithms can identify these natural user segments, providing a data-backed foundation for your roles.
Qualitative Research: This phase is crucial for understanding the "why" behind the "what." Conduct in-depth interviews with a representative sample of users from each identified quantitative cluster. Using JTBD interview techniques, you can uncover their core motivations, goals, and pain points, adding rich, human context to the cold, hard data.
Synthesize & Define: Consolidate your findings into a set of well-defined, actionable team personas. For each persona, create a one-page summary that includes a name, role description, JTBD statement, key behaviors observed in data, and primary pain points from interviews. This becomes a shared reference point for your entire company.
Validate & Iterate: Personas are living documents that should be continuously validated. Socialize them across the organization and use them to inform product and growth decisions. Periodically refresh the analysis with new user data to ensure the personas remain accurate as your product and user base evolve.

Understanding these roles isn't just an interesting academic exercise; it's a strategic imperative. It allows you to automate your onboarding flow to make a new user's first experience immediately relevant. It empowers your CS team to move from firefighting to foresight by spotting "role gaps" in an account as a leading indicator of churn. Don't build for a single, mythical user, guided by your assumptions about the user roles. Instead take steps to understand the rich, complex ecosystem that exists within every team.