Personas

Personas are fictional characters that represent the different users we expect to interact with FlowFuse as a brand and/or platform. Personas are a generalized way of talking about the ideal target we are aiming to communicate with and design for.

Personas help us not only define our messaging and marketing delivery, but also our product. Keeping personas in mind allows us to use the correct language and make the best decisions to address their specific problems and pain points.

As outlined in our brand voice, FlowFuse serves as a trusted partner for industrial engineers and developers navigating digital transformation. We position ourselves as "the engineer's enabler — technical enough to be respected, accessible enough to be adopted." This approach ensures our communication is aligned, consistent, and memorable across all organizational levels.

Two Buying Motions

FlowFuse sells into two account shapes, and the personas below reflect both:

  • Mid-market accounts — a compact buying group (Peter/Sarah → Steve/Isabella), where one person often wears multiple hats and is typically responsible for IT/OT platforms.
  • Enterprise / multi-site accounts — the same needs, but split across a real buying committee of five roles, each owning a distinct piece of the decision: digitalization strategy (Diego), IT platform ownership (Monica), OT operations (Owen), enterprise architecture (Elena), and OT architecture (Amara).

Isabella is the bridge between the two. Her original description — IT/OT architect, 50k–50k–500k+ budget, multi-plant to multi-site — is functionally the composite of the whole Enterprise Buying Committee. At a mid-market account, one "Isabella" holds all five of those concerns. At a large account, they're usually held by five different people with five different titles and five different veto points. Use Isabella for mid-market deals; use the Enterprise Buying Committee for large, multi-site accounts.

Peter and Sarah remain our Users/Advocates layer at every account size, including enterprise. They're the hands-on, "one-man-show hitting a wall" voice our ICP calls keep surfacing — the people who build the ad-hoc automation and generate the evidence that eventually gets escalated to the Enterprise Buying Committee. Top-of-funnel content for enterprise/ABM accounts should keep speaking to them directly, not just to the five buying-committee roles.

Our personas are structured around three strategic layers that reflect the typical FlowFuse adoption journey, with each layer playing distinct roles in the decision-making process:

Three-Layer Sales Structure

Layer 1 - Users (End-users & Advocates) FlowFuse serves as their reliable, technically-grounded partner for daily operational challenges.

Layer 2 - Champions (Technical Influencers & Evaluators)
FlowFuse demonstrates value through practical, straightforward solutions that address real business needs.

  • Steve Plant Engineer - Needs convincing through proven results and clear ROI
  • Isabella IIoT Project Lead - IT/OT bridge seeking dependable platform for digital transformation (mid-market composite of the Enterprise Buying Committee below)

Layer 3 - Buyers (Economic Decision-Makers) FlowFuse provides transparent, enterprise-ready solutions with measurable impact on business outcomes.

Layer Interactions & Influence Flow

The personas influence each other in a structured flow that mirrors typical B2B technology adoption:

  • Users → Champions: End-users like Peter and Sarah identify operational challenges and advocate for solutions to their engineering managers. Their hands-on experience and technical credibility make them powerful advocates for FlowFuse's capabilities. At enterprise accounts, that same evidence — a working pilot, a quantified pain point — is what gives Owen or Monica the internal case to escalate.
  • Champions → Buyers: Technical influencers like Steve and Isabella evaluate solutions, build business cases, and present recommendations to executive decision-makers. They translate technical benefits into business value propositions.
  • Buyers ← → Champions: Decision-makers (at enterprise accounts, Diego/Monica/Owen) rely on champions for technical validation while providing budget authority and strategic direction. This bidirectional relationship ensures alignment between technical capabilities and business objectives.
  • Within the Enterprise Buying Committee: Diego typically owns the strategic mandate and program budget; Monica and Owen own operational/platform fit and are often the economic buyers for the specific tooling decision; Elena and Amara act as gatekeepers, approving or vetoing on architecture, security, and standardization grounds even when they don't hold budget. A deal can stall if any one of the five is unaddressed — the reason ABM content needs to speak to all five distinctly rather than treating "IT/OT leader" as one persona.
  • Cross-layer Communication: Users often directly influence buyers through demonstration of results and ROI, while buyers set constraints and requirements that flow down to champions and users.

Sales Funnel Stages by Layer

Each persona layer engages with FlowFuse at different stages of the sales funnel:

Awareness Stage

  • Users: Discover FlowFuse through technical communities, Node-RED forums, industrial automation conferences
  • Champions: Learn about FlowFuse through industry publications, vendor evaluations, peer networks
  • Buyers: Become aware through business publications, executive briefings, strategic planning sessions. The Enterprise Buying Committee also comes in through analyst reports, industry conferences, and direct ABM outreach/LinkedIn.

Consideration Stage

  • Users: Evaluate technical capabilities, test integrations, assess ease of implementation
  • Champions: Analyze business impact, compare alternatives, build ROI calculations
  • Buyers: Review strategic alignment, assess vendor stability, evaluate total cost of ownership. Elena and Amara additionally review architecture fit and standards compliance; Monica and Owen review support and governance model.

Decision Stage

  • Users: Provide technical validation and implementation feedback
  • Champions: Present business cases and recommendations to decision-makers
  • Buyers: Make final purchasing decisions based on business value and risk assessment

Marketing Materials by Layer

Each persona layer requires targeted content that addresses their specific needs and decision-making criteria:

Users (End-users & Advocates)

  • Technical documentation and integration guides
  • Video tutorials and how-to content
  • Community forum discussions and peer testimonials
  • Hands-on trial experiences and sandbox environments
  • Technical webinars and training sessions

Champions (Technical Influencers & Evaluators)

  • ROI calculators and business case templates
  • Comparative analysis and competitive positioning
  • Solution architecture diagrams and technical specifications
  • Case studies demonstrating measurable business outcomes
  • Proof-of-concept implementation guides

Buyers (Economic Decision-Makers)

  • Executive briefings and strategic whitepapers
  • Total cost of ownership (TCO) analyses
  • Vendor stability and roadmap documentation
  • Security and compliance certifications
  • Customer success stories from similar organizations
  • Architecture/standards documentation for Elena and Amara; governance & support-model one-pagers for Monica; multi-site rollout/standardization case studies for Diego and Owen

Persona Template

Profile

  • Name: Naming your Persona is very important to increase empathy with them. Having them named is shown to make relating to their situation easier to do, and result in better product decisions.
  • Picture: What does the persona look like? Choose a realistic and believable picture.
  • Age: Choose a realistic age for the persona, this can also be a range if needs be, but try to keep it fairly precise.

Details

  • Occupation: What is their professional occupation? This doesn't have to correlate directly to why they're a Persona, but can play a very important role defining them.
  • Purchasing Role: Where in the hierarchy of a purchasing decision do they sit, and to what scale could we expect such a decision to bring in financially?
  • Technical Skillset: This is a FlowFuse-specific characteristic we've introduced for our Personas. It's important as a low-code platform to consider technical skillsets, that developers or those in the technical industry such as ourselves may take for granted, and even how they've learned their technical skillset, should they have one.
  • Node-RED Experience: Another FlowFuse-specific detail. This helps us frame the sales/marketing strategy for this Persona, and will also frame explanations of what FlowFuse is and does.
  • Additional information: A catch-all for any other remarks or comments to be made for the persona.

Behaviours

  • Interests: What personal and professional interests does this person have?
  • Motivations: Why does this persona do what they do? What drives them?
  • Influences: Where do they get their opinions from? What sources of information influence their own decision making?
  • Needs & Expectations: What does this persona need in their day-to-day life to help them? What are their baseline expectiations for what "good" or "valuable" looks like?

Goals

What problem does the persona want to solve, or which benefit does the character seek? Why would the persona want to use or buy FlowFuse?

  • Job To Be Done: In the context of the persona, what are they trying to achieve?
  • Challenges: What are their regular blockers and pain points when trying to work towards their goals?

Persona Profiles

Steve, Plant Engineer

46
Plant Engineer, Manufacturing Inc.
Decision Maker. >$15k. High Influence
Mechanical Engineering, MEng
Knows of it
  • Responsible for the design, production, and maintenance of a line or facility
  • Sets guidelines for mechanical design of a facility
  • Responsible for identifying opportunities for increased production
  • Ongoing investment planning and budget setting for new machines
  • Prepares meaningful KPIs together with the production planner
  • Wants the factory to run smoothly
  • Downtime Reduction
  • Data & facts
  • Conferences
  • Network
  • Easy access to reporting
  • Transparency
  • Predictive Maintenance
  • Downtime Reporting
  • Process Visibility

Sarah, Process Engineer

28
Process Engineer, Manufacturing Inc.
Influencer, user
Industrial Engineering
Knows of it
  • Responsible for the design
  • Identify process flow bottle necks
  • Report on productivity and efficiency of a production line
  • Identify quality problems and is the quality engineer if one isn't present
  • Identifies meaningful KPIs and creates them
  • Wants the factory to run smoothly
  • Quality production
  • Data & facts
  • Industry specific Conferences
  • Peers
  • Automation and Controls Engineers
  • Easy access to reporting
  • Transparency
  • Data Access
  • Real Time Analytics

Isabella, IIoT Project Lead

35–52
Head of Industrial IT / IIoT Project Lead / IT-OT Architect / Digital Transformation Lead at manufacturing organizations (single plant to multi-plant international groups)
$50k–$500k+ budget authority, Strategic buyer and technical influencer
Deep industrial networking, protocols (OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus), cloud/edge architectures, cybersecurity, enterprise IT. Often self-taught, stays current through industry events.
Familiar with Node-RED as flexible integration tool. Experience from plant implementations to multi-site POCs. Seeks scalable, enterprise-ready solutions.
  • Architect and deploy unified, scalable data collection and management platform across manufacturing sites
  • Enable secure, reliable, cost-effective access to operational data for analytics and business intelligence
  • Define IT/OT architecture from machine level to global enterprise level
  • Coordinate handover to Operations for software component management
  • Manage integration of new facilities via M&A or expansion
  • Interface between IT department and OT departments
  • Deliver measurable business value through scalable, reliable technology solutions
  • Drive digital transformation and increase IIoT maturity across organization
  • Reduce complexity across tech stack while enabling operational excellence
  • Build future-proof data infrastructure supporting business growth
  • Demonstrate clear ROI and strategic value of IT investments to stakeholders
  • Peer recommendations and industry analyst reports
  • Technical communities (Node-RED forums, IIoT networks)
  • Industry conferences, podcasts, professional networks
  • Direct POC results and reference cases from similar manufacturers
  • System integrators and technology partners
  • Tools that interact seamlessly with industrial equipment and provide data to enterprise systems
  • Centralized management across multiple plants with flexible licensing
  • Seamless multi-protocol support with high availability and redundancy
  • Standards-compliant solutions with enterprise-grade security
  • Ability to quickly onboard new facilities and integrate acquired systems
  • Vendor-neutral approach with clear architecture documentation
  • Legacy solutions difficult to scale, requiring excessive manual intervention
  • Systems tied to specific vendors or Windows-based platforms creating lock-in
  • Establishing and maintaining IIoT standards across diverse manufacturing environments
  • Managing complexity while ensuring high availability and security
  • Proving added value and ROI to production stakeholders and executive leadership
  • Rapidly integrating new plants and acquired company systems
  • At enterprise/multi-site accounts, this role is typically split across a 5-person buying committee — see Diego, Monica, Owen, Elena, and Amara below.

Peter, Automation and Controls Engineer

42
Automation and Controls Engineering Team Lead, Manufacturing Inc.
$15k, Medium Influence
Electrical Engineering (BEng)
Has used it for small things
  • Works alongside Sarah
  • Management of a team responsible for planning, design, and programming of PLCs
  • Conception, specification, and programming of Controls Systems
  • Connection of the control systems to other systems and implementation of process adjustments
  • Management of the commissioning of machines and production lines and controlling of compliance with software standards in the application
  • Central contact for control technology
  • Extract data from control systems and make available to enterprise
  • Visibility into the production
  • Enabling team member to solve own problems
  • System Integrators
  • PLC OEMs (Siemens, Rockwell, ABB, Beckhoff)
  • LinkedIn
  • Trainings
  • Wants easy ways to provide PLC data to other systems
  • Budget
  • Time
  • Identifying problems gives them work

Enterprise Buying Committee

Applies to multi-site / large accounts. These five personas replace the single "Isabella" role at large accounts, where digitalization strategy, IT ownership, OT operations, and architecture governance are held by different people.

Diego, Industrial Digitalization Leader

44
Director of Industrial Digitalization / Head of Smart Factory / Industry 4.0 Lead / Digital Transformation Director
Strategic buyer / executive sponsor — owns digitalization program budget. Typically the highest-altitude persona in the committee, with budget authority at the $100k–$1M+ program level.
Broad digital transformation / Industry 4.0 background; less hands-on technical depth than OTL/OTAL, more program and strategy oriented.
Aware of it as one tool among many in the stack; unlikely to have hands-on experience
  • Drives digitalization initiatives across manufacturing operations
  • Owns smart factory / Industry 4.0 programs and operational data strategy
  • Responsible for improving efficiency, visibility, and agility across plants
  • Efficiency, visibility, and agility across plants
  • Moving from isolated pilots to repeatable, standardized solutions
  • Being seen as the driver of successful digital transformation
  • Industry analyst reports, conferences, peer networks
  • Executive briefings, strategic planning cycles
  • A platform that turns one-off pilots into a repeatable operational standard
  • Governance and deployment control across facilities
  • Clear evidence of ROI at program scale
  • Pilots that never scale past the plant they started in
  • Proving digital transformation ROI to the executive team
  • Standardizing across facilities with different maturity levels
Helps them move from isolated pilots to repeatable operational solutions — providing governance, deployment control, and standardization for operational applications across facilities.

Monica, Manufacturing IT Leader

41
Director of Manufacturing IT / Manufacturing Systems Manager / Head of Manufacturing Platforms / Plant Systems Manager
Economic buyer for manufacturing IT platform investments — owns systems, infrastructure, governance, and support model. Budget range $50k–$500k+.
Enterprise IT background applied to manufacturing systems; strong on infrastructure, security, and support models rather than controls-level engineering.
Aware of it and evaluates it as one of the platforms she's responsible for supporting
  • Owns the systems, infrastructure, governance, and support models enabling manufacturing operations
  • Manages manufacturing applications, plant systems, integrations, security, and OT platforms
  • Operational reliability and maintainability
  • Security and governance
  • Standardization; reducing support burden
  • Peer IT leaders, enterprise IT standards bodies, vendor evaluations
  • A governed platform she can support without unbounded maintenance debt
  • Clear security and compliance posture
  • Standardized deployment/update model across sites
  • Long-term maintenance debt from one-off scripts and shadow IT
  • Balancing operational reliability with the pace OT wants to move
  • Scalability of support as the number of sites grows
Provides a governed operational application platform to manage, deploy, monitor, update, and standardize operational workflows across sites without creating long-term maintenance debt.

Owen, Operations Technology Leader

45
Director of Operational Technology / Head of OT / OT Manager / Plant Systems Director / Manufacturing Technology Leader
Decision maker for OT platform and tooling investment — balances operational performance against governance. Budget range $50k–$300k.
Deep OT/controls background; leads teams responsible for plant systems and automation strategy.
Direct exposure through his teams' use of it in the field
  • Leads OT teams, plant systems, and automation strategy
  • Balances operational performance, reliability, governance, and technology evolution across manufacturing environments
  • Operational performance and reliability
  • Standardization and deployment control
  • Team productivity — freeing his engineers from one-off maintenance
  • OT peer network, system integrators, industry conferences
  • Easier, more consistent way to deploy updates across sites
  • Reduced operational risk from unsupported automation
  • Ability to scale a successful pilot org-wide
  • Standardizing tools and practices across sites at different maturity levels
  • Reducing operational risk introduced by ad-hoc, unsupported solutions built at the plant level
  • Proving productivity gains to leadership
Helps them standardize and govern operational applications across sites — easier to deploy updates, maintain consistency, reduce operational risk, and scale successful solutions org-wide.

Elena, Enterprise Architect

47
Enterprise Architect / Lead Enterprise Architect / Principal Architect / Solutions Architecture Director
Gatekeeper / technical influencer — approves or vetoes on architecture and security grounds; typically not a budget holder.
Enterprise architecture, security, and long-term technology strategy across IT and OT.
Evaluates it primarily through an architecture/standards lens rather than hands-on use
  • Ensures manufacturing and OT initiatives align with enterprise architecture standards, security requirements, and long-term technology strategy
  • Evaluates platform decisions, governance models, and integration approaches
  • Technology standardization and architectural alignment
  • Governance and security
  • Platform sustainability and risk reduction
  • Enterprise architecture frameworks and standards bodies, internal governance boards
  • Clear architecture documentation and standards compliance
  • Lifecycle management and governance built into the platform
  • Fit within a vendor-neutral, standards-based strategy
  • Custom operational applications built outside architecture governance
  • Balancing OT's need for speed against enterprise standards
  • Long-term platform sustainability and avoiding lock-in
Brings governance, lifecycle management, and operational control to custom operational applications while fitting within an open, standards-based enterprise architecture strategy.

Amara, OT Architecture Leader

43
OT Architect / Manufacturing Solutions Architect / Industrial Systems Architect / OT Platform Architect / Controls Architecture Lead
Technical influencer / evaluator — defines architecture requirements and shortlists; works closely with Elena.
Deep OT systems design, integration patterns, and technology selection across manufacturing environments.
Hands-on familiarity as part of evaluating integration tooling
  • Defines how OT systems are designed, integrated, and scaled
  • Evaluates architecture standards, technology selection, integration patterns, and governance models
  • Architectural consistency and open architectures
  • Integration flexibility and long-term maintainability
  • Scalability across teams and facilities
  • OT/controls peer network, system integrators, technical standards bodies
  • Consistent governance and deployment layer across teams
  • Preserved architectural flexibility — no proprietary lock-in
  • Clear integration patterns that scale across facilities
  • Avoiding proprietary lock-in while still getting a governed platform
  • Keeping architecture consistent as teams and facilities multiply
  • Long-term maintainability of integration patterns chosen today
Provides the governance and deployment layer to scale operational applications consistently across teams and facilities — preserving architectural flexibility and avoiding proprietary lock-in.

Common Use Cases

Based on the Personas, the following section describes the most relevant Use Cases that we identified in exchange with our customers. These Use Cases align with our product methodology.

  1. Data transformation As Peter, Automation and Controls Engineer, I want to connect, collect, and store data from several sources, so that I can analyze my data further and ensure it is accessible in a unified manner.
  2. Generate actionable insights As Peter, Automation and Controls Engineer and Sarah, Process Engineer, I want to visualize and analyze my data, so that I can generate actionable insights from my data.
  3. Enterprise Readiness As Isabella, IIoT Project Lead, I want a professional partner with seamless enterprise integration, security, and a reliable architecture, so that I can use Node-RED in corporate and production environments.
  4. Standardize at scale As Owen, Operations Technology Leader (or Diego, Industrial Digitalization Leader), I want to take a solution that already works at one plant and deploy, govern, and update it consistently across every site, so that I don't have to re-solve the same problem — or accept the same risk — at every facility.