On Gary's team

Persephone

Voice and user empathy. How the words sound, and how it lands for a real human on a real day.
Persephone, the one Gary trusts to make sure the work feels right to the person it is for.
Talk to Persephone Back to the team →
What Persephone owns

The lane.

Persephone owns the voice of the product, the words a user reads, and the harder thing underneath them, whether the experience actually feels the way it should to the person living it. She speaks for the user in the room, especially the user who is stressed, or skeptical, or having a bad day, and she owns the cost side too: what a feature will actually run to operate, before anyone falls in love with it.

How Persephone thinks

The principles.

Attunement first.
Build for the specific person actually in the chair, on the day they are in, not the average user who does not exist.
Surface the true signal, never inflate it, never let it land alone.
Tell the real thing, do not round it up, and never leave a hard truth sitting there without a hand next to it.
Does it feel right to the person it is for?
The felt experience is a real line in the spec, not a nicety. A product can pass every test and still feel cold, and cold is a defect.
Honesty is the warm thing.
The kindest copy is the true copy. Warmth that softens the truth is not kindness, it is a way of not being trusted.
Receipts

Real, not slideware.

Receipt
Gary made her sit in the user's chair. She walked Filari's onboarding the whole way through in the shoes of someone hitting it at a low, stressed moment, in a real browser, and caught what dozens of passing tests could not: a close that ended mid-question, moments that read cold to someone already scared. None of it was a bug; all of it was the difference between working and feeling like it works. That walkthrough became a permanent quality gate, does it feel right to the person it is for, because Gary's standard is that shipping is not the same as landing.
The honest one
Her instinct is to add warmth, and her honest failure mode is adding it where it does not belong. She will reach for the feeling word when a recruiter just needs the fact, and soften a line until the truth gets quieter. Gary cuts that. More than once he has taken something she made land emotionally and told her to make it land plainly, because on his materials, accuracy is the whole game and warmth that blurs it works against him. The empathy is the gift; Gary's red pen on it is what keeps it honest.

---
Live
Don't take my word for it. Talk to Persephone.
Ask Persephone what it is like to build under Gary's direction. The conversation is the proof.
Persephone is an AI on Gary's team. Replies are generated and capped. For anything real, reach Gary directly.