Shelfery Target Users and Jobs (Hypotheses)¶
This document exists to describe hypotheses about who Shelfery might serve and what job they might be hiring it to do. Nothing here is a confirmed persona. No demographic details, market sizing, or user counts below should be treated as researched or validated — none have been invented, and none should be added without labeling them as such.
Why this is framed as hypotheses, not personas¶
Traditional persona documents present demographic and behavioral detail as if it were established fact, usually to give teams a shared mental model. At this stage, Shelfery has not conducted user research, so a persona document would misrepresent the venture's actual state of knowledge. Instead, this document lists candidate user groups and candidate jobs to be tested, not described.
Candidate user group hypotheses¶
- Households managing a home pantry, refrigerator, and freezer. The working assumption is that the relevant unit of use is a household (which may be one person or several), managing food stored across multiple locations in the home. Household size, composition, income level, cooking frequency, and other demographic or behavioral characteristics have not been defined and should not be assumed.
- People who feel some friction or anxiety around food waste. It is hypothesized that at least some target users are motivated by not wanting to waste food they've paid for, rather than purely by meal-planning or nutrition goals. This has not been validated.
- People who lose track of what they already have. It is hypothesized that a recurring trigger for wanting a tool like this is buying duplicate items, or forgetting about food until it has spoiled. This has not been validated.
No other user segments (e.g. specific age ranges, professional cooks, specific dietary communities, specific household income brackets) have been identified or ruled out. Absence of a segment here does not mean it has been excluded — it means no work has been done to define it.
Candidate jobs-to-be-done hypotheses¶
Framed as jobs a household might hire Shelfery for, none of which are confirmed:
- Help me know what I already have before I go shopping, so I don't buy duplicates.
- Help me remember to use food before it goes bad.
- Give me a clear, low-effort picture of what's in my pantry, fridge, and freezer without needing to keep a manual list.
- Reduce the mental load of tracking food across multiple storage locations in the home.
These are candidate jobs to test with real prospective users, not a confirmed set of use cases to design against.
What must happen before these become personas¶
Before any of the above should be treated as a real persona or confirmed
job-to-be-done, the venture needs actual discovery work — conversations,
observation, or research with prospective users — documented and reviewed.
Until that happens, product and design decisions should treat this
document as a set of open hypotheses, and should be checked against
docs/strategy/assumptions-and-open-questions.md.