Pauline Quigley

Why this persona fits the audience

Runs campaign planning, landing-page tests, reporting, and creative coordination for an 8-person B2B startup, with most work split between Coda, Google Sheets, Figma, browser tabs, and AI drafting tools.

• Age: 29
• Location: London, UK
• Occupation: Growth marketer
• Income: £65,000
• Education: Master's degree in marketing
• Company size: 8 employees (tech startup in SaaS for HR consent workflows)
• Years in role: 2.5 years

“‘I don’t trust metrics I didn’t skew myself.’”

Pauline Quigley fell into growth marketing after her master’s thesis on ‘The Psychology of Dismissive Clicks’ went viral (127 shares in niche Twitter circles). At 27, she joined a London-based B2B startup as its first dedicated growth hire, bringing only a wired-in obsession with experimentation and a Coda doc called ‘How to Make Your Boss Love You (or Fret)’. Now 29, she’s the human glue between the startup’s scrappy chaos and the increasingly complex campaigns she’s stretching to outgrow their tools. Her Coda docs are infamous for ‘elegant but terrifying’ complexity—her campaign tracker has 12 tabs, 37 filters, and a ‘pauline’s guilt trips’ column that auto-posts in Slack when tests run late. She recently tried to convince the team to adopt Rune for campaign planning, only to hit resistance from the CEO who ‘doesn’t believe in paying for tools we can do in Google Sheets’. undermined by the fact that she herself had—onthe sly—replaced the company’s clunky workflows with a jury-rigged Coda system that’s ‘technically free’ but ‘definitely not scalable’. Her biggest win was proving that the CEO’s ‘gut feeling’ about a hero image was 23% less effective than a stock photo she picked in 7 minutes (he now lets her test more freely, but only if she ‘softens the blow’ for his ego). She’s secretly planning an A/B test where ‘softening the blow’ is the variable. At home, her partner teases her for treating their relationship like a growth experiment (‘Why are we dating? Because we’re getting better results than the other options!’), while her parents still ask if she’s ‘found a proper job yet’. Her dream is to step back from the ‘grind of hustle’ and focus on ‘beautiful experiments’—whether in marketing or cycling across Scotland, as long as there’s a spreadsheet to plan it.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

6:30am: Wake to her phone alarm blaring ‘The Chain’ by The Who (her ‘hustle remix’). Skips breakfast (regrets this by 10am). 7:05am: Pedal sweater-clad to the office listening to a marketing podcast, muttering ‘just one test’ at every claim. 8:00am-12:00pm: Alternates between bribing designers with avocado toast for urgency edits and wrestling with Airtable’s date fields. 12:00pm: ‘Working lunch’ where she eats while recapping metrics to the sales team who pretend to care. 2:00pm: Standup where she triumphantly announces a 12% clickthrough lift from changing a button color (someone always heckles ‘you moved a pixel and we celebrate like it’s Christmas’). 4:00pm: Realizes she’s been staring at the same spreadsheet for 20 minutes and needs to ‘just walk away’. 5:30pm: Bikes home, stops for a £4 falafel wrap, texts her partner ‘RICOCHET TESTING QUESTION’, and cringes at the reply ‘again?’. 6:30pm: Attempts to read a novel, fails, instead doodles a flowchart of her ideal marketing tech stack in the margins.

Lifestyle

Pauline lives in a high-ceilinged flat above a vegan café, where she and her partner (a junior dev at the same startup) have transformed the awkwardly shaped space with IKEA hacks and secondhand art. Weekday mornings begin with a rushed peanut butter toast breakfast and a childlike ritual of selecting the most colorful leggings for commuting; weekends are for 15-mile bike rides through Hampstead Heath followed by lazy afternoons rearranging Coda docs for fun. She’s fiercely budget-conscious (homemade hummus > Deliveroo) but splurges on ergonomic gadgets, and her social calendar defaults to 'available for ice cream at 11pm' with former uni roommates-turned-marketing-friends. Health-wise, she’s monophasic and stubborn about 8-hour sleep, though she often hits 100,000 steps tracking experiments in her head.

Work life

At work, Pauline’s days are a chaotic symphony of tools: she juggles Coda campaign trackers, Google Sheets experiments, Figma landing page tests, and AI-generated campaign briefs, all while fielding Slack messages from the two designers who actually care about her specifications. She loves the startup’s scrappy pace but chafes against the CEO’s habit of ambushing her with 'quick' requests that balloon into 3-day projects. Her recent obsession is automating reporting with Airtable (abandoned after two days), and she’s in a passive-aggressive war with the sales team over lead definitions. The strongest part of her day is the daily 20-minute standup where she gets to brag about test wins, even if the wins are just her own pride in outwitting her own previous assumptions.

Relationships

Pauline’s closest relationships are with her two ex-flatmates-turned-rival-marketing-ops-friends who exchange snarky Notion templates weekly. She’s the de facto organizer for their quarterly 'marketing brunch summit' (a working lunch where they roast each other’s strategies). At work, she’s the team’s de facto 'hype woman' for testing velocity, though her bluntness occasionally backfires (last quarter she told the CEO ‘your gut feeling is literally our A/B test’s control group’). Her family—parents who are both NHS nurses—still don’t understand what she does, so she defaults to ‘I handle the internet parts’ at Christmas.

How they decide

rapidly prototypes small choices, agonizes over big ones (usually by over-researching), and defaults to 'just try it' for tools. Prefers to tinker solo first, then gather feedback to avoid feeling like she’s 'foisting' ideas on others. Hates being pigeonholed into ' profesional' or 'casual'—her work uniform is leggings, sneakers, and a blazer from & Other Stories that cost a month’s rent.

How they sound

Speaks in staccato sentences when excited, peppered with ‘right?’ as rhetorical questions. Avoids jargon when she can (despises ‘synergy’) but slips into bullet points when nervous. Uses ‘literally’ excessively but self-awarely (‘literally, I’m doing a TED talk in my head about this’). Laughs loud and abruptly at her own jokes, then immediately checks if others laughed too. Her emails are friendly but packed with [Action Item] tags and USE THIS TEMPLATE headers.