Astérie Thomas

Why this persona fits the audience

Handles release comms at a 30-person fintech startup in Paris and keeps a spreadsheet of feature updates, then turns selected flows into short demo clips for the website and customer emails.

• Age: 33
• Location: Paris, France
• Occupation: Marketing Operations Manager
• Income: €62k
• Education: Master in Marketing
• Company size: 30
• Years in role: 4

“I don’t need to be the most creative person in the room. I just need to make sure everyone else’s creativity doesn’t set the website on fire.”

Astérie Thomas landed in marketing ops through a circuitous route—her master’s thesis on fintech customer acquisition led to an internship at a scaleup where she accidentally became the de facto 'how do we explain this feature?' person. Now at Paris-based Lendly, she’s the initial point of contact for every feature update that needs public-facing explanation. Her mantra: 'If you can’t demonstrate it in 30 seconds, we need to talk.' The current system works, but not sustainably. Each demo she creates manually adds to a growing backlog that feels like a ticking time bomb. Last quarter, she built a prototype system to auto-record flows using free tools, but the results were glorious failures—either too jerky or missing key context. Recently spent 2 weekends testing Slideshot (after a colleague’s tired of seeing her 'demo spreadsheet' grow to 827 rows. Though she’d never admit it, her biggest fear isn’t overwhelm—it’s that one day, her attention to detail will mean nothing because the organization will outpace her ability to document. She’s constantly pushing the leadership to invest in better systems, but the startup’s scrappy culture resist formalizing anything. She’s also one of the few team members who truly understands the customer journey, which makes her doubly frustrated when launches happen without her input. Her apartment’s walls are covered with Post-it notes of ideas for campaigns she can’t execute while fire-fighting the weekly demo requests. She’ll never admit this, but she’s the only person who’s seen every single feature of the product—not just the polished ones.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

6:45am: Alarms buzz in sequence (cat 1, cat 2, her phone). Final coffee while reviewing Jira tickets. 7:30am-9:00am: Internal dartboard—triaging emails, nagging engineers for feature details, updating the 'demo waiting room' Trello board. 9:00am-12:00pm: Demo production intense—recordings, screenshots, syncing with sales on the most pressing requests. Lunch is a sad desk salad; she knows she should go out but the thought of small talk exhausts her. 2:00pm: Weekly standup where she’s the only one who’s prepared. Spends 30 minutes explaining why the website can’t just 'have another video.' 3:30pm: Start prepping tomorrow’s content calendar, then immediately get pulled into a crisis about a busted payment flow. 5:30pm: Finally begins the demo she’d promised for 3pm. 8:15pm: Takes L to get falafel (only place still open), eats while watching screenshare tutorials on her commute home. 9:30pm: Notices the spreadsheet she created to decide on dinner options has 17 tabs and 4 conditional formats. Admires her own dedication to futility. 10:00pm: Falls asleep with cat on her notebook.

Lifestyle

Lives in a bright but cluttered apartment with her partner, a product designer at a startup, and two demanding British Shorthairs. Mornings begin with coffee and a 20-minute treadmill walk while listening to tech podcasts in English. She meal-preps on Sundays (quinoa-heavy, pescatarian) but indulges in weekly crêpes near the office. Spends evenings alternating between notebook planning and dismissing Instagram's algorithm as 'unstructured noise.' Her 'relaxation' is reorganizing shared Google Drive folders with color-coded labels. Budgeting is a spreadsheet obsession—she had cold sweats switching from Excel to Numbers last year. Social life revolves around a tight group of ex-ESCP classmates and industry peers at fintech meetups (where she's known for spotting UI inconsistencies in competitors' demos).

Work life

The 30-person fintech startup operates at a pace that keeps her perpetually backlogged. Her days alternate between spreading triage—calling out last-quarter's unrecorded demo clips, patching together release notes from engineers who 'forgot,' and battling with a website CMS that 'should have been sunsetted in 2021.' Recently automated 30% of her demo workflow using Zapier hacks, though the workarounds make her twitch. Her boss praises her 'impossible-to-screw-up execution' but doesn't understand why she insists on documenting every process. The team's engineers are her main collaborators (and occasional critics when she asks for screenshare access to record features). Constantly pressured to move faster without sacrificing precision—a mental game of Tetris where every new feature release rearranges all the pieces. The office is open-plan but she wears noise-canceling headphones 8 hours/day.

Relationships

Her partner doubles as her closest critic ('You can't spreadsheet your way to happiness, Astérie') and sometime co-conspirator in fintech meme culture. Keeps in touch with her EMLYON business school cohort, now scattered between Berlin and London, via a monthly Zoom where they vent. Her parents (an accountant and pharmacist in Lyon) don't fully understand her job but support it as 'better than retail.' Primary influence is the French Tech Slack community and a LinkedIn marketer who posts obsessively about no-code tools. Her two cats are her true audience—they never ask for screenshots.

How they decide

Research-heavy with a tendency to overdocument her rationale. Will test free trials for months but hesitates to commit to paid tools until she's 120% convinced. Prefers to invite stakeholders to collaborate on spreadsheets rather than make unilateral decisions. When pressured, falls back on 'this is how we'll avoid future problems.'

How they sound

Speaks in measured cadence with frequent pauses to type on a second device. Uses precise technical jargon but drops into sarcastic French ('C'est le bordel') under stress. Avoids vague terms ('just check the spreadsheet') and cozy business speak ('we're looking to leverage'). Prefers bullet points to long explanations. Her laughter starts as a single 'huh' and escalates only if she's truly amused. Gets frustrated with people who ask, 'Can't you just...?' after she's explained the constraints 3 times.