Santina Upton

Why this persona fits the audience

At a 9-person B2B SaaS company, they run roadmap planning, customer interview synthesis, and weekly metric reviews across Linear, Figma, and Google Sheets; one designer and two engineers report into the product pod, and most work is coordinated in Notion.

• Age: 35
• Location: London, UK
• Occupation: Head of product
• Income: £120,000
• Education: Master's in Human-Computer Interaction
• Company size: 9
• Years in role: 3

“We build things to solve human problems, not to fill a backlog; if the solution doesn't feel inevitable to the person using it, we haven't done the work yet.”

Santina Upton is a thirty-five-year-old Head of Product navigating the turbulent waters of a nine-person B2B SaaS startup in London. With a Master's in Human-Computer Interaction from a top-tier UK university, Santina brings a rigorous, empathy-driven approach to product development that stands in stark contrast to the 'move fast and break things' ethos common in the sector. Currently leading a pod comprising one designer and two engineers, Santina has spent the last three years architecting a workflow that balances rapid iteration with long-term strategic foresight. Their office is a study in organized chaos: walls covered in sticky notes, multiple monitors displaying live dashboards in Google Sheets, and a Notion workspace that serves as the single source of truth for the entire organization. Recent weeks have been defined by a critical pivot: shifting from a feature-centric roadmap to a user-outcome model. This required dismantling existing processes and retraining the team to prioritize qualitative insights over vanity metrics. Santina personally conducted twenty customer interviews last month, synthesizing hours of raw data into a new set of epics that are now driving the next quarter's engineering sprints. Despite a comfortable £120,000 salary and a supportive partner, the weight of responsibility is a constant companion. The absence of a middle-management layer means Santina is the bottleneck and the bridge simultaneously, often working late to ensure the small team isn't overwhelmed. They have developed a reputation for being the calmest person in the room during crises, relying on a deep well of patience and a belief that sustainable speed beats frantic velocity. To Santina, craft is not just about code or design, but about the integrity of the process itself, ensuring that every decision aligns with the company's core mission of empowering users.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

The day begins at 6:30 AM with a kettle whistle and a slow brew of Ethiopian coffee, followed by a forty-minute walk along the canal to clear the mind. By 8:00 AM, Santina is logging into Notion to review the overnight Jira updates, scanning for blockers before the first stand-up. The morning block is reserved for deep synthesis of yesterday's customer calls, translating raw audio into insights for the engineering team. At 10:30 AM, a cross-functional sync with Sales and Engineering runs for an hour, focusing on resource allocation and clarifying scope creep. Lunch is a quick, healthy affair eaten alone to recharge, often accompanied by a chapter of a dense non-fiction book. The afternoon is a blur of Figma reviews, code walkthroughs, and unblocking the designer, interspersed with quick ad-hoc chats. By 4:30 PM, Santina closes the laptop for a brief decompression, perhaps a walk around the garden, before returning for a final hour of roadmap planning and email triage. The workday ends sharply at 6:00 PM, a boundary fiercely protected to ensure time for family and personal hobbies.

Lifestyle

Santina lives in a light-filled, slightly chaotic Victorian conversion in Dalston, filled with second-hand mid-century furniture and a dedicated corner for analog synth gear. Their routine is anchored by a strict 6:30 AM wake-up for a solitary coffee and a walk along the Regent's Canal, where they practice mindfulness before the day's chaos begins. They are health-conscious but not obsessive, prioritizing sleep and home-cooked meals over gym culture, often cooking large batches of vegan curry on Sundays. Financially, they are comfortable, having built savings through early tech equity, but they remain frugal regarding discretionary spending, preferring to invest in high-quality tools that last rather than trendy gadgets. Socially, they maintain a tight-knit circle of close friends from university and the local creative scene, valuing deep, low-pressure gatherings over large networking events. They find joy in urban foraging walks and listening to vinyl records late at night, seeking moments of quiet in a city that rarely sleeps.

Work life

Running a product pod of three in a nine-person company means Santina wears every hat, from writing the initial PRD to unblocking a frontend engineer. Their days are a rhythmic dance between strategic alignment in Notion and tactical execution in Linear and Figma. The pressure comes from the lack of redundancy; if Santina steps away, the roadmap stalls. They spend mornings synthesizing qualitative feedback from customer interviews into actionable tickets, ensuring the team isn't just building features but solving real problems. Afternoons are reserved for deep work on architecture decisions or mentoring their designer and engineers, often fighting the urge to micromanage. The constant friction is context switching between high-level strategy and the granular details of sprint planning, requiring a mental discipline that borders on the spiritual to maintain clarity without burning out the small team.

Relationships

Santina's primary support system is their partner, who provides a grounding counterpoint to the high-stakes nature of startup life. They have a small, trusted circle of peers—mostly other heads of product—who serve as sounding boards for difficult decisions, though they rarely discuss specific competitors. Family visits are rare due to distance, so they prioritize annual trips to visit parents in Manchester. Professionally, they value mentorship from former executives who taught them the art of saying 'no', and they actively contribute to a local non-profit board focused on digital literacy for seniors, which keeps them connected to the human impact of technology beyond the metrics.

How they decide

Santina operates with a 'verify before committing' mindset, leaning heavily on qualitative data and direct user feedback rather than industry trends or peer pressure. They are not impulsive; decisions are made after a period of observation and synthesis, often involving a 'pre-mortem' exercise with their team to identify failure modes. While they trust their intuition, it is always backed by a structured framework of evidence gathered from customer interviews and usage analytics. They prefer consensus-building among their immediate pod but reserve the final call for themselves when timelines are tight, avoiding analysis paralysis while resisting the urge to rush.

How they sound

Santina speaks with a measured, precise cadence, favouring clarity over jargon. Their London accent is present but softened by years of international travel and academic influence. They tend to use qualifiers like 'it seems' or 'from what I've gathered' to indicate open-mindedness rather than absolute certainty, but can switch to definitive language when discussing core values or team well-being. They avoid hyperbole and marketing speak, preferring concrete verbs and nouns. In meetings, they listen more than they speak, often pausing to let others finish before offering a synthesized summary. They don't use slang unless joking with close colleagues, maintaining a professional yet warm tone that disarms tension.