Personas¶

Starting set, pulled from recurring roles found across this repo's Feature Sets, improvements, and debt entries, plus the 2026 Q3 Roadmap PRDs (see the source note at the bottom for personas that don't have a local spec yet). Add to this as new personas surface in future specs — don't invent one speculatively ahead of an actual PRD or spec naming it.

Employee / End User¶

The person interacting with Novaworks agents to get HR tasks done — documents, structured input collection, notifications — across whatever host surface they happen to be on. Conversations are owned by Novaworks regardless of host. Needs assurance that sensitive disclosures are handled appropriately and that input/output is screened before it reaches them. Also the primary Reporting consumer when asking plain-language workforce questions scoped to their own record, and the primary subject of every Guest Console pre-boarding flow before becoming a full Employee.

Gemini Workspace (and other third-party host surfaces) is this repo's concrete example of an Employee reaching Novaworks through a reactive third-party chat surface — one that only responds when the user initiates it, and can't be proactively nudged outside an active conversation. On that surface, this persona receives in-chat nudges and "Continue in Novaworks" deep links as the fallback when the surface can't natively render what's needed. It's the same persona, not a distinct one — only the interaction surface differs.

See feature-sets/ai-chat-surfaces/concept.md (Section 2 for the Gemini Workspace example), feature-sets/ai-chat-surfaces/continue-in-novaworks/spec.md, feature-sets/ai-chat-surfaces/notifications/spec.md, feature-sets/ai-guardrails-sensitive-routing/concept.md; Nova Natural Language Reporting PRD (permission-scoped queries); Preboarding Guest Console PRD (Use Case 1).

Manager¶

A people manager responsible for a team, distinct from HR Operations. Wants real-time visibility into their team without asking HR — new-hire readiness before Day 1, career and performance tracking over time, proactive insights such as an expiring-certification cluster or a direct report with no recent one-on-one. Doesn't get direct-edit access to the authoritative HR record — change requests route to HR Operations rather than the Manager altering the system of record directly. Approves or terminates a contingent worker's contract renewal as one of exactly two allowed actions; no response escalates to HR Operations rather than silently defaulting to termination.

So many managers in a fast-scaling, acquisition-heavy org are new or first-time, and carry readiness work they aren't otherwise equipped for. This is the same persona in that state, not a distinct one — it receives HRBP-shared enablement content (first one-on-one structure, check-in questions, PIP guidance) in the flow of work, at the moment it's needed rather than after something goes wrong.

See: Manager Workspace PRD (Features 1, 3, 6, 7, 8); Contingent Worker Lifecycle PRD (Feature 1); Nova Natural Language Reporting PRD (team-scoped use case); HRBP Persona Canvas Experience PRD (Feature 7).

HR Operations / HR Ops¶

⚠ Naming note: also appears as "HR Admin" and "HR Operations Specialist" across newer PRDs, with nothing cross-referencing them as the same role — treated as one persona here pending confirmation. "HR Admin workspace" specifically may denote a narrower surface scoped to deterministic transactions rather than the full role.

The customer's own HR Operations team (not Novaworks) that needs a live queue of flagged or escalated conversations from their tenant, with full context handed off automatically. Today has no real-time visibility into sensitive-conversation escalations and depends on employees re-reporting issues elsewhere. Novaworks reviewing a customer's sensitivity-flagged conversations itself would be a privacy/trust violation, not a feature — this persona is strictly customer-side. Also executes deterministic pre-boarding transactions from a dedicated HR Admin workspace, runs and receives event-triggered and scheduled compliance reports, and reviews and marks statutory filings as complete in Compliance & Filings — though never submits the actual form, which stays outside the platform. Can override any auto-generated task or auto-classified document.

On the ticketing side, resolves insourced tickets exclusively via the Core ServiceNow UI — deliberately given no dedicated Novaworks fulfiller workspace, keeping the ticketing module from creeping into case-management territory — and can explicitly request ticket creation on an employee's behalf (e.g. "open a request for this") as a first-class interaction, distinct from a ticket raised automatically after an agent failure.

See feature-sets/ai-guardrails-sensitive-routing/concept.md, feature-sets/ai-guardrails-sensitive-routing/human-escalation-context-handoff/spec.md, feature-sets/ticketing-integrations/concept.md; Preboarding Guest Console PRD (Feature 4, HR Admin workspace); Compliance & Filings PRD (Flow 1); Nova Natural Language Reporting PRD.

HRBP¶

Operationally manual today relative to how strategically it's positioned — building ad hoc spreadsheets by hand to run processes current tooling can't produce. Requests workforce data in plain language, pins views to a persistent personal workspace, reshapes them through time or segment lenses, and receives proactive insights (attrition patterns, expiring certifications, span-of-control drift) as prompts to investigate — never as automated actions. Also gets early pre-boarding visibility and prepares managers to receive new hires.

See: HRBP Persona Canvas Experience PRD; Preboarding Guest Console PRD (Feature 9, HRBP readiness involvement).

VP / Head of HRBP¶

Adjacent to HRBP, not identical — drives the org's move toward being data-driven and wants a quarterly cadence of blended quantitative and qualitative reporting to bring to business leaders. That practice depends entirely on this one person today, with no succession path if they leave or get pulled onto something else for a quarter.

See: HRBP Persona Canvas Experience PRD (Features 4, 8).

CHRO¶

Wants HRBPs freed from administrative work to stay strategic. Also the buyer persona for governance over agent behavior — increasingly the de facto owner of AI/automation policy for HR without infrastructure in place to act on it.

See: HRBP Persona Canvas Experience PRD; Agent Accountability Framework concept paper (not yet a scoped spec).

HR Coordinator¶

Absorbs administrative overflow when HRBP urgency spikes. The line between this persona and the HRBP isn't always clear today, which creates rework — needs shared visibility into the same workspace data as the HRBP so handoffs don't require re-keyed context.

See: HRBP Persona Canvas Experience PRD.

System Admin / Customer SN Administrator¶

⚠ Also appears as "HR Administrator / Brand owner" in Portal Theming material — likely the same technical-admin persona under a different hat, not confirmed as distinct.

The tenant-side admin who tunes guardrail sensitivity/thresholds and which risk categories route to a human, per customer or pilot group, through a policy console built on the existing feature-flag targeting pattern. Also configures jurisdiction-to-legal-entity mapping and annually-updatable rate tables (e.g. workers' comp, minimum wage) in Compliance & Filings with no developer involvement, owns the rebrand-without-editing-source theming flow, and customizes and downloads a branded, pre-configured mobile app build per instance.

See feature-sets/ai-guardrails-sensitive-routing/concept.md, feature-sets/ai-guardrails-sensitive-routing/policy-configuration-console/spec.md; Compliance & Filings PRD (Flow 5); Nova Portal Theming, Portability & Embeddability PRD; Nova Tenant Controller & Mobile Auth Enhancements PRD.

HR Policy Owner (Author)¶

Authors, collaboratively co-edits, versions, and publishes policy directly in the Native Policy Editor. The only persona who can publish a policy change — the advisor itself never edits or publishes autonomously. Assigns managers to newly-created policies from within the tool.

See: Nova Policy Advisor PRD (Use Cases 1 and 3; Native Policy Editor).

HR Compliance / Policy Analyst¶

Asks the Nova Policy Advisor plain-language policy or compliance questions and gets a grounded, cited answer before making a decision or publishing a change, with the full exchange persisted for internal audit. Distinct from the HR Policy Owner above — interprets and sanity-checks policy, but does not author or publish it.

See: Nova Policy Advisor PRD (Use Case 2).

Compliance / Legal / Trust & Safety¶

The customer's own compliance/legal team (not Novaworks) that needs a reason-coded, defensible audit trail of every guardrail decision on their tenant — what was asked, what nearly got said, why it was blocked or escalated. Sign-off from this persona gates guardrails going live for that customer's tenant, not Novaworks' overall GA of the feature. Distinct from the HR Compliance / Policy Analyst above — this persona sits closer to legal/audit than to day-to-day policy interpretation.

See feature-sets/ai-guardrails-sensitive-routing/concept.md, feature-sets/ai-guardrails-sensitive-routing/guardrail-observability-audit-feedback/spec.md.

Codex Curator / SME Reviewer¶

Internal-only — never customer- or employee-facing. Curates the candidate source list for a country before large-scale crawling, then reviews individual crawled documents (Accept / Reject / Needs Review, with a required comment on the latter two) before anything syncs to the vector database powering the Policy Advisor. Both gates are hard requirements, not optional review.

See: Nova Codex Curator PRD (Use Cases 1–2; Document Review flow).

Recruiter¶

Hands a candidate off to Novaworks with a structured special-instructions field (accommodation needs, unique offer terms, start-date sensitivities) intended to travel with the candidate record. Today, without ATS integration in place, loses this context after the offer is made.

See: Preboarding Guest Console PRD (Feature 5; Use Case 4).

New Hire / Candidate¶

Signs into a gated, time-bound Guest Console, meets the HR Concierge agent, completes a sequenced read-and-sign task list, and bulk-uploads documents that get auto-classified into their personalized EDM — all before Day 1. Today receives generic document packs by email with no single place to track progress, no confirmation HR received a signed offer, and no visibility into what remains.

See: Preboarding Guest Console PRD (Use Case 1; Feature 2).

Contingent Worker¶

Covers contractor, independent contractor, and staff-org consultant roles placed at clients — the staff-org-consultant scope is contested between the Guest Console and Contingent Worker Lifecycle PRDs and is still unresolved. Uses the same gated Guest Console experience as an Employee, scoped to contractor policy. Receives a contract-renewal notification on a shared 90/60/30-day cadence and must clear a background-check hard gate before any renewal proceeds; re-enters the Guest Console through a fresh gated invitation, not persistent access, to sign a renewed contract that supersedes the prior version in the EDM.

See: Preboarding Guest Console PRD (Use Cases 2, 6; Feature 12); Contingent Worker Lifecycle PRD.

Finance & Department Leader¶

Needs workforce data for planning and budgeting. Today receives periodic HR snapshots that are stale on arrival and can't be segmented further without requesting a new extract. Wants self-serve, department-scoped natural-language queries reshapeable by time period or segment without involving HR Operations.

See: Nova Natural Language Reporting PRD.

IT Admin / MDM¶

Prepares and distributes a branded, pre-configured mobile app build per customer instance. Today done by hand, communicating endpoints and client IDs through onboarding docs one user at a time. Wants to customize and download a signed, ready-to-distribute build from the Tenant Controller instead.

See: Nova Tenant Controller & Mobile Auth Enhancements PRD (Feature 2).

Nova Platform / App Engineer¶

Internal, not customer-facing. Consumes versioned API contracts, a single correlation id across the stack, and one feature-flag service rather than ad-hoc property checks scattered through code. Today, cross-scope reads depend on per-record ACL/scope evaluation with no request-level trace.

See: Nova Platform Enhancements PRD.

Frontend Engineer / ISV¶

Internal/partner-facing. Consumes the design-token contract and the widget-embedding pattern. Today works against implicit styling where tokens drift and double-loaded bundles risk re-registration collisions.

See: Nova Portal Theming, Portability & Embeddability PRD.

Payroll Admin¶

Named in a real spec but explicitly out of MVP scope — payroll-adjacent filings (Forms 941, 940, W-2) depend on a payroll module not yet available. Phase 2.

See: Compliance & Filings PRD (Phase 2 persona table).

Benefits Admin¶

Same status as Payroll Admin — named, not speculative, but explicitly deferred pending the benefits module (Form 5500, ACA 1094-C/1095-C). Phase 2.

See: Compliance & Filings PRD (Phase 2 persona table).

Source note: personas above citing a PRD Name rather than a local feature-sets/ path are grounded in the 2026 Q3 Roadmap PRDs, not yet materialized as Feature Sets in this repo — treat those citations as pointers to external source material, not navigable local paths. Read in full on 2026-08-04 (21 documents; one file in that source set, Document.docx, was empty and contributed nothing).

A handful of personas named in this same PRD set were left out for now: Comp Specialist, Recruiting Specialist, Immigration, Workers Comp, Leave Specialist, and Offboarding Specialist have no PRD actually naming them — only adjacent mentions — which conflicts with this file's own rule above. Accounting/Finance was named in a working session rather than a PRD, so it's held out on the same grounds pending confirmation it's distinct from Finance & Department Leader. Revisit once a real spec names any of these.