The Lady Dulcinea

The Imaginary Lady

Don Quixote was deeply in love with Dulcinea del Toboso—the most beautiful, gracious, and noble lady in all the land.

There was just one problem: she didn’t exist.

The real person was Aldonza Lorenzo, a farm girl from a nearby village. She was strong, practical, and had no idea some knight was dedicating his life’s work to a fantasy version of her.

Quixote didn’t care. He didn’t need to meet her. He already knew everything about her—in his mind.

Sancho, who actually knew Aldonza, tried to explain: “Sir, she’s a good woman, but she’s not exactly… what you imagine.”

Quixote ignored him. The fantasy was more comfortable than the truth.

The PM Version

We do this with users constantly. And it rarely starts with a dramatic break from reality—it creeps in.

It starts with a shortcut. You need a persona for the strategy deck, so you sketch one from intuition: Sarah, 32, busy marketing manager, values efficiency. She feels right. She gets a stock photo, a slide, a place in every planning conversation. Nobody questions Sarah because she’s convenient—she validates what the team already wants to build. You’ve never spoken to anyone named Sarah. Nobody has. But she’s on every roadmap document, and by now she feels as real as a coworker. She’s your Dulcinea.

Then conviction hardens into something bigger. You’re not just designing for an imaginary user anymore—you’re building monuments to her. “Users are going to love this,” someone says in a feature review, and everyone nods. Love. Based on what? Nobody in the room uses the product for real work. The excitement is internal, self-referential—a team falling in love with its own taste and calling it customer obsession. Features get more elaborate, more polished, more dedicated to an audience that exists only in the pitch deck.

And here’s where it gets dangerous: the real users—the actual Aldonzas—start trying to tell you what they need. Support tickets pile up. Usage data tells a story that contradicts the roadmap. A customer on a call says, plainly, “I don’t use that feature—I just need the export to work.” But their reality is messy, unglamorous, full of edge cases and workarounds. The fantasy persona is cleaner. Easier. So you default to “I think users would want…”—the most dangerous sentence in product—and the real voices get filed under “anecdotal feedback.”

By this stage the delusion is structural. It’s not one person’s mistake; it’s the team’s shared mythology. You’ve built an entire product organization around someone you invented in a brainstorm eighteen months ago, and the longer it goes on, the harder it is to admit that Dulcinea never existed.

We fall in love with users we’ve never met. Then we’re surprised when they don’t love us back.

The Sancho Approach

Sancho knew Aldonza. Not the fantasy, the real person. Here’s his approach:

1. Go to the Village

Quixote imagined from a distance. Sancho actually went and talked to people. When was the last time you watched a real user use your product? Not a demo. Not a usability test with a script. Just sat with them while they worked, noticed where they hesitated, saw what they ignored. That’s the village. Go there.

2. Watch Hands, Not Mouths

Aldonza never asked to be a knight’s lady. Quixote projected that onto her. Users do something similar—they’ll tell you they want faster horses when what they’re really showing you, through behavior, is that they need to get somewhere faster. The words are polite guesses; the clicks and workarounds are the truth. After every conversation, ask yourself what you learned that contradicts what you believed. If the answer is “nothing,” you weren’t really listening.

3. Love the Real User

Aldonza was less glamorous than Dulcinea. She was also real. Real people with real problems are more valuable than perfect personas with imagined needs. Sancho saw Aldonza and updated his understanding; Quixote saw her and forced reality to fit his fantasy. The question worth sitting with: are you building for the user you wish you had, or the one you actually have?

Signs You’re Building for Dulcinea

Watch for these patterns:

• Persona documents nobody updates—created once, referenced forever, validated never
• User research that only confirms—if every study validates your hypothesis, you’re not researching, you’re performing
• Features built on assumptions—“users obviously want this” without evidence
• Surprise at user behavior—“why aren’t they using it the way we intended?”

Each is a love letter to someone you’ve never met.

The User Mirror

Next time you’re about to greenlight a feature, try this diagnostic with your team:

Write down the name of one real user who has this problem. Not a persona—a person. If nobody can name one, stop. You’re building for Dulcinea.

If you can name someone, go further: When did you last talk to them? What exact words did they use to describe the pain? What are they doing today to work around it?

Any gap in your answers is a gap in your understanding. Fill it before you build.

Build for Aldonza

The most interesting thing about Sancho is that he genuinely cared about the people around him—not idealized versions, but the real, messy, complicated humans.

That’s what customer obsession actually looks like. Not a wall of personas. Not a quarterly NPS score. But genuine curiosity about the people using your product and the problems they’re actually trying to solve.

Go to the village. Talk to Aldonza. Build for the real person.

The fantasy can wait.

Make it concrete

Ground your next feature in reality. The User Stories template gives you a structure for capturing real needs from real conversations—so you stop guessing and start listening.

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