What Are Customers?
Customers in Cartographer represent the real companies, accounts, or market segments that influence what you build. They answer one question: who asked for this?
A flat backlog might track customer requests as tags or labels. Cartographer treats customers as their own concept. You create them at the space level and associate them with individual story cards across any project in that space. This gives your team a clear, filterable view of which customers are driving which parts of the roadmap.
Customers vs Personas
Customers and personas serve different purposes:
- Customers are real: specific companies, accounts, or named segments like “Enterprise Tier” or “Acme Corp.” They represent external demand.
- Personas are archetypes: fictional representations of user types like “Power User” or “New Hire.” They represent behavior patterns.
Use both together for the fullest picture: a story card might be tagged with the “Admin” persona and the “Acme Corp” customer, telling you both who uses it and who asked for it.
How Customers Work
Creating Customers
Customers are created at the space level, which means every project in that space shares the same set of customers. This lets you track a customer’s influence across multiple projects without duplicating data.
Each customer has a name, an optional description, and an optional color. Use the description to capture context like account tier, contract size, or strategic importance. Colors are useful when you want a visual indicator across the board, but keep the palette small (2 to 4 colors) so it stays readable.
Associating with Cards
Once customers exist in a space, you can associate them with any story card on any project in that space. A single card can have multiple customers. This is useful when several accounts need the same feature.
Customer associations show up in card details and are returned by the MCP server’s projects_get_card_details tool, so connected AI assistants can see and reason about customer context too.
Filtering by Customer
Board views can be filtered by customer. This lets you see only the cards relevant to a specific account or segment. It helps during customer-facing planning sessions, QBRs, or when prioritizing what to build next for a key account.
When to Use Customers
Customers are most valuable in B2B or multi-segment products where different accounts have distinct needs:
- Feature attribution. Track which customers requested or will benefit from a feature. When prioritizing, you can see at a glance how many key accounts a card serves.
- Account planning. Filter the board to a single customer to see the full scope of what you are building for them.
- Segment analysis. Use customers to represent segments (“SMB,” “Enterprise,” “Free Tier”) and see how your roadmap is balanced across them.
- Sales alignment. Share filtered views with sales or customer success to show what is in progress for their accounts.
MCP Tools
Manage customers programmatically through the MCP server:
customers_list. List all customers in a space.customers_create. Create a new customer.customers_update. Update name, description, or color.customers_delete. Soft-delete a customer.cards_customers_set. Associate customers with a card.
