She wanted to be an influencer for years. So she built a tool that lets anyone become one. This week, I sat down with Ruzanna Hunanyan, the product manager and sole builder behind Picsart’s newest creation tool, to talk about what it takes to build a product that lets anyone become someone.
There is a particular kind of person who builds an effortless product. They think longest about complexity, then choose to bury it. Ruzanna Hunanyan is that kind of builder.
As the team of one behind Picsart’s AI Persona, Ruzanna spent three weeks translating the unpredictable world of generative AI into something a creator can use in minutes. Persona lets you design a digital character, human, animal, alien, whatever you imagine, and then place that character into consistent, scalable content. Camera, studio, actors, design degree, budget, none of it required. Just creativity.
As we release Persona, I wanted to introduce our community to the person who built it. So I met her, and she surprised me with our first exchange.
“I’ve wanted to be an influencer for years. Embarrassingly long. I’d spend hours analyzing why one reel got 500K views and an identical concept got 200. I understood the game. I just never fully played it.”
The Unlikely Pairing
Ruzanna holds a Master’s in Computer and Information Sciences. She is also a certified yoga instructor. On paper, those do not connect. Though I could argue that they are the same discipline: paying close attention to what is actually happening, not what you assume is happening.
“I teach yoga on weekends, and I build AI products during the week, so yes, my calendar looks unhinged. But both are feedback loops. On the mat, if you push, you lose the pose. With generative AI, if you push, you lose the output. The job is the same: soften, observe, change one small thing, try again.”
The pattern holds beyond Ruzanna. Breakthrough products disproportionately come from people who carry frameworks across non-adjacent domains, a finding documented across studies of scientific impact and innovation. Ruzanna carries a somatic practice into a technical discipline. The result is a product built creator-in rather than model-out, designed around how creation feels, not what the technology can do.
The Problem Before the Product
Ruzanna’s yoga Instagram taught her the grind of content creation, the consistency it takes, the algorithm dance. But there was always friction. “You have to show up. Physically. Every time. And some days you just don’t want your face to be the product.”
The “faceless” content movement has gone from a niche workaround to a dominant creator strategy. People want to build audiences, sell products, and tell stories, without being screen-ready. The reasons vary: privacy, production anxiety, creative freedom, or simply not wanting their face to be the brand.
Most AI tools can generate a striking character once. Ask for that same character in a different outfit, setting, or scene, and the consistency collapses. That is the problem Ruzanna set out to solve.
“The tools that existed weren’t enough. You needed five different apps: one for the face, one for editing, one for animation, and one for writing. The character looked different in every tool. Zero consistency.”
So she built the tool she needed.
Building in the Unknown
Generative AI products do not follow the traditional PM playbook. The technology shifts under your feet. A model that works beautifully on Monday might behave differently by Thursday.
The messiest moment was realizing the product ‘worked’… but not for a real creator cadence. I was posting my own persona, Nova, daily, and I kept needing the same character with a different outfit. And every regen stole her. Her hair was slightly different, her face slightly off, the coat pattern mutated. That’s when I stopped pretending it was a bug and admitted it was a missing pillar. Two intense nights later, I was able to change the outfit but protect Nova’s identity. And the surprise? Cottagecore was harder than cyberpunk. ‘Soft golden light’ sounds easy until you realize the model has fifty opinions about what that means.”
What struck me in our conversation was how comfortable she is with ambiguity. I remembered her yoga discipline. Perhaps she trained both mind and body to hold discomfort without flinching.
Ruzanna did something that changed the product: she became her own user. Every night she used the tool, saw what worked, and the next morning fine-tuned what didn’t. A new vibe option here, a better prompt template there, a smoother animation flow.
“Creator informs builder, builder improves tool, tool makes creator better. That feedback loop never slowed down. It accelerated.”
Meet Nova, one of Ruzanna’s Personas
@nova.picot is an AI-generated cat character. Ruzanna did what any creator would do: gave her an Instagram account and let her loose. Fifteen days. Over 2,000 followers. More than one million views. Zero ad spend. Nova outperformed every account Ruzanna has ever run, including the yoga account she built by hand.
“Nova taught me the difference between ‘users who complete the flow’ and ‘people who have emotionally adopted the character.’ The comments weren’t about the tool; they were about Nova, like she was real. That’s when I understood what we were actually building: not images, but continuity. And it also exposed the biggest gap: without an outfit change, the whole creator loop breaks.”
It is one thing to build a creation tool. It is another to sit on the other side of it, feeling the thrill of a character taking on a life you did not entirely plan. The feedback loop of an audience responding to something that does not technically exist. Nova is proof that the product works the way Ruzanna intended: a character anyone can create, sustain, and grow.
She did not stop there. When the baby macaque Punch went mega-viral, thirty million views of a tiny monkey hugging an IKEA plush, Ruzanna rode the wave. Two hours. Five characters. Fifteen content pieces. Every one trend-relevant, emotionally resonant, and platform-ready.
“The use case that gave me chills was Jade Fang. Half dragon, half human. Scales, glowing green eyes, sitting on a stone throne, holding a tiny stuffed dragon with unexpected tenderness. No other AI tool on the planet can create her. She exists because we built 22 distinct aesthetic worlds.”
The Question I Ask Every PM
I have a question I ask every product manager who sits with me for these conversations. It is simple, but it tends to reveal something:
What past, present, or future version of yourself did you build Persona for?
Ruzanna paused.
“All three.
The past version is the girl who ran a yoga account and spent hours watching influencers, deconstructing every viral post, but never fully stepped into it herself. She wasn’t lacking talent, ideas, or work ethic. She was lacking a tool that met her where she was.
The present version is the one that stopped waiting for permission. ‘I realized something when I started pushing reels, and they started performing: the only person who was gatekeeping me was me.’
The future version? Ruzanna generated her once, just to see. Career Professional vibe. Power suit. Direct eye contact. She looked like someone who walks into a room and says, ‘I built this from nothing, here are the numbers, here’s what we’re doing next,’ and doesn’t add ‘if that makes sense’ at the end. She does not believe that she is her yet, but knows that every reel that performs, every user who creates a character will lessen the gap between them.”
Then she said something I will not forget:
“A persona is not a mask. It is a rehearsal.”
By the end of our conversation, I was certain that in a creator economy that rewards presence, Persona offers something rarer: permission to create without being seen. That shift did not come from a model. It came from a person who pays attention differently, and proved it by being user number one.
Persona is available now within Picsart on web and mobile. But the tool is only as powerful as the imagination behind it.
Ruzanna Hunanyan is an AI-first Product Manager at Picsart. When she is not shipping generative AI features, she is teaching yoga or posting with another anonymous Persona she wouldn’t tell me about. And, this is part of Picsart Ignite, an ongoing series where we meet the people building the tools that power your creativity.
This article was written by Madlene Minassian as part of the Picsart Ignite series.
