CELab – Ep 190 – The Secret to Speed Isn’t More Content: Mikaron Fortier on Customer Education Through an OD Lens

Customer education programs in fast-growing companies rarely stall because the content is bad or the tooling is wrong. They stall because the organization around them changes faster than any curriculum can keep up: reorgs, new products, a shifting ICP, a new leader every few quarters. In this episode, Dave puts that hypothesis to Mikaron Fortier, an organization development practitioner who earned her stripes training customers at a Seattle legal-tech startup that grew from 12 to 150 people, spent two decades as a learning consultant and instructional designer, and just completed her Master’s in Organization Development at Pepperdine. Her answer reframes the job: the secret to speed isn’t shipping more content, it’s managing how the team works.

Mikaron hands customer educators the OD toolkit our field rarely gets: complexity and chaos theory applied to a company that won’t hold still, the foundational team dynamics (how decisions get made, who owns what, how often people actually talk) that quietly decide whether a cross-functional program moves, and her new research on what people learn, and lose, when they work across company boundaries. You’ll hear why “knowledge leaks” happen every time a field expert returns from a customer engagement with no time to reflect, why trust has to come before anyone shares their IP, and why so much partnership work stays invisible to the organization that depends on it. If you lead Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the vocabulary for diagnosing what you’ve been feeling; if you’re in Enablement, L&D, Product, or Marketing, it’s the case for breaking down the silos where five teams quietly build the same thing.

Highlights from this episode:

  • Slow down to speed up. Why the fastest education teams build in time to reflect instead of shipping more courses.
  • Knowledge leaks. What your organization loses every time an expert comes back from the field and nobody asks what they learned.
  • Tugging on the known unknown. How an outside facilitator surfaces the conversation a team never knew it needed to have.
  • Room for both. Mikaron’s case for making space for emergence and co-creation with customers alongside the hard-coded curriculum.
  • The OD reading list. Where to start: Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute, Meg Wheatley on leadership and complexity, and David Teece on dynamic capabilities.

Connect with Mikaron on LinkedIn to talk organization development, fractional OD work, or her research on how learning happens when companies collaborate.

CELab – Ep 189 – Stop Throwing Content at the Problem: Talya Reynolds on Contextual, Data-Driven Product Education

Producing customer education content has never been cheaper, and that’s exactly why making more of it is no longer the answer. The teams pulling ahead are the ones making smarter decisions about what to build, when to show it, and where it should live. In this episode, Adam sits down with Talya Reynolds, Head of Product Education at ClearCo. Nearly ten years ago, Talya found the name for the work she was already doing by listening to CELab. Today she’s rebuilding product education as a data-driven system designed to teach customers in the moment, inside the product, instead of sending them off to a course.

Talya gets refreshingly specific about what that system takes. She covers when contextual education works and when screen real estate means a deeper format is still the right call. She explains why ClearCo is building a user maturity score from entitlement, product telemetry, support tickets, and call sentiment instead of trusting usage alone. She describes how her team is consolidating Gong, Zendesk, product data, and Slack into a customer hub, and how skills in a shared GitHub repo are starting to turn PRDs into first-draft docs and learning plans. She’s just as candid about the costs, the human review that self-healing content still needs, and the two months her team lost chasing a perfect AI model. If you work in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is a practical blueprint for contextual learning. If you’re in Digital CS, Product Marketing, Enablement, Support, or L&D, it’s a clear look at how shared customer data can make every team’s content smarter.

Highlights from this episode:

  • Stop sending users to a course. Why “take a course to learn our guides” is a bad signal for any product, and what changed when Talya moved repeat questions into the app.
  • Usage isn’t health. A busy account can still be an unhappy one. Here’s how a user maturity score triangulates entitlement, telemetry, and sentiment.
  • Docs drafted from the code. Skills, schemas, and governance rules in a GitHub repo that produce first-draft documentation, adoption plans, and learning plans.
  • Self-healing content has a price tag. How a tiering calculator decides when the update agent runs, and why a minor UI tweak can break 50 embedded guides.
  • Write for humans and LLMs at once. Governance, alt text, heading order, task-based jobs-to-be-done articles, and the table problem nobody has solved yet.

Connect with Talya on LinkedIn; she welcomes DMs and ideas on cracking the content intelligence model.

CELab – Ep 188 – Customer Education Doesn’t Have a Confidence Problem – It Has a Visibility Problem: Irana Wasti of Thought Industries

Customer education doesn’t have a confidence problem. It has a visibility problem wearing a confidence problem’s clothes. Thought Industries’ 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report found that 99% of leaders are confident their program influences business outcomes and 72% say they have the data to prove it — yet education is still one of the first functions on the block when budgets tighten. Both of those things can’t be true. In this episode, Dave puts that tension to Irana Wasti, CEO of Thought Industries, a product leader who spent twenty-plus years at IBM, Intuit, GoDaddy, Typeform, and BILL before stepping into the learning category a year ago — and who calls customer education “the best hidden secret” in every company she’s met.

Irana’s outsider lens is the whole point. She explains why the customer journey looks so much bigger from the education seat than it ever did from the product seat, why declining academy logins are an opportunity rather than a loss, and why the fix isn’t a better dashboard — it’s getting your best content out of the gated portal and into every place your prospects and customers actually ask questions, from ChatGPT and Claude to in-product chat and the help center. You’ll hear how Thought Industries’ Omnichannel Learning and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) work, why “two-second answers or a PhD” is the new customer expectation, and what changes on the vendor’s side of the table. If you sit in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is your case for a bigger seat; if you’re in Enablement, Marketing, Support, or L&D, it’s the argument for one shared source of truth instead of five teams educating in silos.

Highlights from this episode:

  • The best hidden secret. Coming from product, Irana had barely interacted with customer education teams — then she saw how much of the customer journey they actually own, and how little of it reaches the executive dashboard.
  • Falling academy traffic “screams opportunity.” Customers left for ChatGPT overnight. Irana reframes that drop as the moment to insert education into every touchpoint instead of asking people to come to you.
  • Everybody thinks they do customer education. Product tours, community, help center, academy — five teams, five versions of the truth. The team with the richest, most accurate content should own the fabric, not just a platform.
  • Why budgets get cut. When education is measured as “just another platform,” it looks redundant every renewal cycle. Tie it to the full customer journey and the metrics finally climb the dashboard.
  • A new goal for the industry. Irana’s closing challenge: stop at 99% of education leaders being confident and go for 99% of CEOs confident that education drives business outcomes.

Connect with Irana Wasti on LinkedIn, explore Thought Industries’ AI Wave — Omnichannel Learning and Conversational AI Learning — at thoughtindustries.com, and watch for the 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Thought Industries.

CELab – Ep 187 – Customer Education Comes First: How Anna-Lena Kress Flipped the Content Flow at quantilope

At most B2B SaaS companies, the customer comes last. Product announces, internal enablement scrambles, marketing drafts, documentation piles on — and the customer-facing material gets slapped together at the end by whoever’s left. Anna-Lena Kress, Senior Learning Experience Designer at quantilope, decided that order was exactly backwards. She pitched leadership on building the polished, customer-facing asset first and letting marketing and internal training derive from it — and got an immediate yes. The result: a help center rebuild scoped at six months shipped in two, a team that trained itself just by using the customer content, and a one-person education function that now runs like a system instead of a cleanup crew.

In this episode, Anna-Lena walks through the three pillars that made it work — Customer Education First (create once, publish everywhere), Capture at the Source (SMEs recording asynchronously in Camtasia Online instead of being interviewed), and Amplify with AI (Clueso for step-by-step articles, Claude for finished Zendesk HTML). Then the conversation turns to attention itself: how her family farm’s social channel went from 1,000 followers in March to 50,000 by recording day with strictly educational soil-health videos, and what hook–arc–payoff can teach Customer Education about getting people through the front door. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the playbook for going first. If you’re in Enablement, Marketing, L&D, or Support, it’s a look at what you get when the customer asset already exists on day one.

Highlights from this episode:

  • “Who actually sends our content to the customer? Our team.” — Why Anna-Lena treats internal colleagues as her first customer, and how that reframes the whole launch sequence.
  • The waiter effect — When the team trains on customer-facing material, they recommend it like a server who’s already tasted tonight’s special. Confident referrals, zero extra enablement lift.
  • The “it’s not baked yet” objection, answered — Last-minute product tweaks are cheaper to patch on a finished customer asset than to rebuild from internal drafts. The fear is legit; the conclusion is backwards.
  • Six months to two — 100+ help center articles rebuilt by one person: SMEs record in Camtasia Online, Clueso turns video into screenshots and steps, Claude assembles the final Zendesk HTML — and the leftover video library later powered an unplanned course update.
  • Fix the front door, not just the interior — We obsess over the inside of our academies while the entrance is off its hinges. Why 30-second, one-lesson, myth-buster videos are a scroll-stopping way in — and how Dave’s viral Atlassian short-form program got killed anyway.

Connect with Anna-Lena Kress on LinkedIn, explore the quantilope Academy to see the modular, customer-first model in action, and find her farm, Better Together Acres, on Facebook for the soil-health videos that stopped the scroll.

CELab – Ep 186 – Build Once, Distribute Many: Stop Making Your Customers Come to You

Every Customer Education team eventually hits the same wall: you build something genuinely good, and it quietly dies behind a portal your customers never log into. We call that an engagement problem. It isn’t. It’s a distribution problem — and most of us are still solving it one channel at a time. In this crossover episode, Dave replays a July 2026 webinar recorded with Casey Trujillo of BrainStorm, a digital transformation coach who has spent 20+ years helping Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies get their people to actually use the software they bought. The topic is content syndication, and the argument is blunt: “come to my site, create an account, take my course” is a losing pattern, and everybody in the chain knows it.

The through-line is build once, distribute many — build a genericized version of the material once, then split it two ways: one copy inside for enablement, one copy outside for customers, delivered where they already work and shaped to the slice of your product they actually own. Casey and Dave walk the two-sided standoff that keeps this from happening — vendors terrified of losing control of their content, customers exhausted by asking permission for every change — and land on the mechanism that resolves both at once. You’ll leave with a way to think about shared reporting, a churn signal you’re probably already ignoring, and a low-risk experiment you can run with a single existing customer this quarter. Primary audience here is Customer Education and Customer Success, but if you sit in Enablement, L&D, Support, or Marketing and you build content for people who don’t work for you, this is your problem too.

Highlights from this episode:

  • “Why are you rebuilding this?” — Dave on watching enablement teams reconstruct fundamentals for content that already exists, in excellent form, out in the world.
  • It was never an LMS problem. Why the LMS mental model — completions, seats, box-checking — quietly caps what your education program can ever do.
  • The two-sided standoff. The vendor’s fear of losing content control versus the customer’s fear of asking permission forever — and why private portals resolve both at the same time.
  • Shared reporting, both directions. What changes when the vendor and the customer see the same engagement data, and nobody has to play reporting concierge at 7am on a Monday.
  • The signal you’re throwing away. If a customer isn’t touching the training, they’re probably not touching the product — and that’s a proactive play for your CSM, not a lagging metric.

CELab – Ep 185 – The Four Faces of AI Resistance: Eve Kedar on Why Customer Education Should Own the AI Rollout

Most companies handed the internal AI rollout to whoever sits closest to revenue — Sales Enablement or RevOps — and adoption promptly stalled at the login screen. In this episode, Dave reunites with his old Gainsight colleague Eve Kedar, EdD — Revenue Execution Architect at EK Consulting, author of Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and creator of the Four Faces of AI Resistance — to make the case most org charts get wrong: the team that should own internal AI adoption is the one nobody put in the room. Customer Education.

Eve brings a combination almost nobody else in this conversation has: a doctorate in Education and Leadership for Change plus 15+ years inside revenue teams at Apple, Seagate, PayPal, Cisco, Gainsight, and copy.ai. Whether you sit in Customer Education, Customer Success, L&D, Enablement, Marketing, or Support — if your job is helping people genuinely change how they work, this episode hands you a diagnostic for the resistance you’re up against and two plays you can run on Monday, no platform purchase required.

Highlights from this episode:

  • The Four Faces of AI Resistance — status fear, displacement fear, change aversion, and rollout fatigue — and why naming which face you’re looking at tells you exactly which intervention to run.
  • Why not Enablement or RevOps? Neither function is chartered to own learning — and real “adoption” means use-in-workflow, not logins.
  • Attendance is a vanity metric. If all you can show is headcount and quiz clicks, your team may be next to get cut — bring KPI movement instead.
  • The master glossary play: become the anchor for canonical learning with two-minute mini-trainings — without critiquing Enablement’s content and losing them forever.
  • The cheapest AI enablement in the world: prompt-based roleplay with Claude or ChatGPT — twenty minutes per rep, no purchase order.

Learn more: get the Four Faces of AI Resistance framework — plus Eve’s speaking and workshops — at evekedar.com, explore EK Consulting’s revenue-execution work at ekconsulting.io, read her book Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and ask her about the AI roleplay prompt workbook. And connect with Eve on LinkedIn!

CELab – Ep 184 – Your Biggest AI Problem Isn’t Skills – It’s Belief: Customer Education in the Age of AI

In this kickoff to Season 8 of the CELab podcast, host Dave Derington sits down with Anya Eydman to explore a provocative idea: our biggest AI problem in Customer Education isn’t a skills gap or a technology gap – it’s a belief gap. Anya draws on her background in corporate finance, small business and startup operations, coaching, municipal and nonprofit work, and energy/civic tech to show how AI is becoming a new learning style and a genuine learning partner, not just another productivity tool. Anya connects the dots between AI, underserved communities, workforce shifts, and what it means to design learning experiences that people actually want to engage with.

Across the conversation, they unpack the role of prompt engineering as a core literacy, not just a niche technical skill, and examine how AI can level the playing field while also exposing new inequities. Anya shares how she’s using AI with interns, cities, and universities (including a forthcoming “AI Without Hype” course at Vassar College) to build trust infrastructure, redesign workflows, and bring more people into complex conversations about energy, affordability, and technology. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success and wrestling with how AI changes your strategy, your stakeholders, and your learners, this episode will challenge how you think about outcomes, belief systems, and what “meeting learners where they are” really means in 2026.

Key Topics:

  • The “belief gap” vs. skills gap
    • Why resistance to AI is often about belief systems, not capability.
    • How this parallels learner motivation and adoption challenges in CE/CS.
  • AI as a new learning style and learning partner
    • Treating AI like a sharp intern or co-worker rather than a magic answer machine.
    • Designing learning journeys that assume AI is in the loop.
  • Prompt engineering as a core literacy
    • Why prompt engineering should be taught like a fundamental communication skill.
    • How better questions drive better learning outcomes and better customer outcomes.
  • Non-linear, outcome-focused learning journeys
    • Moving beyond “I took a course” to “we changed a workflow and a behavior.”
    • Aligning CE programs with measurable participation and impact, not just completions.
  • Cross-pollination beyond SaaS/B2B silos
    • Lessons from civic tech, energy, and community engagement that apply directly to CE/CS.
    • How to bring community-style thinking into customer communities and academies.
  • Underserved learners and access to AI
    • What “underserved” means when AI accelerates knowledge but not everyone can use it well.
    • How CE can help customers navigate fear, overload, and trust issues with AI.
  • Trust infrastructure and stakeholder mapping
    • Building trust frameworks inside organizations and with customer stakeholders.
    • Rethinking stakeholder mapping now that decision-making paths and gatekeepers are changing.
  • Team dynamics, titles, and shared ownership of knowledge
    • Shifting from heavy titles to everyone as a “lead” owning a slice of the mission.
    • How this mirrors modern CE/CS teams that must be flexible, cross-functional, and AI-augmented.
  • Practical AI use cases in learning and community engagement
    • Using AI to co-create plans (e.g., interns drafting a 3‑month strategy) then iterating as a team.
    • Designing pilots and learning experiences that feel like meaningful participation, not checkbox training.

CELab – Ep 183 – Your Product Isn’t Too Complex for AI: Georg Gottschalk on ERP, Partners, and Learning at Scale

In this episode of the Customer Education Lab, Georg Gottschalk, VP of Global Education at Acumatica, to unpack what it really takes to build a skill infrastructure around a highly complex ERP platform. Georg traces his journey from early work with SAP and manufacturing optimization, through leadership roles at IBM, Salesforce, and MuleSoft, to his current mandate: Enabling a fast-growing, partner-led ecosystem in the small and mid-sized business ERP space. Georg shares why ERP is one of the ultimate “stress tests” for Customer Education and why the old excuse of “our product is too complex for AI” no longer holds up.

The conversation dives deep into AI-assisted learning, micro-vertical partner strategies, and what it means to certify companies instead of just individuals. Georg explains how Acumatica leverages tools like LearnExperts’ LEAi to transform rich but dense documentation into fun, engaging, and increasingly personalized education at scale—without tripling headcount. You’ll hear how his team thinks about partner enablement, customer onboarding that massively exceeded adoption targets, weaving education into the product workflow, and even “teaching machines” by producing content optimized for LLMs. If you work in Customer Education or Customer Success and are wrestling with complexity, scale, or AI, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Here are some of the key insights from this episode!

  • AI works for complex products too — the “too technical for AI” excuse no longer holds; AI acts as a force multiplier, handling grunt work (first-pass quizzes, structuring, transformations) so SMEs can focus on quality.
  • Skill infrastructure at ecosystem scale — enabling customers, partners, consultants, and developers across a complex ERP, with tools like Leah powering engaging, personalized education.
  • Certifying companies, not just individuals — partner-level certification builds trust and signals capability, supporting a partner-led growth and micro-vertical strategy.
  • Closing the value gap — bridging what the platform can do and what users actually achieve through in-workflow, contextual guidance rather than course-based learning alone.
  • Hyper-personalization with telemetry — using product usage data to spot skill gaps and deliver “what users need tomorrow, not today.”
  • Teaching machines and fostering experimentation — writing content readable by LLMs and skill files for AI agents, while leaders create psychological safety for teams to experiment, keeping humans in the loop.

Stop Hiring SMEs as Trainers: How Optro Scales Live Training That Actually Protects Revenue

In this episode of CELab, Dave Derington sits down with Tim Devine, who built Optro’s (formerly AuditBoard) live training program from a solo effort in 2021 into a three-person team running roughly 250 custom training engagements a year. Tim’s thesis is deceptively simple and a little provocative: you don’t need to hire subject-matter experts to deliver expert training. You need people who are experts in the product and the path — and the discipline to stay there.

We all know the “one legendary expert who doesn’t scale” problem, right? Tim approach is to hire trainers with no auditing background, coach them to “learn the language and trust the audience to fill the gaps,” and keep a customer subject-matter expert on deck to field methodology questions. Guardrails — a prescriptive course catalog, recommended agendas, and tightly structured virtual sessions — aren’t limitations; they’re what make scale possible.

The conversation digs into Optro’s “do-it-with-me” methodology, where a temporary sandbox is mirrored from the customer’s own UAT data so learners click along live instead of watching a demo — a direct answer to the live-attendance problem. Tim also opens up the tech stack: Amplitude to correlate learning objectives with product outcomes, Gainsight health scores, and Skilljar as the LMS — plus a 13% renewal-rate lift that reframes training as revenue protection rather than a cost center.

On AI, Tim shares two practical wins: auto-scoping tailored learning paths from sales-and-implementation handoff data, and using Zoom’s auto-chapters to make session recordings instantly navigable. Honest, tactical, and full of things you can steal on Monday.

CELab – Ep 181 – Kelly Mullaney – From “Team of One” to 10x Impact: How AI Is Rewiring Customer Education

In this episode of the Customer Education Lab, Adam Avramescu sits down with Kelly Mullaney, Head of AI Guild at Juniper Square, to unpack how AI is actually changing Customer Education. Kelly traces his journey from tax tech writer at Microsoft, to leading Customer Education at Envestnet, to building AI Guild—an internal enablement function focused on helping teams 10x their productivity with AI. Along the way, he shares concrete builds: an AI‑driven help center that watches code commits and auto‑drafts release notes and docs, a 37‑agent competitive intelligence system feeding Slack, and experiments in “vibe‑coded” e‑learning that challenge what LMSs and SCORM should look like in an AI‑first world.

Adam and Kelly go deep on the questions every Customer Education and Customer Success leader is wrestling with: Will AI kill our jobs, or amplify our impact? When does it make sense to build with AI versus buy another SaaS tool? How can small, scrappy teams of one keep up when engineering output increases 10x? You’ll hear a practical breakdown of the Anthropic stack (Claude Chat, Code Desktop, Cowork, Design, Managed Agents), a simple “80% AI / 20% human‑in‑the‑loop” mental model, and a candid look at the future of help centers, LMSs, and documentation. If you’re trying to move past the hype and see what AI‑enabled customer education really looks like, this episode is for you.

We talk about:

  • AI as the new “electricity”: why simply bolting AI onto old workflows fails—and what it means to rewire your education stack.
  • Kelly’s path: tech writer → running Customer Education at a $5B company → leading AI Guild at Juniper Square.
  • Human‑in‑the‑loop: using AI to get to 80% done and relying on experts for the final 20% quality bar.
  • AI‑driven help centers: monitoring Git repos for meaningful commits, pulling Jira context, applying style guides, and auto‑drafting release notes and help docs.
  • Fixed docs vs. AI assistants: why Kelly layers AI chat on top of a traditional help center instead of replacing it outright.
  • Discovering content gaps: using AI search and chat logs to identify missing documentation and new questions customers are asking.
  • Build vs. buy math: when building 80% of a SaaS tool in a weekend (with Claude + Supabase + agents) beats paying $30–60K per year.
  • Agentic competitive intel: 37 Claude agents monitor competitors, post daily briefs to Slack, and learn from a feedback loop.
  • Rethinking LMS and SCORM: legacy tools’ reporting limitations vs. what AI‑enabled tracking and analysis can unlock.
  • Demystifying Anthropic’s stack: how Claude Chat, Code, Cowork, Design, MCPs/connectors, and Managed Agents fit together.
  • Tool choice vs. governance: innovating even when your company only “allows” one AI vendor like Copilot.
  • Why CE leaders are primed for AI: curiosity, user empathy, and great questions matter more than coding backgrounds.
  • Getting started advice: don’t just “insert AI into the SDLC”—reimagine your education model for a 10x‑faster product team.

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