Adam Avramescu 03:11
Welcome to C lab the customer education lab where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stopped growth dead in its tracks. I’m Adam ever rescue and
Dave Derington 03:27
I’m Dave Derington And guess what? Guess what? What? Can you believe it? It’s episode 100
Adam Avramescu 03:35
Oh my God somehow in probably we have made it to 100 episodes of this little podcast
Dave Derington 03:43
episode in okay, we were just talking about this and pre pre gaming the show what episode was it? That’s the milestone audience we need to do a price for this maybe she would have price I don’t know what to do as a price. What was the number of episode that you have to reach to actually be a consistently produced episode? And who gave us that number?
Adam Avramescu 04:10
Wait, what do you mean Oh, so you’re talking with somebody came on our show pretty early on and told us that he says number of you. If you got to this number of episodes then you were likely to endure as a podcast and keep going because most podcasts peter out at this average number. Yeah. Okay, do you want me to guess because I know the answer. Okay, I’m gonna guess correctly because I remember that.
Dave Derington 04:36
Just tell the audience what it is.
Adam Avramescu 04:38
Okay, that was that was Bill Rashard who came on our episode 12. And we made a really big deal about this at the time, because I couldn’t remember whether it was 11 or 13. But I do believe it was 12. Can we prove that came on? Yeah, he came on and he said, if you make it to Episode 12, then you’re likely to have a long enduring podcast and that’s why we saved him. him for episode 12. At the time, he was one of our first guests on the show.
Dave Derington 05:04
Yeah. bantering, before that we had just really kind of done a series or a string of episodes, it was just talking about what we were wondering about.
Adam Avramescu 05:14
Yeah, it will bantering was a, I think a strong term for what we did actually went back and listen to some of those first episodes. And it’s really interesting, the format’s completely different. We’re very scripted compared to how we are now, we didn’t have our groove yet. We had a weird mailbag section at the end, everything was very structured into having a hypothesis and a call to action. So I think we’ve Yeah, we played with format a lot more since then.
Dave Derington 05:42
Well, okay. Let’s wax nostalgic then. So
Adam Avramescu 05:47
here we are on wax off.
Dave Derington 05:50
Recording or recording, recording this episode. You know, going back to the actual dates, we recorded this show, August 2018, four and a half years since this time, right. And
Adam Avramescu 06:05
when we say actually, on the first episode, what the date is, I was I was listening to it.
Dave Derington 06:09
Yeah, we used to do that and think we stopped at some point. But
Adam Avramescu 06:13
once we realized that they weren’t going to air anywhere near when we recorded them.
Dave Derington 06:17
Yeah, we gave herself that space. But how much? Like what Hall has changed out? This is everything, everything about our lives, even where we’re living changed, fundamentally. The world changed literally.
Adam Avramescu 06:33
Yeah, I mean, we look we went through a global pandemic, we went through a an economic downturn. Yeah. Yeah. What else do we get hit? Personally, personally, I moved to Amsterdam. I guess that’s Is there a Third World 1/3? World One, what Black Lives Matter? I mean, there’s a lot. There’s
Dave Derington 06:48
a lot that happened in the oh my gosh, and in living in Seattle, you know, there was chat or chop, which there’s all kinds of crazy, but many things have changed for us too. And far as not just where we’re living or what we did, but the podcast itself. And I think you talked about it just a little bit ago, you we had a mere weird mailbag session. We didn’t get our vibe together yet.
Adam Avramescu 07:15
We’d like we’d fake fake mailbag. People was like, really fun tequila. Hey, she’s real. So hey, shout out to Julie from Temecula. You got us where we are today. Yeah, no shows different. Right. We started having guests on the show starting I think with Bill, I think he was our first one. We introduced sponsors. We started having guests on the show. Yeah, there’s there’s a lot. There’s a lot that we did. But if you’ve been listening faithfully to the past several episodes, you’ll also see that for both of us, like de both you and I, we’ve had our evolution across multiple customer education leadership roles.
Dave Derington 07:53
Yeah. That’s been. And I think I didn’t we didn’t really script this in. But one of the things that this evokes is a sense of what we don’t scratch the show. Now we don’t very lightly. I remember talking to several of our peers who all said, and I think it was our friend Melissa Van Pelt. That said, you know, I don’t want people It wasn’t just her. But she said it in a conversation I had, I don’t want people to have to go through some of the things that we did to. And yeah, where we’re where we’re at today. It’s like, alright, gosh, look at all the places we went. We were going to talk about this today, right? where we’ve been, where we’re going within minutes in which we’re going, where we’ve been, what we’ve made mistakes, and what what were our favorite episodes. We’ve got a lot to talk about in this show. And I know, I’ll let you go with the next section here, because this is exciting.
Adam Avramescu 08:55
Yeah, I’m gonna do today, I’m gonna do the frame up. So yeah, I think we today we are looking back at our previous roles and customer education that we had over the course of meeting each other and doing this show. And we’re not doing that to be self indulgent, we’re actually doing that for a very specific purpose. We’re doing that to share some of the key mistakes that we made in each of these roles and what we learned from them because I think, like sometimes it’s really easy to talk about these journeys in a positive light and all the accomplishments we had or, or, you know, everything that we’re thankful for, because it’s true. I’m personally grateful for all the opportunities that I’ve had along the way from from then to now. It’s been a hell of a 4.5 years. Yeah, but yeah, you’re right on this show. We tried to focus on real world lessons for customer education leaders, whether it’s people who are currently out there doing the work and need to build a community that’s that’s our idea of finding the others, or whether it’s people who want to be COMM customer education leaders one day, a lot of you listen to our show, it’s it’s hard to know what the what the reality of that looks like. So I think if we look back on our journeys and highlight some of the mistakes that we’ve made along the way, and what we learned from them, it’s going to be helpful for all of our listeners to know hey, you’re not alone.
Dave Derington 10:21
Yeah, and you’re not I really hope that if you have a friend that’s in this space, you have a peer that struggling the one of the most interesting things that I’ve learned in talking to a whole lot of people, particularly now service rocket, we’re talking to many, many people. We’re all experiencing the same thing. You know, we’re now we’re working virtually more than ever. You can’t go to the conferences like you used to that’s coming back. Okay, let’s not get off track. You want to talk about No, let’s the major bonus there is
Adam Avramescu 10:51
there’s yeah, there’s there’s a little bonus here.
Dave Derington 10:55
So we big this is fun. It’s a big, but
Adam Avramescu 10:58
you’re right. It’s it’s a big, big bonus, we asked some of our friends of the show, aka also our friends, and many of whom have appeared on past episodes of this show, which is really cool to call in, so to speak, and share their own hard won lessons. So we asked them this was the prompt, we said, Please give advice to your past self on becoming a customer education leader. So we’re going to air those throughout the episode. And we’ll do live reactions because we have not listened to these yet.
Dave Derington 11:34
Yeah, this is the best. Cool,
Adam Avramescu 11:37
I’m gonna share that with you as well, like not our own not only our personal journey, which we’ll we’ll dive into in a second, but also some of our friends. So why don’t we actually kick off with one of those clips?
Dave Derington 11:49
All right, well, we what are we going to kick off with Adam? Who is it and where I’m from?
Adam Avramescu 11:53
Let’s start with Christie Hollingshead who is customer education, and engagement. She’s gonna say it in the clip at heap. And she was on our episode 70 about data doesn’t lie. And you and I had hours of fun debate about whether the title of that should be data. Don’t lie.
Dave Derington 12:15
Don’t lie. Alright, play it.
Adam Avramescu 12:17
Let’s roll the clip.
Christy Hollingshead 12:31
Hi, y’all. My name is Christy Hollingshead and I’m the Vice President of customer engagement and education at heap. And the advice that I would give to my past self about becoming a customer education leader is pretty simple. Honestly, it is to focus on the outcome of the work that myself and my team are providing, what impact are we having to the business? Early on in my career, the focus really was on output, how much content could we put out in a week, a month a year. And it was a never ending cycle of just tackling items on the backlog. And while everyone was really happy, and really supportive of the work that we were doing, I wasn’t really getting invited or recognized for any of that work beyond my initial team. And once I really slowed down to start thinking about, okay, how can I showcase the impact of the work that my team is doing, and really focus on driving key behaviors. I really feel like that was the turning point in my career where doors started to open seats at tables started to be offered. Because now I could talk with leaders about how education was going to improve their adoption, improve their user and account retention, drive more expansion dollars, reduced support tickets. And once we started talking in this way with people truly, like, they cared a lot more about the work that my team was doing. And what it also allowed us to do is not just tackle an endless list of requests, but it really gave us permission to focus on quality over quantity in our work, too. I think too often. What I see a lot of teams doing is just that focus on output and constant releases. And they don’t really ever spend time asking themselves, hey, which content is working? Not what content is getting the most registrations, not what content is getting the highest satisfaction scores. But what content is working in the sense that it is correlating to these business metrics that it’s driving the desired behaviors? And when we started doing that analysis, what we found is that 80% of our course catalog really wasn’t doing anything For the business, and ultimately, that means you’re not really supporting your customers or your learners either, right? If they aren’t able to take the information that you’re sharing with them and apply it in a valuable way, then they’re not getting value out of the product, which is really our job. So focus on the outcome, find ways to make yourself part of those larger business discussions. And I think that can be a great opportunity to grow your career in customer education and become a leader as well.
Adam Avramescu 15:37
Wow. Thank you, Christy, for sharing your your perspective there.
Dave Derington 15:45
That was great.
Adam Avramescu 15:48
That was great. That’s that’s gonna be hard to beat. Although I know that our other customer education leaders on the call on the Yeah, on the clips will also opera really good stuff.
Dave Derington 15:56
You know, I think we were talking about how we’re going to conduct this. And let’s go ahead and do this live. Let’s not respond too much to these. We want to do one quick takeaway. Each. I mean, just one quick takeaway between us, then we move on. Yeah, go for it. I really appreciate this perspective that Christie gives out. One of the things that really stands out is I think off the top of the three things she said, learning the language of the business so that you can, you know, eventually acquire a seat at the table by your, by your deeds, not your words, right. Those are my language, but learning how to talk with leadership’s and spread, show the outcome of what you’re doing. That’s really hard.
Adam Avramescu 16:45
It’s one of the key skills to master. And we’re all constantly working on it. Alright, so now, enough about Christie, let’s talk about us. Usually, it’s the other way, isn’t it? But yeah, we want to share our own lessons. And we’re going to be a little bit harder on ourselves, not just asking ourselves for lessons, but we’re going to really try as much as possible to talk about our mistakes and what we learned from them. So to cue this up. Dave, you and I met while we were in our respective roles at Optimizely and Gainsight. So I’m going to I’m going to try to describe your career briefly. And since then, and you can tell me what you would add. So okay, I met you while you were at Gainsight. And again, sight you were really going deep into both the world of customer education and customer success, right? Because that’s what Gainsight does customer success. Yeah, you had all of these innovative ideas about how to tie systems together and how to use product telemetry to be able to make data driven decisions about customer education. And then you moved to Zuko. And that’s when we started recording together. And Zuko was in the IPASS. World. And so that also helped add to your your story here, because iPass is all about being able to connect different systems to each other, to automate or to connect data. And then you got a job leading education at Outreach, I believe, after a Zuko got acquired, is that right? Yeah. LED right into. Yeah, so then then you went to outreach, and that was a famously catalogued in our episode starting over, which was episode 17, where we did the Bennett Fadi clip. And you led the education team there, before more recently, making the move to service rocket, which we again, talked about in the very memorable episode starting over all over again, where we were taking the walk around the Seattle locks. And Dave, this is funny, because I went back and I listened to some of the very early episodes, and even in episode three, which is the LMS conversation. Yeah, you are talking about service rocket quite a bit already at that point. Because you already knew them, you know, you’re already kind of in their, their world. But I thought it was so funny to listen to past Dave talking about a company where years later, he would then be working
Dave Derington 19:24
about that. We need to take that out and send it to rob Castaneda at service rocket. So we talk a lot about that where we don’t have a loan as much as we also have pre loan. People that were our customers who enjoyed working with the way we transact with people, which is the bill Bilka shard helping sales mentality and still pervades the culture. It’s really it’s really an excellent place to work. But yeah, that’s fun. Shall I take a stab at your career in my interpretation of the let’s do it? Let’s do it. Okay. So um, I can’t remember the exact moment prior to meeting you in person. When we were at the sedima event, separate conference, we met it that it said, Ma, that’s the computer education management Management Association.
Adam Avramescu 20:18
They say customer education. But yeah, yeah, was not that long
Dave Derington 20:21
ago that they changed. But at that point, I started to become aware of what you were doing at Optimizely. And I looked at the case studies and the things that you were producing with, wow, that is really cool. And at that same time, you know, here I was against site and I was seeking, well, I guess a lot of ways someone, or someone’s fine, I was looking to find the others, right.
Adam Avramescu 20:44
We all were at the time, we were and
Dave Derington 20:46
you had been doing these great things at Optimizely, which I would come to see and we will come to talk about together in conferences that, you know, in, in our podcast and discussions with other people. But what really blew my mind Adam, about that career path? Is that kinda like me, but in a different context. Here, you were constantly eating a schema, the Artifactory a love, I love that word. All the things that go into building a not like, what is that? Would you call it? Omniverse? Yeah, the Federation, meaning I can look one place and see everywhere else, I can go to my community, I can get in my knowledge base, I can go to the university or the academy where all of my content is. And Dan, that was cool. Because it was just really cool to see. That were you working with? With Daniel at the time?
Adam Avramescu 21:39
Yeah, so they look like who we’re gonna hear from later in this episode we’re gonna talk about So work with me. Yeah.
Dave Derington 21:44
Which I mean, it’s cool, because now you’re seeing these names of people that we are starting to see in this constellation of, you know, folks that we interact with all the time. So that was cool. And then you got an opportunity to move to the next our next place checker, which this was my, my interpretation of the checker a little different for you. And now you’re in a space, which was more compliant space. But, again, this is my language and understanding of what it is. But it was a really important product and really important platform to start to give the tools to people do background checks, screening, things like that in a fair way. Was that does that sound? Right?
Adam Avramescu 22:30
Yeah, it was it was a background check software, but also with a big mission component in helping people become fairer about the way that they evaluate background checks.
Dave Derington 22:38
I had to think that attracted you to that, that position, because that edge, right? Absolutely. Yeah. But that’s where you push the boundaries of it. Now you get into the space, you’re like, Oh, well, now I’m talking with the legal a lot. Like doing your, you’re doing all this, that you have to like a completely different world. It’s still SAS, but now it’s intersecting with this world. They invented before. And I don’t know how long we were there. I know, then you got an opportunity. And this was the one where you’re, you can’t say anything, I’m not even gonna talk about it. And then he landed at Slack. And I was like, Man, that’s cool. I mean, what an opportunity to do slack in the heyday where things were exploding. And yes, you absolutely needed customer education. It’s such a cool app. Still, I still use it all the time. You know what I mean, you had a great team. There. We met other folks in that in that role, who are now going out and onto their own and stick in a claim and overlook customer ed or enablement or partner enablement. Right. And then now, for Sanyo, and what what a big transition, that I like how you have articulated your career in a fashion where you’re going up the chain, you’re learning, you’re the intentionality behind it. You have a lot to say about the leadership and the nuances behind that. And particularly now, as you’re coming into the VP level, what does that world look like to all of us? How do you transact just like Christie had just said, right, it’s, you’re thinking about different things. Now we’re thinking about outcomes. Now we’re thinking about strategy. Now we’re wow, you know, what a cool story. I’m thankful to have had like a parallel to you too. I feel like we’re ladder stepping, sharing the experiences as we go.
Adam Avramescu 24:29
Yeah, absolutely. And I think yeah, interesting to see you know, we’ve documented this pretty extensively over the course of the past 100 episodes, making those moves. Sometimes having built up teams and then taking either kind of lateral steps or taking a step back to build something from scratch because both you and I are builders and then now our paths are are diverging a little bit with me having gone into like a broader VP role still in house and you haven’t gone to the vendor or consulting side. so to speak, because like service isn’t a vendor, but like the consulting side, building your own customer education services practice for other customer education teams, which is really cool perspective. So I’m glad that we’ve, we’ve really stayed together on on this whole journey. But an amazing people aren’t here to hear us wax wax nostalgic. That was all the table setting. So we can start talking about some of those juicy, juicy mistakes. That was the frame up. Yeah,
Dave Derington 25:30
now we’re going to be really vulnerable and transparent, right? And talk about the hard stuff, the things that didn’t go, right.
Adam Avramescu 25:37
Yeah, yeah. So let’s start with Optimizely. I’ll go first, and then we can go, then we can go to Gainsight. So there were a few moments that I remember very distinctly, at Optimizely, some very discreet mistakes. But then I can talk a little bit more existentially as well about. Maybe the biggest mistake that I made at Optimizely are some things that I you know, even today, I look back and I go like was that a mistake? So one that I remember really clearly, and I don’t remember if I’ve talked about this on the show before was an early lesson in trying to get Smee buy in for for our program. So if I recall correctly, we were like we started this program by building out our Help Center or a knowledge base. And then we were building a prototype of an academy. And during that time, especially when we were working on the knowledge base, we were looking at the analytics, and we were starting to get a really good idea of what needed to be fixed or what needed to be scrapped entirely. And we had a pretty big list of things that we needed to work on. And a lot of them were not things that we have the two customer education managers at the time, me and Wes, were, were technical enough ourselves to really be able to address. And so we work together. And we were talking with the leaders of one of our peer teams, who I believe are the solutions. Architects are the technical architects, as well as the support team, to say, hey, you know, what, we need people’s time and attention to actually be able to update this content. And we had thought that we got their buy in, we had a discussion with them, where it was like, Okay, well, someone will be able to rotate in and spend 50% of their time during the week, actually helping us with education, stuff. And that felt like a huge victory. And it was like, okay, great, now we’ve got this nice support we need. And then we announce, we announced this to the team that is going to be helping us with our speed work, and it lands like a wet fart. Because, of course, even though we’d had this discussion as managers, we hadn’t gotten true commitment for people to spend their time doing this. And what we didn’t realize because we hadn’t gone deeply enough with our species to understand what this would look and feel like is there, there wasn’t really no such thing as 50% of their time. It just meant that someone was going to get an extra job on top of their normal job. Yeah. So that was a big moment for me and realizing that you can’t, you can’t kind of just so to speak, manage things, through process or through high level agreements, you have to understand what the reality is like for your collaborators, and that customer education is not going to be the biggest part of their day.
Dave Derington 28:48
Wow, good stuff. Yeah, that’s a that’s a hard lesson too. That’s me one.
Adam Avramescu 28:54
That’s that. And that was an early one. Another early one that I remember is, so I had been a manager before Optimizely. But when I when I went to Optimizely, I joined as an individual contributor, like I mentioned, there were two customer education managers, we were both ICs. And I then got promoted to be the team lead. And that was the first time that I was interviewing at at Optimizely. I think maybe I was even in a manager role by this point. And I was interviewing someone for I don’t remember what role this was. But you know, it was like a pretty experienced candidates. And he ended up dropping out of the process. And I was shocked because like, I like this guy. I thought he was it was really cool. And so I talked to the recruiter and was like, Hey, what happened? And the feedback that I got was, Well, hey, you know, this candidate didn’t really feel very respected by the way that you were interviewing. Because you were asking the questions very robotically, you felt like you were reading off a script Maybe you weren’t like responding very well to the answers. And that’s something that I’ve taken to heart ever since not just in improving my, my interview technique, which now anyone who’s ever interviewed with me will know that I’m pretty conversational during interviews, I don’t think I’m perfect at it. But I, like you can’t say I don’t have a different style. But also my approach in general to hiring and realizing that, you know, if you’re asking someone to come join your team, that it’s not just this transactional thing where you ask questions, and they answer it, and you analyze it, but you’re really, you’re really attracting a talented person to be on your team and make a multi year commitment to being in this together. So I’ve come to view team building is much more relationship oriented than, you know, purely checking off boxes on like, obviously, the candidate has to be qualified, right? That’s yeah, that’s that’s the table stakes. But interviewing and in general, just the whole talent acquisition process is so much more nuanced than I thought it was at the time. Interesting. It’s yeah,
Dave Derington 31:06
interviewing is a talent. And it’s really hard, particularly when you’re in a smaller very, very heavily move fast moving startup, where, gosh, to slow down, sometimes, it’s a lot and to interview somebody, if you’re like, Oh, my God, I have all these 10 things, do I need an interview? And then sometimes it does come off as robotic until you embrace that. This person on my team, I really need to give him that time. Give them that time. You know what I mean?
Adam Avramescu 31:35
Absolutely. And then the last one that I would bring up, and I feel the most vulnerable talking about this one, because I don’t think I’ve fully processed it myself. So this is this is a question mark. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about in my current position, if I hired the person that I was kind of towards the end of my time at Optimizely, like, let’s say, if I hired 2017, Adam, what would I think of him today. And at that time, we’d really built up a lot of Omniverse, we had, you know, a thriving Academy and help center and community and we were starting to run certification programs that there was a lot of program growth. And we could also show a lot of really interesting attribution numbers for our program. And I was super proud of those. And in fact, I would go to his, you know, senior leadership meetings and talk about these and give updates and people UHD and odd. But I didn’t feel like I was having a ton of success, really getting traction to grow the program in the way that I wanted to, and that I knew could deliver value. Even getting a full time community person was a gigantic struggle. So, you know, we got kind of the license to homebrew our own academy and do a big systems project, which was a really interesting project. But we didn’t, we weren’t able to grow our headcount. And I looked back. And I wonder why that was. And I think that, even though at the time, I was sort of speaking the language of the business, and I’m thinking here about Christy’s advice to us. Yeah. I wasn’t necessarily pairing that as well with really showing people how an investment in our programs could solve the key business challenges. Right, like I was talking about attribution between educated customers and support tickets. I was talking about the attribution between educated customers and product adoption. And these were really interesting, meaningful correlations that helped sell the program as a whole. But it wasn’t necessarily saying, hey, you know what, we can actually solve this other problem that’s going on in the business to do that, here’s what we need to do it. And that includes headcount. So I think I, I could have been more assertive at the time about really connecting not just what we were doing to what the business cared about, but what we could be doing, to really growing the business in a future facing manner. Yeah. And so then, I felt like I was stagnating. And that’s one of the reasons why I left and wanted to get a fresh start at a checker. Right. I just didn’t, I didn’t feel like we were we were growing or that there were a lot of new challenges. But in retrospect, I probably could have done more to help generate some of those new challenges for us.
Dave Derington 34:36
alike, I like your reflections upon that. I’m not going to comment too much because we got a lot to read through. But maybe some of the things I’m going to say coming up, are, this is a good this is a good validation exercise, and hopefully all of you my breaking the fourth wall right now. You’re doing the same thing that we are. So if I were to go into Let me respond with Gainsight. And what kind of Move it along a little bit. And but I guess maybe I’ll pick one or two things that are key for me out of that experience. But I want to say something really positive about Gainsight. That I’ve watched it evolve over the years, you know, I left in 2018, you know, 2017 2018 Ram when we met, before we met before, ya know, when we met. And it was such an amazing experience because of what I was learning. Because he was at ground zero of the atom bomb of customer success. And it was all just mushrooming up around me. And I was learning about seeing all like the it’s almost the celebrity status before it was a celebrity thing. And pulse was a big thing with the small events.
Adam Avramescu 35:45
Yeah, I remember going to one of the early pulses in Oakland, and it was still pretty modest sized event. Yeah, you weren’t you were there for this huge moment of category creation for customer success.
Dave Derington 35:56
Yeah. And we’ve seen all those people, you know, go into other roles and their leaders and those respects and, okay, but putting putting that aside, and that was important. So here’s this thing called Customer Success, and it pulled me in, right, and I was just completely in the thrall of this category creation. It was exciting, fun. And there was there was so much to learn. But let’s talk about the mistakes I think I made at that time that that younger me, here I was I was coming out of a management consulting role, right I was that traveling person that you’d send to, to solve the big problems that big
Adam Avramescu 36:34
corporations, you were like, up in the air, George Clooney,
Dave Derington 36:38
really close sadly. And it was painful job to do. But I learned a lot of it. What I had brought into this role was I there was a little bit of arrogance there to be honest, because I’m like, Oh, I know these processes and these methods and all that. And at the same time, I had been an a university professor, an adjunct professor. And so I had all that clout, right? years of teaching at a university level really help you. And now I come into this environment. I’m like, Oh, my God. Okay. There’s so much to do. The, there is like a couple or three things, really two points that I would say I, I struggled around. One of them was that, that very first early sense of certification. Right, you talked about this a little bit. But I got really into that. And this is before I met you, or Debbie, or anybody and I was trying to pilot it out and say what’s the certification thing. And I was getting pulled along by leadership. So we’ve got to certify people, we got to do all these things. And I got sucked into that rabbit hole. It was really good thing to learn early on, in retrospect, this was my weaker of the two lessons learned or mistakes. I went I double down, I went all in and I I came up with a like a homebrew solution. And we piloted it out. And I should have at that point said before I left the company, because I left the company at the end of the commencement of a pilot at some data. But I wasn’t communicating as well that this program was kind of a failure. It worked well enough to prove yes, you could certify somebody. But at that point in, if I were to talk to my earlier self, I would have said you’re gonna waste a lot of time and resources on trying to build a certification program, it will look great, it will look great on paper, it will help some people, but the cohort of people you’re going to train are going to be very small. And it’s not. It’s worth doing in a different context, which is I would have said do a badge, do a credential do a whatever. But that was one of the lessons learned that I’ve had frustration, it was hard to learn a lot.
Adam Avramescu 38:54
Yeah, those are those are big ones. Dave.
Dave Derington 38:57
There’s one more this is the this is a really big one that I learned is, and this was more personal. And this is something that I actually had a conversation with, just with somebody recently about, it’s that, for me, I was looking for the promotional pathway to where and why is because I truly did feel after a couple or three years. I was right at that three year threshold, where like you were talking about, I was really proud of this community we felt and I was really proud of the university and Academy put together. And, you know, my story against site was I actually leveraged gain sites, internal dashboards, to be able to say it munge
Adam Avramescu 39:43
I think that we’ve gotten all of your catchphrases in Yes, okay. Ding ding. If anybody’s here anyone following along on our CNC lab, Brandon
Dave Derington 39:53
but what now that I’m opening up I feel you feel better sharing about this the this frustration of Gosh, I’ve done so many things. Send it don’t feel like I’m getting seen or heard. And that so it kind of clouded my judgment appointed and encouraged me to want to leave. Because I didn’t feel like leadership in this talk, to speak to not adapting with the business or look, because he said, not speaking the language of the business. I was doing all the right things. But I’m hitting a wall. And that wall is the wall of, well, I need to talk to Nick and leadership team and expose what’s going on here in it and be able to connect it more and the connection was not happening. Was that on me? Maybe? Maybe not, not completely. But that that growing frustration of that I deserve this. And I should be this when I wish I maybe I maybe would have made the same mistake, or made the same decision. I’m not going to call that a mistake to leave, because I intentionally left to go to different places to learn this craft and to evolve. But at the same time, I’m like, well, what could it have been like if I had stuck around or I’d done something a little different, or I knew something a little bit more about leaning leading upwards, you know?
Adam Avramescu 41:09
Yeah, some consistent themes here and our story so far. But before we move on to the next stage in our careers, let’s hear from a couple of our customer education leader friends. So next, we will hear we talked about a moment ago because he was on the team at Optimizely. But let’s hear from now noted, customer education book author and C suite education leader, Daniel quick.
Daniel Quick 41:58
Hi, I’m Daniel Quick. I’m co author of the customer education playbook. And here’s the advice I’d give my past self about becoming a customer education leader. First, I’d tell myself to focus on what matters to the business. When I first got started, I found myself drawn to ideas that felt fun or cool or personally rewarding. For example, in my first customer education role, I wanted to find ways to apply my game design skills, since that was an area I felt passionate about. So I came up with a bunch of ideas for learning games and simulations. But I never stopped to ask is this idea something that will actually move the needle on a goal my business currently cares about. And that’s such an important question to resolve. Because to become a leader in your company, you have to be seen as someone who is focused on what matters to the business, whether that’s increasing brand recognition, driving product adoption, or identifying reference customers, whatever it is, you got to make your work about that. The second piece of advice I give to my past self is this. Don’t hold on so tightly to your learning science background, I’d sometimes get so caught up in the science of learning, in applying the research in ensuring sound psychometrics for assessments, for example, that I’d overlook the core business need to ship products, or ignore that customers are busy people and don’t necessarily have the time or interest to take an hour line exam. So finding a balance between your learning science hat and your business acumen hat is is key. And sometimes that requires you to make trade offs. Lastly, I would tell myself to get outside my comfort zone and network more. I’m an introvert and I usually feel anxious at social events. And earlier in my career, I think this inhibited me from connecting with others in my network who could support me in developing my career. But part of leadership is confronting your fears and taking risks. And I discovered that the more I practice networking and public speaking, the easier became so be patient because it’s a skill you can develop like any other. So that’s the advice I’d give my past self. Thanks for letting me share it.
Adam Avramescu 44:27
Wow, next one from Daniel on echo is actually in some ways, not just what Christie said earlier, but some of the things that in fact, you and I have been sharing. Yeah. In our in our past couple of lessons learned. Yeah, Daniel quick. In fact, if you want to hear a little bit of his evolution, he was on Episode 37, which was on delightful learning and gamification. And then he rejoined us on I don’t have the episode number but later to talk about the book he co authored with Barry Kelly, on the customer education playbook. And I think You could probably hear the difference in his approach between even those two episodes.
Dave Derington 45:06
Yeah, it’s a lot of learning going on there. It’s It’s exceptional to be able to share that with a group of people.
Adam Avramescu 45:14
So why don’t we have one more example because we share two of ours. We did We did Optimizely and Gainsight. Now we can have to two of our leaders. So we’ll have Alessandra Marinetti. Next. And Alessandra joined us for episode 80 on tribal leadership. I’m sure she will be on the show again sometime soon, because we have a lot of really good conversations about customer education leadership. But let’s hear what she has to say. All right.
Alessandra Marinetti 45:53
So advice to my past self on becoming a customer education leader, there’s so much I would tell her probably the first one, the first advice that I would give myself is to be clear with the organization that I’m part of as to why they want to build a customer education program. What is the be very clear about the goals that they have in mind? What is the impact that they would envision for customer education to have on the business, they may actually not know exactly what the what the goals are. And then I would tell myself to figure it out myself by listening to the sales organization, customer success, and really get curious about what their metrics are and what they’re trying to accomplish. And clearly aligned with their objectives. I think especially at the beginning of a customer education program, it is so important to show value and really be perceived as value adding. That’s why I think that aligning with business goals and business metrics is absolutely crucial. And along with that, clarify what can be measured, and what you will measure as a customer education leader. And what you cannot measure, there are times in which you may not have the tools to measure all the the things that you’re doing like ideally, you would like to measure adoption, maybe you don’t have the tools to measure adoption. So start with measuring attendance or consumption of content, or start measuring customer satisfaction, there are a few things that are fairly easy to measure. Also, I would say to her to set expectations as to what is meaningful to measure for education, for example, it may not really make a lot of sense to measure the direct impact that education has on sales, but rather measuring the impact that it has on adoption. So just have conversations with the leaders in your organization really get clear on that and really be clear as to what is what are the shared objectives that you would like to achieve. Another thing that I would tell myself is to really get curious about other disciplines. I come from a learning and development background and education background, and early on was really, really focused on the construction of robust learning experiences to ensure that customers can make the most out of the tool. And that’s, of course, massively important. But I would also recommend early on to get curious about what marketing does and what customer success managers do, what sales leaders do, what sales, AES and SDRs do. Because there’s a lot that I could have learned very early on from those disciplines and from those teams, and really take a page out of their books, they know how to marketing, for example, knows how to promote programs, right. And it’s crucially important to promote education. So I think I could have learned a lot more and faster had I gotten very, very cute curious early on. So super valuable to learn from from others. And maybe the last thing that I would say that connects with this last point is to look at who you bring into your organization, I would tell myself to be very open to various levels of competencies and there’s types of comp But then sees beyond people who bring the instructional design learning and development, training, delivery expertise. Those are obviously really important. And depending on who and what you need to do, you may want to bring somebody who has already, let’s say, a strong certification expertise or instructional design expertise. But I’ve also found over the years that hiring for potential and bringing in people who may have started in customer support or customer success management or marketing or, or nonprofit, you know, there, there are lots of competencies that folks from other disciplines and from other domains bring to the table that really enrich and diversify the pool of people working on your team. So these are some of the things that come to mind that that will tell myself today.
Adam Avramescu 51:01
Oh, thanks, Alessandra. And, by the way, I don’t think I mentioned this Alessandra now leads customer education at Asana. Although she has been on her own journey, like she could be our third parallel person because yeah, she was at LinkedIn when we first met her and then I feel like I’m missing something because she was an app direct. But I think there’s another one in there Alessandra. Sorry, I’m forgetting where you worked. But now is that Asana. And I promised that we didn’t listen to these in advance. I didn’t realize it’d be such a tie between the two of these. But the one thing that I would pull out of both of these is this emphasis on being business acumen focused on understanding what other parts of the business are trying to do, and not over indexing on your area of expertise, which is going to be learning or instructional design, you don’t get points for being the best at learning, you get points for working to further broader company goals by partnering with other teams who are also doing that.
Dave Derington 52:06
Yeah, and I also like we’re backing up a little bit to what Daniel said but now we’re now we’re seeing the same thing with Alessandra that you like you said business but also that reluctance that concern you know, learning other things, learning going outside your box, right? You’re not just a learning and development person. You also need to learn marketing and this is this is great stuff.
Adam Avramescu 52:31
Box. That’s the one I was forgetting she was a box. How
Dave Derington 52:34
can we forget box MACOM just because I
Adam Avramescu 52:37
didn’t prepare that before we don’t skip this show. Alright, so now let’s let’s go back to talking about our experiences. So let’s reverse the order. Dave. You want to go first this time and talk about lessons learned that?
Dave Derington 52:52
Yes, Azuqua. Azuqua. Is that Well, it’s Azure and aqua where the ocean meets the sky. Okay. That was a story.
Adam Avramescu 53:07
I was thinking about that. Dave the other day. I think he will be mentally preparing for this episode.
Jesse Evans 00:01
Hey, everybody, my name is Jesse Evans and I have been in this crazy business for about a decade now, spending most of that time at Box and at Meta, and if I were gonna go back in time and give past me some advice, a, I would have a lot of advice to give and be the number one piece of advice that I would give is that data is not optional. And I’m not talking about the data that shows your enrollment numbers or your satisfaction rates with your courses. I mean, obviously, those are important numbers for us. I’m talking about data that actually lines up to business objectives. And so don’t treat the data connection between your academy and your your database, like your hive, for example, as optional, or as the next step or thing for future you to worry about. Don’t treat a connection with Salesforce as something that will happen one day, when you are able to get around to it, how it needs to be. Now, when you’re setting that that Academy up, you get the rest of the data infrastructure going as well. That’s what’s gonna allow you ultimately to show that you’ve got some impact. And if you were able to try to get some kind of like in app messaging tool, like Pendo. Or if you happen to have some in app messaging tools that have been built natively for your product, leverage those, that’s a great way for you to promote your stuff, and then actually look at the impact that has had on those users down the line. If you’re not able to get any of these things, okay, second best option. Go download a list of your learners figure out which companies are a part of and then go back and figure out what percentage of your ARR is being touched by your program. It can be a little bit of a pain, this could be a lot of work, but at the end of the day is going to mean a lot more when you say things like our program has touched 85% of our ARR than if you say we’ve trained X number of people this year. All right. Good luck.