Adam Avramescu 00:10
Welcome back to CELab, the customer education lab where we do all the things. If you are just picking up here on Episode One on one, then you probably want to go back and listen to episode 101st. Because this is a continuation of that discussion. If you want to start here, I’m not judging you. You could do what you want, and you’re a free person. But this is going to make a lot more sense if you listen to the previous episode first. So, Dave, we’re in the middle of talking about some of our biggest customer education mistakes and what we’ve learned from them. So what do you think? Should we dive back in?
Dave Derington 00:47
Yeah, let’s go ahead and dive back in and get into these get into being vulnerable a little bit.
Adam Avramescu 00:53
All right, I’ve got my vulnerability shoes on.
Dave Derington 00:56
You have shoes for that?
Adam Avramescu 00:58
Who doesn’t?
Adam Avramescu 01:23
All right. 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? Well?
Dave Derington 01:33
Yes. As Zuko.
Adam Avramescu 01:35
Zuko,
Dave Derington 01:38
is that well, it’s as you’re an aqua where the ocean meets the sky. Okay. That was a story.
Adam Avramescu 01:48
I was thinking about that. Dave. The other day, I think he’ll be mentally preparing for this episode. And that was one of the weird little nuggets that came to mind is Azur and aqua?
Dave Derington 01:57
Yeah, well, it’s, if I, if I can show a picture, maybe we’ll put this as one of our episode pictures. But I had just great luck, after moving to Seattle, where I had these jobs that were literally on the bay, Elliot bay here in Seattle. And you could see that in the summertime, it was the best. The rest of the time. It’s dismal. You know, you can believe it. But when you’re looking out, everything’s green. But then there’s the ocean. And then there’s a bright blue sky. And all you want to do is just sit there and look out the building. Every day. I had that at outreach as well. So let’s talk about it was Zuko a little bit. And my God, this was an interesting lesson learned. It was a great experience, because, you know, I lean techy, having been a DBA. And in a scientist, this was one of those weird edge cases, Adam where I came in, after being a Gainsight using this as a technology to solve some problems we were having with digitalization connecting things, actioning on things, automation, right. And coming from Gainsight, the one I would say one of the big claims to fame that our team did was we architected this instant, really instant sandbox environment. So you can deploy a version of Gainsight with all everything in it with all the test examples. And you could do the work on yourself. By yourself. It was amazing. But I used a Zuko to do some of that. So became kind of an expert at it. And I got to know their team and all of a sudden landed here at a Zuko was given a great opportunity. But you know what? The hard part about it was that I was a single person, Joe. It was just me, that was an independent contributor with a nice director title.
Adam Avramescu 03:47
The cloud, the classic ICE Director.
Dave Derington 03:49
Yeah. And, but it was cool, because I did have that insight into leadership, and did kind of have a seat at the table. And in fact, I was in board meetings, which was amazing. This is really small at the time and to get exposed to what a board is thinking and meet the VCs and other investors. Man lessons learned there, I learned a lot about how to talk with an executive and our board member are those the kinds of people that were out there, that was great. Um, but I think because in light of being an attack person, one, right. Probably ADHD type. I’m obsessive, too, because I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole. And in fact, I did that. That’s this rabbit hole was that I saw I had a vision of something that that we could do. Very much like Daniel was talking about, where you know, gamification wasn’t going gamification. I was going more into using a platform like Twitch where you know how excited I was when I saw that Twitch building one day when we were in San Francisco to reimagine training, and how we could do it. I’m not gonna say it Didn’t work. And it actually did prove the point I was trying to make that we can use alternative things rather than a closed, isolated system to train people and get them engaged in a high level that work. But I was kind of stuck on that. And I also exhausted myself because I was trying to do way too many things by myself. And I burned. I don’t know if you’ve had this feeling, but you’re in a job and you’re like, put so much of your blood, sweat and tears into it. And then you and then for me, I hit this wall. It’s almost like a depression, right? It’s this overwhelming sense of, I think I’m done. I don’t know where to go. Next. I hit a wall. That
Adam Avramescu 05:43
sounds that sounds like burnout.
Dave Derington 05:45
It was but there was a it was passionate burnout. Like, it didn’t want to be there. But yeah, when I was very, I was very gung ho, I knew I could do I did the things. But the mistake I made was really not even taking care of myself. And just just trying to do it all.
Adam Avramescu 06:06
Yeah, that makes that makes sensitive. I mean, it’s a barrel
Dave Derington 06:11
roll, right?
Adam Avramescu 06:13
Yeah, absolutely. So shall I do checker?
Dave Derington 06:19
Yeah, I was gonna say move on to checker because I’m really curious, hearing more of more of this, because I’ve also know other people had it, then more recently, a checker.
Adam Avramescu 06:28
Yeah, and we’ll keep this short, because I wasn’t there for very long, I was a checker for just over a year. And like I mentioned in the previous example, I left Optimizely, because I felt at that point, we built a lot of what we were going to build, and we’d been through the cycles and weren’t necessarily getting the traction to grow and experience new challenges. So on one hand, I wanted the opportunity to do that and to build from scratch. But also to do it in a very different context. So check are very different product. Like you mentioned, the need for customer education was very different, because it wasn’t about category creation, it was about compliance in a lot of ways, making sure that our customers were fairly and properly adjudicating their background checks, and understanding all the different laws that affect it. So I learned a ton in a very short period of time. But also, it was kind of a test for myself of can I do this again, without running the exact same playbook? Because I knew that I couldn’t just come in and be like, Well, you never want to be that guy like, oh, at Optimizely, we did it this way at Optimizely did it this way, because it’s not useful to anyone but yourself. So, you know, on one hand, I think I look back fondly at that little bit over a year. And it was one of those things where I came in as a team of one actually reporting to our General Counsel, I was on the legal team, like you mentioned. And that was a unique experience. Also early in terms of views, one of the best views I’ve ever had. And if an office we were on the 20th floor of one Montgomery, looking out over all of San Francisco with a panoramic view, really cool office, really cool people. But yeah, I came in as a team of one with the expectation that I would build a team. And I’m actually very thankful that pretty quickly within that year, I was actually able to build one I hired a tech writer to customer education generalists, who later actually joined me at Slack, which was great. A more operationally focused person who is now at HubSpot, so just, you know, talented team, for sure. But I think really the the mistake, or I don’t know if this is a mistake, but a maybe a regret is just not having been there that long. I think that it’s really hard to feel, you know, despite everything that you can put together quickly and in a hack together manner in a year, you’re not going to go through a full cycle, you’re not going to see the effects of the work that you do, or of the programs that you build, or really be able to develop your your people or develop with your people. So certainly, if, if the folks that I hired hadn’t also joined me for another round at SLAC, I would have felt really bad about never really getting the chance to truly get to know them and what they were about. So I think like, the advice that I would give myself is, you know, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t change anything, because I got the call from a pre IPO slack and I wouldn’t have traded that for anything. It wasn’t like I was really getting burnt out on chakra specifically or anything like that. But if if it weren’t a circumstance like that, and it was more me kind of going well. Did I build everything that I have to build here? The answer is clearly no. There’s there’s way more to be gained by spending the time seeing the results of what you do come to life and really going through the cycles and taking learnings from it.
Dave Derington 09:59
Yeah, That’s, that’s very interesting, because we both had those very short stints mine was 18 months at Asuquo. Yeah. The contrast was interesting because you did have a team I did not. I think I had on good understanding that a lot of your material continued to be used for quite some time. Do your part. Yeah, apparently,
Adam Avramescu 10:23
all those all the other weird Camtasia videos that I built before I had a team, I think kept kept getting used for years afterwards, the original Learning Center curriculum that we worked on. So yeah, no, I’m proud, I’m proud that what we built, at least was built to last somewhat, but it was it was distressing, going to like the Learning Center page, months after or maybe a year after, I don’t know, something like that, that I left in seeing it all kind of getting slowly torn down.
Dave Derington 10:53
That’s a depressing thing when you see your legacy fall apart. But that’s what we do. Now.
Adam Avramescu 10:59
It was way more depressing for October’s than it was for the checker Learning Center. But still,
Dave Derington 11:04
yeah, I remember talking with I think, was it the anti Shah, about some of the things that she’d put into place and one of the previous episodes, and how that, you know, it’s sad when somebody comes in and says, Oh, I’m going to change this, we’re going to do this a wholesale replacement of a system. And
Adam Avramescu 11:19
that’s it. It’s not it’s not your program anymore when you leave. So you know, you can’t, you can’t you can’t manage it from the outside.
Dave Derington 11:25
You know, there’s a lesson right underneath that I just want to mention real quick is that yeah, embracing that, that change that loop is important. We’ve talked about that a lot. So it’s, you got to let it go.
Adam Avramescu 11:37
For sure, for sure. You can’t put too much of your your ego into the programs that you built. So why don’t we hear from another couple of customer education leaders before we move on to our our third at bat? Let’s do it. All right. Let’s take a listen to Phil Byrne and Phil Byrne joined us on episode 82. Talking about breaking into customer education among a million other things. That’s a really great ramble of an episode. And I mean, ramble and a great sense. Good good banter. Phil leads customer education at intercom. So a lot of great things to share. Let’s see what he has to say.
Phil Byrne 12:20
Okay, so this is my advice to my past self, or anyone else on becoming a CE leader. So mostly that will be focused on outcomes. And that’s pretty much it, you can apply that to almost any situation, whether it’s planning, conflict resolution, giving or receiving feedback, I think it’s a great way to dispense with all the biases you or somebody else might have, or any emotion you might have wrapped up in something, you can you know, the scope, your deliverables for the project, you can make sure you have a shared language to the C suite about the value of the education you’re working on. So if you and whoever you might be working on something with can align on the outcome you’d both like to see from whatever you’re working on. You always have somewhere to start from, and you can dispense with all of the other stuff, which really at the end of the day, isn’t that important and should always be in service of the outcome.
Adam Avramescu 13:16
Well put Phil, very to the point focus on outcomes.
Dave Derington 13:21
Have we should have a tally running?
Adam Avramescu 13:24
Yeah, definitely one of the big themes running through all of all of these clips. Well, why don’t we see if we can keep the streak running with Mike De Gregorio. So Mike joined us for episode 69. On next level, instructional design. I listened back to that episode not too long ago, because it’s actually one of our most listened to episodes. And it’s really a nice episode. Lots of super interesting ideas. And not to mention a good deep dive into more advanced instructional theory if If all you’ve really been playing with up to this point is some of the more basic concepts. Yeah. All right, Mike. Let’s tee it up.
Mike Di Gregorio 14:05
Hi, friends, Mike De Gregorio from top hat here. So what advice would I give my younger self about being a leader in customer education? Well, the first piece of advice is to never miss an episode of CE lab. Congratulate him and Dave on turning 100 The show has been amazing. Second, do better work. The perfect is the enemy of the good. work fast, work small, iterate quickly. Get feedback, really offense, specifically customer feedback as quickly as you can never forget to talk to them as often as you can and really stay customer obsessed. Third, coffee, drink coffee, drink lots of it. And more importantly, say yes to every invite for a virtual coffee chat. The community and customer read is amazing. They’re going to energize you, you’re going to meet great people doing great things and you’re going to learn a ton from them. So always say yes to the coffee chat. And then finally, don’t stress About where customer Ed lives in your organization. The truth is, it doesn’t matter which team you’re on, because customer education lives in you. It lives in everyone be the evangelist for using education of customers to make them more mature, more resilient, to make their lives better, and the lives your colleagues better and work feel lighter. So thanks for the opportunity to reflect a little bit and advise my younger self, congrats, Adam and Dave, and congrats on episode 100.
Dave Derington 15:32
Wow, customer education lives in everyone. I think that should be on a t shirt.
Adam Avramescu 15:38
I feel like if we had pre listened to these clips, I would have put that one last because that was really inspirational and really about what we always talk about on this show, which is finding the others finding others. Yeah. So thanks. Thanks, Mike, for your advice. I don’t care if you live in Toronto, you’re good people.
Dave Derington 15:56
Cole.
Adam Avramescu 16:00
If you go back and listen to the episode, we rouse each other about the Montreal Toronto thing?
Dave Derington 16:04
Yeah. Okay, that’s cool. I did want to say real quick about the community and finding the others in that. If I can say anything about why one reason I do this show with you, and with the community is because of the community. We, again, we did this book club reading, we’ve gone back in time we’ve done all these things. customer education will become a category of its own if we band together and find each other.
Adam Avramescu 16:34
Yeah, I mean, that’s why before even before C lab, this is again, going back into our history when when I was at Optimizely. I’d started the Bay Area, customer education meetup. And the reason I started that Meetup is because we were there were few of us who were out there doing this thing. But we hadn’t met each other there. We weren’t exchanging best practices. It was a lonely world. And you could go to something like sedima. But that wasn’t exactly the thing that we were doing. And there was this opportunity to really come together on that more, let’s say informal basis, find the others have the coffee chat. So yeah, I really like Mike’s advice there. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike. All right. Let’s move on. So we are now at the point where both of us were starting over, I got the call from slack, you got the call from outreach, got the end, you got the call. And you have to take it and I’m I’m incredibly thankful for the time that I had at Slack that was a completely memorable and unique experience with a ton of growth because I joined pre IPO slack went through the direct listing went through our entire life as a public company, and then the acquisition by Salesforce. And even before the acquisition, I was working with folks at Salesforce to kind of started integrating our programs and thinking about how they were going to play together and just learned a ton. But this is also while the pandemic and everything that everything else that happened around that time. Right. This is, like I mentioned is the time of Black Lives Matter protests. Just a ton going on in the world. And so I think one thing that stands out to me and Dave, I don’t want to repeat your, your takeaway too much is I felt as though between the work and everything going on in the world. I was putting a lot of myself and my energy into staying afloat, and really continuing to build a business in hypergrowth through a time where I think my energy reserves were already lower than they usually might be. And I think one thing that I made a mistake on at that time was it took me longer than it should have to realize that I could be more vulnerable about how I was feeling. And when I was getting overwhelmed, I was really trying to show up and be you know, kind of like a strong face for my team and you know, keep everything moving. And because, you know, we still we still had work to do. But I think probably even earlier on I could have been more honest about hey, you know what, everyone, I’m feeling it too. Here’s, here’s how it’s affecting me. Here’s where I’m not feeling like I have a whole lot of energy and what I’m trying to do to deal with it and probably even asked other people more How are you dealing with it so we can figure out a better way to Uh, to move forward together. So yeah, I mean, I, you know, I wouldn’t have traded that time for anything, I learned more at Slack than I have at any, any time in my professional career. But it was also one of the most intense and demanding experiences that I’ve ever had in my career. The other thing that I think about with Slack is similar. Again, I don’t want to repeat you too much, but going down this path of building a legally defensible certification. So when I came to Slack, one of the things that I was tasked with basically on day one is, hey, you’re going to take over this education services team. But also, we want you to build certification. And so I started doing my listening tour and finding out why these things were important to people, and how should we strike the balance between building education services and building up a certification program? And do we have resources to do this? And the answer was not really like, we’re gonna have to hack it together. And I remember I had this walking deck where I was really, I was constantly trying to figure out whether we would do low stakes or high stakes. And thus, whether we would call it a certification or not. And eventually, I ended up at this, what I was calling a middle stakes approach. And there’s no such thing as middle stakes. And so that was a mistake on my part. If you’re going the moment, you’re gonna go high stakes you are you are in for a penny in for a pound. Yeah. And so by trying to take some elements of a high stakes certification program, I was basically then inviting us in our program to need to take on all of the security measures, all of the vendor work all of the psychometric processes that you need to defend, legally defend reliable and valid certification program. And if you want to hear more about what that means you can listen to Debbie Smith’s episode of C lab. I don’t have the episode number, but it’s easy, easy to find, Google it, Google it, or use our user website. So that was a big lesson learned is that there really is no such thing as middle stakes. And what I wish I had done in retrospect is been more deliberate about having an initial stage where we were starting low stakes deliberately building something scrappy. And while we wanted to focus on having a really solid instructional experience, also being willing to I think be scrappier about even the instructional experience that we were delivering, because we were also trying to use a lot of strong evidence based learning techniques. And as you know, we heard in the clips from earlier, I think Daniel was the first person who said this, but we’ve heard it echoed a couple of times. Now, you don’t necessarily, you don’t get points for having like the most instructionally designed experience. So I really, I wish that I had figured out a better way as the person managing the project, to help everyone on the team who was working on it, and who was driving these discrete work streams, to kind of have permission to be scrappy, or in the early phases and do something that we would still be proud of, but still felt more like a minimum viable product, and then be more intentional about how we would evolve that to eventually becoming high stakes. And I don’t regret the fact that we did eventually build a high stakes program that actually helped us integrate very well with Salesforce as high stakes program. And we got really, really great marks from the trailhead team when they were evaluating our program during that integration phase. But like, Yeah, we didn’t we didn’t need to do that necessarily as early as we did. And I don’t think I was providing a lot of clarity in terms of where we should hit the mark between that initial phase and where we would eventually end up same thing with the instructional design right? I’m really glad that we have a program that has solid instructional design and offers this great, you know, challenging experience to our customers. But we put in so much effort, blood sweat and tears to build that program that I think we probably could have iterated our way there more than doing it in one big bang at first. Wow
Dave Derington 24:36
just like wow, you know what, I think is really cool. Adam is you okay with me transitioning in commenting as I talk about outreach? Sure. So let’s let’s hold the moment. You want to this massively big company, pre IPO then an IPO dennoch got acquired by Salesforce nonetheless,
Adam Avramescu 25:03
you’re you’re a massive company.
Dave Derington 25:05
That’s a massive company. And we want to talk about what’s going on today in 2023. February, but when we’re recording this, but that experience you went through the things that that I’m trying to help share with people I talk to, is that the multiple at bats, the talking to your peers, the people, you know, I did it once. Okay, you know, I learned something. I think I might know everything I don’t that’s Dunning Kruger talking. I do it twice. Oh, okay, now I’m seeing some trends. But I’ve only done this twice. Do it three times. Oh, I’m seeing you know, now I think I got my third at bat, I have a little bit more seasoning behind me, I’ve been beat up a little bit. I’m a little bit less gung ho and a little bit more jaded. Do it again, and talking to other people. This is what I really appreciate about our careers. And we talked Alessandro, many of people that were on that we’re all on this journey together. If you’re listening again, I’m gonna break the fourth wall and talk about you that this community thrives on connecting with each other to sharing our stories, because we’re dealing with a category here, which it’s been like wiped out in the past twice, or a couple of times. We heard about it in, you know, 1984, and then again in 1997, and another book, and then it takes 30 years, and then it pops its head up again. Why? Because we’re not connecting. We got to connect our experiences. So let me talk about outreach. Like your experience. This was both, like I’ve said this about many of my my jobs in my past, going way back, it was both the best of time. And it was the worst times. I remember walking into the building my first day, and I see you know, outreach on the building in his right by Elliott Bay. Again, I’m here in Seattle, flipping beautiful, they just moved into a new building, just as I started, that just went to this big of man, all these great things are happening. It’s pre COVID. Like, yeah, walking in, and feeling like hey, this is a company that’s going to IPO someday they’re doing really great. Cool, set the stage. Manny Medina is cool. My manager gives me a really good charter. He’s, as Dave, you know, was, you know, a few years ago based. We understand the value of customer education, build your team, and go. heart stops, you know, I’m like, crap, I’m gonna get to build the team, the guild, this team, and I’m like, You’re not fighting me. I’m hiring right now. Right? I’m staffing up, things are going great. I’m learning. I’m growing. Okay, cool. It was such a great experience. But it was also a very difficult one. I remember we even had some coaches around that you can go talk to because it was stressful. Oh, my God, we’re up against everything. Right. We’re moving super fast. Here’s the things that I messed up. Number one, you know, I’m not going to talk about certification. But I had a really big struggles around that. I’m not going to go into that you already covered it. I will. I validate you. Lesson learned is credentialing. It’s called tunneling. Yeah, it’s
Adam Avramescu 28:28
a tricky thing. Certification, right, because like, you get asked to build certification. Sorry. Now now we’re back on this trolley, you could ask to build something like certification. And you’re getting asked to some extent, because the leaders who are requesting it are looking at other programs and seeing that they have certification and seeing the benefits of it. For however, there’s a little bit of FOMO. And because you have an idea of where that program is going to get you when you’re at scale, however, if you were in the position where slack was in 2019, or where outreach was, was also 2019. When did you start there? Yeah, 2018. Yeah. So you’re not yet at the same size and scale that something like Salesforce is at or Microsoft or whatever other gigantic certification program you’re looking at. And so you have to be able to make that trade off between, do I want something that is already operating at that level of formality where someone is willing to invest the time and effort to take the super complex proctored test to have this credential that will give them a job as a, let’s say, Slack admin. And in 2019, that didn’t really exist yet. And we talked to our customers and like, there weren’t full time slack admins out there. There were a couple but it was very rare. You weren’t going to get a job as a Slack admin by taking that test. Now now, in 2023, things are quite different, especially after the acquisition, especially after slack got folded into Salesforce ecosystem. And frankly, just as this space has grown, But at the time, we could have reached so many more people by designing an experience that was intentionally more light and scalable. So that’s the the inherent trade off that you’re always making.
Dave Derington 30:11
Yeah, I think what we’re seeing, and we’re listening to all these other folks who are tearing, sharing their experiences, it’s, you kind of got to put yourself on the shelf a little bit and stick to some fundamentals, right, that is gonna be a hard job, until we get this category to have be a completely repeatable process where you can pick up, you know, a playbook or a yearbook or something like that, and say, I could just follow this, I don’t think it’s ever going to be that honestly, this is a really hard thing to do. But yeah, that certification thing, let me unpack this a little bit more and talk about the feelings, like the emotive things and, and also like the, like, what’s going on in my head. So here I am, in this environment, we’re moving really fast. My, you know, CEO, and cmo and all these people are coming to me that we need to do this, we need this. And that carries a lot of weight, it pivots you in different directions, when your CEO looks at you and says, you’re going to do this, I’m going to do it, right. But I think this is where I’ve learned a lot about having the inner strength to do the job that I am called to do. And when I say called, I’m gonna go back to that, we said that in some other meeting some of the conversations, I feel called to do this job in customer education later, it’s like, it just makes sense to me. I don’t know why, you know, like you do, you were, we made mistakes, too. But we’re still going to do them, because we’re passionate about it, we’re going to make those mistakes. And hopefully, you listening to this show are not going to make this mistake. The number one thing that I missed on at Outreach was my team. And specifically, not that I know how you can talk to people and talk about my management style, I’m a really transparent and sometimes vulnerable manager, I’m going to tell you what’s going on, I may tell you too much about what’s going on. But I want you to know, and I want you to be part of the solution as a team member. And in this case, there were nuances that that came up were okay, I’m going to talk about one of them. There is a very big push a palpable sense of I can call it millennial probably more Gen Z, there’s this push of people wanting to move in their careers alone at a clip, right, where am I going next? Where am I gonna go next? What is this very natural,
Adam Avramescu 32:37
you’re earlier in your career, you want to have that really fast trajectory.
Dave Derington 32:41
And I wanted to tell you about why me like why I think this is important to share with our audience. Is that, okay, I’m here in this company, who is at that time of joining, I think it was series D or series, C or D, somewhere in there wasn’t really big yet. It was like a 200 person thing, and exploded into over 1000 While I was there. So all this massive growth happened. And that’s hyper growth, hyper growth, HR wasn’t there. And when they were there, they weren’t strong. And that’s not a net. It’s a they’re growing too. And they’re building an organization. So now I started to have people I’m not gonna say people problems, but I needed to be there for my team in I needed to show up in new ways. Not ways that I had been worked before, hey, do this, do this, do this. But now is where I’m saying what, and this is weird to even say this. If I were to go back in time and tell my earlier self, what I should be doing, I would say okay, Dave, sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and lay out a job progression. Forget HR, they’re not going to do this for you for about five years. They’re way out. Layout, a staggered progression on how I can go from junior instructional designer to an instructional designer to senior instructional designer to Curriculum Manager, to manager of instructional design to whatever and just and then write down underneath that. These are the things you need to be doing to to do that independently with help.
Adam Avramescu 34:13
BUMP BUMP ball. Okay, yeah, without making it like a check the box activity
Dave Derington 34:18
in with fluidity. Yeah. And, I mean, I wouldn’t, I would have never thought to do this, because I thought we’ve got HR HR does this, they should be doing job stuff and leveling. Dude, what I didn’t know, you know, going into this, and gosh, this is I’ve been doing customer education for a long time now. Now I’ve got a team of 10 people, and they all want things they want to grow and they want to grow with us. And they and they’re getting frustrated about things. And you know, I mean, I can talk about this to death, but the most important thing is to say, Hey, Adam, you know, I know you want that promotion right now. But you know what, this is a new field. There aren’t those titles. Those titles don’t exist. What is it? What are you well, Learning Jubilee insider, know what we can make sure we make stuff up. But the point is, and I was having a conversation with with a team member more recently about this is you want to look at your titles and your roles with intentionality. You want to know where you’re going, yes. But sometimes you have to deal with a little bit ambiguity. And where I, as a manager had a lot of challenges with this, the particular those people were like, No, I need to be a senior something. Okay, I get it. What is the evidence of that? So I would call, right,
Adam Avramescu 35:35
and that’s where it becomes the check the box thing, right? Even if you have written role profiles or job descriptions, then sometimes the discussion is like, well, I’m doing this, and I’ve done this, and I’ve done this, and that matches what you have on the senior job profile. And then it becomes an interesting conversation where it’s kind of like, okay, but let’s talk about how consistently you’ve been doing those things or like kind of what’s your center of gravity and how you been performing? And you know, sometimes, that’s actually a good opportunity for you, as the manager to say, oh, you know, what, I actually haven’t been considering it that way. Let’s stabilize a couple of these things. And then actually, yeah, you are ready for the next role. But sometimes it’s equally a challenge to say back to your, your direct report. Well, yeah, maybe you’ve done these things once or twice. But overall, there hasn’t been a ton of consistency. And it’s not just about whether you can find examples of having done the things that are kind of on the senior level with the senior title. It’s also how you are operating consistently above your, your level, and kind of what what is your trajectory look like? And what investments are you making in continuing to grow in your career and more importantly, to have impact on the business? And I see this consistently, where often the highest performers are the ones who aren’t reading the job description and doing everything that’s in the job description at the next level, the highest performers are the ones who are looking for the opportunities in the business and stepping into those, and figuring out how they can always be having the most impact with what they do.
Dave Derington 37:12
Yeah, it’s one of my my favorite favorite leaders had always said, she said, those are there the dirty jobs to be done. The let me frame it up in a different way. This field, we’re in Adam, I think this is my personal view, you can feel otherwise and disagree with me. But I feel like we still have some kind of fluidity in titles in what we’re doing. Right? If I say you’re an instructional designer in customer education, it really isn’t the same as instructional designer working at some big company somewhere in l&d. It’s very different. It’s extremely different. And that, and that, what I try to do with all of my team members, now I’m and this is hard. So if any of you are listening out there, I’m always learning as manager, but what I want to do is encourage you to understand that you’re in a field, that’s such an, it’s so valuable. We’re the space in between all of the other teams, there’s always learning happening, everybody’s learning everybody’s teaching, what we do is channel that energy, focus energy, we’re a node for the company. And we help we help an emerging company or even a later phase company to deliver actionable learning interventions to people that need them when they need them most. And that’s not something that comes naturally, I don’t think hardly anybody. So if you’re on that journey with us, and you’re in our teams, and you’re growing, we always have to go back to learning what what is the goal? Right, what all of our other friends are saying on this in their eclipses? Outcomes? What’s the goal? What’s the big thing? It’s not about? I just need to do one thing I need to pump out a whole bunch of content. No, I’ve had arguments about that. It’s not the amount of contents the quality of it, what does it serve, you know, we need to retrain a bunch of people and to keep training. Now you’re gonna freak and burn out, you should be charging a lot for live training and having a think of it on demand, and then we build the best. So these kinds of nuances to towards management of a team, particularly as it starts, you start getting into the managing managers point is it gets even harder than and this is stuff that people have MBAs probably already know and veteran managers now but I would say there’s probably more people in our world, our market. Again, I’m talking to b2b SAS Type folks, not necessarily people who have come from l&d, l&d, however in large, large companies and they know this stuff. I’m talking about the people
Adam Avramescu 39:42
where there’s more defined career progressions anyway,
Dave Derington 39:44
and you have that help. But it’s give yourself a break, learn some management techniques, learn how to really talk and listen closely, and shut your mouth. I mean, that’s hard for me because you know how much I talk Shut up. But, but I’ve learned a lot about that. And now going into my service rocket days, I feel like a more heartfelt manager that is going to structure some of those things better and help people understand, look, we’re in a field, you’re gonna have a heck of a lot of opportunities in your career. Don’t be so bold, I want to follow your career, I want you to challenge me on your career, I want you to learn but but we’re working together to build this market.
Adam Avramescu 40:26
So yeah, I feel the same way at personeel. Now managing managers of managers to in some cases, but but more importantly, really trying to bring a broad function. Together, it’s, it’s finding a balance of providing direction and opportunity and helping everyone on the team understand what impact looks like and where we can contribute. While while at the same time being available and empathetic and making sure that I really understand what might be blocking anyone on my team from doing their their best work.
Dave Derington 41:00
It’s a really hard job. The other I want to do when we say more thing, I’ll say this more shortly. But that was the big thing I thought was most important. Give yourself time learn to be a manager, listen to your people. But understand we’re being managers and senior managers and directors and VPS. In a space that’s not clearly defined. Right? The other thing is managing up and being. There’s been times in my life that I’ve been more assertive than I wanted to. But I have learned that leaders sometimes want to think they know everything. And this isn’t not an arrogance thing. This is, oh, I’m a leader. I feel like I’m compelled to make a decision on this and have a frame of reference to be able to tell you what you should do.
Adam Avramescu 41:46
Right? Yeah, that’s what leaders have impostor syndrome to?
Dave Derington 41:50
Yeah. But I’m gonna be really bold and saying this. When I think of leaders that I’ve worked with in the past, and if you’re listening, and you’re a leader, okay, I’m sorry, I’m gonna say it. You do need to put yourself on the shelf when it comes to customer education. And I say that for a reason, because we’re in a space that’s navigable, but it’s swampy and weird. It’s not like I come from an l&d space, and I can just, I got great I got, I got a very clear job to do. And I can make people do my thing. And our mark market, we have squishiness, and all that. Like, if you just say, Okay, I’m going to, I’m going to spam the market with content, and it sucks. People are not going to trust you. If you know, there’s all these different things to think about you, as a leader of leaders need to to realize that you hired them for a reason. And if anything, support them to find our resources here, right? Go out and read your book, Adam, go out and read Daniel and Barry’s book, go out and read, whatever old the old customer education books, and sorry, dropping things. Politics are hard. And but that’s one of the most important jobs you have is to have your walking around deck or your walking deck, like you said, be able to communicate at a moment’s notice with any leader and be passionate about as much as you can, even if you’re an introvert, have it scripted, and practice that stuff. But be able to also stand up to a leader, I remember my, my most challenging meeting I ever had, was with my SVP and my VP and me. And we were talking about this certification program. And they rightfully grilling me on times and deliverables and stuff. And this is that moment, Adam, where I’m like, crap, I realized them in over my head in a certain degree, because this is gonna take a long time. And we’ve only discovered it now. Because we have to get sneeze and you know, this goes back to your crap i They have 50% of their time, where’s that time going to come from for from not just once me but a dozen and having the internal strength to go to a leader and say to them? I don’t agree, or I’m not going to do that. Or
Adam Avramescu 44:04
that is expending that political capital is hard. But
Dave Derington 44:07
yeah, it does say that to somebody. And I should have done more of that. Because I had that conversation about how do we qualify lead our team members and the amount of the work output in the work output has to be a number. And I’m like, and that’s actually broke me. That’s what I said, No, work. Output is not a number of work output is data driven. And that took me down another road where I needed to have that infrastructure built. So I would say those are my two things like really having the strength to be able to use and wield political know how. And if you’re not ready to do that, yet. There’s places to learn. But you need to practice that you’re not just taking care of your team, but you’re also taking care of the company and your leaders hired you to do a specific role that transcends whatever department like Mike Ditka Gharial said No matter where you are, you have a job and accountability your company to help your customers, your partners and your team members. Learn your product. And that means you need to take a posture of whether you have impostor syndrome or not. You’re doing your due diligence as a leader.
Adam Avramescu 45:20
Well said, so why don’t we now hear from our last couple of customer education leaders on what they would say to their past selves? And then we’ll then we’ll wrap up the show with kind of a final look back. Let’s go. Alright, so we’re gonna hear from Lisa rotor off. Lisa has not been on the show yet. Hopefully, she will be soon. She’s our only non guest person who contributed here and correct. But super happy that Yeah, super happy that she did. She leads customer education at amplitude.
Lisa Rothrauff 45:57
So the advice I’d give my past self about becoming a customer education leader? Well, I’d say first and foremost, express your passion for learning. It’s really easy to forget that not everyone in an organization is passionate about the user experience and empowering users. I mean, how could they not be right? And few people understand how intentional that empowerment needs to be. But if you’re passionate and show expertise in a range of areas, people will soak that up and have confidence in your ability to not only enable your their user base and your user base, but they’ll come along and want to learn about your practice with you. The second is to be flexible. Years ago, I couldn’t have imagined the role I’d be playing today or, or better yet, the impact that my team is having in our organization, customer education is by nature cross functional. And its reach can be too so be open to change and the opportunity that comes with it, because it will enable you to influence the direction not just have an education program, but it could be influential to an entire product line or the direction strategic direction of a services organization. The third one is just to keep learning, I’d give that advice to anybody. But here in this field, it’s especially important to connect with other people eat up their suggestions. I mean, in the past year alone, I have met so many people in the broader customer education community, who have morphed into the role who are eager to learn more about it about the theory, the technology, the strategic problems we are trying to address. And I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I hadn’t been open to continually learning from people, even from other areas, other sectors, people who are much younger and newer to the field than I am, they often bring the very best ideas. So keep your keep your ears wide open. And then fourth is just hire great people hire people who are equally passionate and equally flexible, and even more empathic than you are about your customers experience. Because really, your team needs to be the collective advocacy group for your customers. And as a result, they can have a huge impact on your organization.
Adam Avramescu 48:26
Thanks, Lisa. I like it. It was a it was a different take on connecting to the business. But I like that you lead with helping other people understand like through your passion for customer education, where you can add value to the business. That was cool.
Dave Derington 48:42
That’s exceptional. Great job, Lisa.
Adam Avramescu 48:45
Yeah. And finally, our last guest the MVP of the show it is MVP Melissa vanpelt MVP. She leads she leads customer education community advocacy at seismic and she she joined us for episode 75 actually talking about those topics. So MVP, let’s hear what you have to say.
Melissa VanPelt 49:14
Hello, everyone, this is Melissa VanPelt from seismic our customer education program is four years young. And while I feel like I could spend a full hour divulging all the good bad and ugly lessons that I have learned along the way, I’m going to keep it short and sweet and try to target under Quick four minutes for you. So the advice that I would give my past self about becoming a customer education leader. Here we go. Let’s take it from the top number one. customer education in a high growth SaaS company requires tremendous amount of stamina, and resilience, but most importantly, ruthless prioritization, there is endless amounts of work projects, moving targets and chaos to navigate. You must master the art of being comfortable in the uncomfortable. Bonus tip to help with that hire a project manager early to assist with capacity planning and resource management. Okey dokey. Tip number two, clarity is critical. Clarity on your programs scope, clarity on your learner audience’s clarity on the phase of the journey that you will support. Clarity on the business metrics you are targeting, clarity on program evolution and roadmap clarity, clarity, clarity, you will spend just as much time educating internally as you do educating externally. So providing ongoing clarity to your team to cross functional stakeholders to people across the organization will be so critical to your success. In that same breath, refer back to rule number one ruthless prioritization and clarity go hand in hand. Okay, number three, future proofing your program. For those blind spots, you should always keep future proofing at the forefront of your mind. Design your program for what you can not yet see around the corner. Things like mergers and acquisitions, things like tech stack consolidation, things like leadership changes, philosophy changes, you must operate your organization with flexibility, and you must figure out a way to be nimble. Number four, minimize your dependencies were at all possible. By the nature of the work that we do. customer education teams are highly dependent on many other teams and people to get our work done. If you see an opportunity to eliminate a dependency, for example, having product sneeze on your team, or having a UI UX developer on your team, capitalize on those types of opportunities, reduce dependencies where you can. Number five, build your data, infrastructure and ROI framework out of the gate it even if that means starting off simple, the earlier and the more you can point to data to tell the program value story, the better off you’re going to be. And the better you’re going to look in the eyes of your business and executive leadership. get ahead of that data. Number six, spend time upfront finding and investing in a strong staff augmentation partner that can be an extension of your team and extension of the resources that you have access to. There will always be so much to do with little time, you’ll always have emphasized insufficient resources, leveraging a trusted partner would be a valuable, valuable investment. Last but not least, customer education is such an exciting space to be in it is powerful. customer education has the potential to serve your business in a variety of different ways. Pick the paths that you’re going to take your program down evolve your strategy to meet the business where it is. This is a very exciting field to be in. This is a field that will offer tremendous amount of opportunities to make significant impacts at your businesses. Take advantage of it. Have fun with it. Enjoy it. Thanks for listening, hope this is helpful. Good luck to everyone out there listening.
Adam Avramescu 54:17
Well, Melissa, we should have had you do this entire episode.
Dave Derington 54:21
I’ll say the same thing was amazing.
Adam Avramescu 54:26
A lot of similar lessons to what we’ve covered. So let’s not let’s not step on it. We’ve already spent a long time discussing so let’s let’s start to close that Dave. And this will bring us to the last quick segment of this show, which is we wanted to look back. Now we’ve got 99 other episodes that we can take stock of Yeah, so let’s, let’s ask what what stands out to you personally? Which episodes would you recommend that people listen to? If they’re gonna go listen back to certain episodes of our of our podcast
Dave Derington 55:01
Yeah, go first let’s let’s do rapid fire and then we’ll close
Adam Avramescu 55:03
out. Yeah, we’ll do rapid fire. Okay. So number one, I would say like my personal favorite episodes that we’ve done over the course of our time together are really the ones that have highlighted. Great customer, education leaders and practitioners doing the work every day. It’s the thing I’m most passionate about on this show. And it’s the thing that I want to continue to highlight as long as I can, because theory is great, but practice rules. So literally any episode that has in the name of a customer education leader on it, and then some topic after the name of the customer education leader, those are my favorite discussions to have, you could listen to almost any of them, and they’re going to be great. But there’s a few others that I would highlight just rapid fire one is I was going back to our most listened to episodes. And I found one that we did, which is kind of a almost a random episode to be number one. But it goes back to our hypothesis structure, something that we used to do in the early days, and it picked up every once in a while. Since, you know, part of being the the lab. That’s the lab part of the lab. Yeah, it was on customer education, hiring and team structure. It was episode 65. And it’s a funny one, because first of all, we sound like we’re recording it in a jet engine. I don’t know what was going on with our audio quality that day. But it’s such a good discussion. And just a great conversation where we’re looking into the research. We’re looking into benchmarking. We’re expressing points of view. And I think it’s got a lot of our kind of signature Adam and Dave being goofballs. And one thing I really appreciate over the course of our time together is that we’ve probably become more and more ourselves. Yeah. A couple of others episode 54 and 55. Were a great back to back for me that was the Eugene Lee and Lincoln Murphy episodes. So I like that we widen the lens there and weren’t just talking to customer education practitioners and leaders, but we’re talking to respectively, an investor, Eugene, being in VC, and a customer success. Thought Leader, consultant Lincoln Murphy. So really broaden the aperture on how customer education plays into this broader world. Yeah, yeah. And then the last ones I like when we have fun. Always look back on what can Radiohead teach us about customer education, Episode 31. And what can David Bowie teach us about customer education episode 52. Again, just a good chance to kick back break format. And, you know, kind of think outside the box while still learning some lessons to a customer education.
Dave Derington 57:40
And we played some music, but you Dave, yeah. Lots
Adam Avramescu 57:43
of music. What are your favorites?
Dave Derington 57:45
My favorites? I have several, one of the one of the top for me was with Nick Mehta, Episode 76. Why? Because well, I worked for him back in the day and Gainsight, of course, but Nick is such a great leader. And he has such a great perspective on the whole world of customer success and even beyond in SAS. And when he connected and came on the show with the fact that customer we’re always teaching, we’re always educating. And it’s part it’s at the core of customer success. For me, that was a moment where it says, Okay, well now we have leaders, also speaking about our category. That means a lot. Right. Beyond that, some of my favorites on the anti Shah, where we we really geeked out about, you know, the area under the curve calculus, we talked about all kinds of crazy stuff. We talked about the like really the build ROI of building a stack getting all of your technology together and showing exactly what can happen when when a customer education program is successful, but that also is paralleled by the episode with a student Nancy Shahs. 87. Christie Hollingshead, again, we hate who you heard from her earlier, Episode 70 data doesn’t lie or data don’t lie, whatever you want to fight on that again, we can go bring it. But those episodes, particularly one with Christie, where we were also talking about, what should you be measured? How should you be measuring it? Just absolutely amazing. And those are the ones you should be listening to for sure. Then there was one I think, is the one with Ted Blosser. What did you call that? Like,
Adam Avramescu 59:32
get Dave? I call that our TED talk? No, Dave, like seriously, I would have put this one on my list if you hadn’t put it on yours already. This was I hadn’t I wasn’t there for the interview for that one. I listened to it, you know, after you’d already produced it. So I was listening to it for the first time when everyone else was listening to it and I was so inspired by that episode. I thought that was a great one.
Dave Derington 59:57
It was great and I will give Ted also additional props for completely rewriting my script. And that I had designed and he said, Well, I hope you don’t mind. I just went through and edited all this and changed the direction a tad is amazing. We hadn’t we don’t screw up the show though. Yeah, well, we try to make a stub it out at least. And then I kind of want to bring us together at the end, because there was a moment in time. Episode heck, what episode was this starting over again? I have to I’ll have to click the button here to actually get the number
Adam Avramescu 1:00:39
79 Oops,
Dave Derington 1:00:41
don’t have it. Anyway, the episode where you came to town came to Seattle, as you were preparing to depart for the Netherlands, Europe. And you know, this one was we were walking in at Ballard locks in Seattle. And just kind of walking around a loop people were coming by it was really interesting. But that was not about it’s about the meta, Nick meta, but the meta behind what we’re doing. Right? Not the verse either. But you know, this podcast is not about you. It’s not about me. It’s not about us, you know, arguing about stuff, it’s about connection. And it’s about finding the others. And it’s about taking risks and starting again, and trying new things, and challenging ourselves. So that all of us network together, and you benefit, we all benefit from sharing that information. That’s what I took.
Adam Avramescu 1:01:41
Those were couldn’t couldn’t say it any any better. myself. It was that was a great off format episode. And it really was about our, our connection not just to each other, but really to the broader world of customer education. And I really hope as we wrap things up today, that that’s the message that we can take away as we start thinking about our next 100 episodes, is continuing to build this community and connection around customer education. Because I believe that we’ll continue to have more people coming into this world. There’ll be more others to find and we want to do what we can to continue to support that.
Dave Derington 1:02:19
That’s amazing. Let’s bring it home, Adam.
Adam Avramescu 1:02:24
Yeah, let’s bring it home. So listeners, if you want to learn more, we have a podcast website at customer dot education, where you can find show notes, other material goofs and gags what have you. And if you found value in this podcast, please give us 100 or 101 Episode gift. And give us a five star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify podcasts or wherever you listen to our podcast. Share your favorite episode from the first 100 Thanks to Alan Coda for providing our theme music, and to our audience.
Dave Derington 1:03:06
Thanks for joining us, get out there. Educate, experiment. And just like we do every time we get on the show, just like we do every day. Find your people.
Adam Avramescu 1:03:19
Thanks for listening.