Adam Avramescu: [00:00:00] There’s no feeling more intense than starting over.
Dave Derington: [00:00:06] If you deleted your homework the day before, it was jus as I have,
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:10] or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back after spending an hour in the commute, if you want some money at the casino and then put all your winnings on red, but it came up black.
If you got your
Dave Derington: [00:00:21] best shirt, dry cleaned before a wedding,
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:23] and then immediately dropped fruit on it.
Dave Derington: [00:00:26] If
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:26] you want an argument with a friend and then later discovered
Dave Derington: [00:00:29] that they just returned to their original view, what starting over is harder than starting
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:34] up. Okay,
Welcome to CELab the customer education laboratory, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stopped the growth dead in its tracks. like the final season of game of Thrones. Yes.
It’s that time. No spoilers. On a different topic. Today is national by a musical instrument day. So happy by a musical instrument day, Dave.
Dave Derington: [00:01:13] Oh, fabulous. I could use a new saxophone or maybe a keyboard.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:17] Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:01:17] saxophone. that was my go-to instrument in high school. I loved it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:22] It’s a good one.
I need to buy another French horn and that’s what I used to play. French horn. Okay. We
Dave Derington: [00:01:27] have the trappings of the CELab, the band. We can play the theme song.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:31] That’s great. I think we should.
Dave Derington: [00:01:34] Reorchestrate that for,
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:35] for high school marching band.
Dave Derington: [00:01:37] All right. So CELab listeners, we’re going to let you in.
On a little secret, a lot of changes since the last episode that we recorded in, we record many of our episodes well in advance and we create a black back. Try that again, and we create a backlog that way, we’ll always have new content. Even if we in our personal lives or professional lives are overloaded.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:01] So now that you’re in, on that secret, in this case, it’s actually been a few months since we’ve recorded the episodes. You’ve been listening to over the past few weeks. If you’ve been keeping up current with the show
Dave Derington: [00:02:10] and then South that’s hot dog ears, it’s three years.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:14] It’s a long time. And a lot has changed since we last recorded.
In fact, both you Dave and I have changed companies and moved to new roles, building and leading customer education teams.
Dave Derington: [00:02:25] Yeah. And it’s really weird that we were just talking about that on, a little chit-chat, we’ve had this parallel journey where, we’ve gone to a bunch of different things and this makes it a good time.
We both think to kick back, reflect and really think about something that most customer education leaders will have to think about some times in their lives, in their career. And that’s. Starting over. So just give you my narrative, my journey here. I led a team at Gainsight, so I had a four person team there and then started over then rebuilt from scratch at
and now I’m starting over again. You may have heard of the company and its outreach, which is outreach.io, and it’s all really exciting and a good way to reflect on what you need to think about on day one. As you enter a new team.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:15] Yeah. or even on day 90 and some change, like I am
Dave Derington: [00:03:19] day 90.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:20] Yeah. I’ve passed those first 90 days.
Dave Derington: [00:03:25] Oh wait. I already said this, but we’ve had this parallel journey, this parallel path lately. And we, when we met, you were at Optimizely. I was a Gainsight, but since that time we both gone through a second and third job change.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:38] Yeah. some people say the change is the constant or that, the only thing that you should always expect is uninvited guests.
And if you don’t say that, then you probably don’t work in tech. But you’re right. It’s weird. Maybe that’s symptomatic like of a new undercurrent of customer education. There’s a lot more emphasis being placed on customer education and businesses. especially since the time that we first started talking about this and I’ve personally seen more opportunities open for new customer education leaders than ever before.
So perhaps changes a Bruin and businesses are becoming more serious. And they’re trying to find the right people to lead their teams. What do you think about that?
Dave Derington: [00:04:16] I think you’re absolutely right. And for a lot of us, it means we’re going to start over many times. And so this episode’s title and hypothesis are going to reflect that they’re both attribute.
to a game and I’ll take a step aside and personal life. I really enjoy games, used to have company. They ran video game tournaments. And this game I like to play, I think is familiar to this whole process. You can find it on steam, out there on the internet. It’s called getting over it with Bennett Fati throughout the game.
The thing that I think is really novel about this is. He Bennett Fati is narrating as you hike through a series of obstacles and here’s how it starts.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:00] There was no feeling more intense than starting over. If you’ve deleted your homework the day before it was due as I have, or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back after spending an hour in the commute, if you want some money at the casino and then put all your winnings on red and it came up black.
If you want an argument with a friend and then later discovered they just returned to their original view. Starting over is harder than starting up.
Dave Derington: [00:05:28] Ooh, I love this. I love this.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:31] So let’s work is harder than starting out,
Dave Derington: [00:05:35] but I think we, let’s test that hypothesis, right? Let’s work our way through the topic.
And as always, this is where we begin, Adam. What are you thinking about for our hypothesis?
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:47] Okay, let’s try to generalize this. We won’t be talking about the specifics of our own companies and our roles today, but we will talk about what it takes to start over as a customer education leader. So this isn’t necessarily for those in their first role in customer education, like we’re often focusing on in this podcast, but rather, what should you be thinking about if you leave your successful customer education team to start or lead another.
It takes a balance of leaning on your previous accomplishments and expertise with listening to your business and innovating.
Dave Derington: [00:06:17] Okay. So let’s unpack that. And what we’ve come up with for our hypothesis is what we’ve come up with for our hot, I can’t say it. I almost want to lead that in here’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:28] your call w over saying hypothesis,
Dave Derington: [00:06:32] how fitting it is.
I will leave this in as starting over because it started over twice. So to successfully start over, you must actively listen and learn from stakeholders and team members within your new organization while actively balancing your findings with the basic tenants that we know about from customer education.
So how do you feel about that?
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:56] Yeah, that’s a big hypothesis, but it sounds to me like you’re really focusing on the idea here of balancing your past with your future.
Dave Derington: [00:07:02] Absolutely. Absolutely. So let’s begin with point number one for today’s podcast. And that is a phrase that I’ve heard. It’s been circulated around the internet.
It’s put yourself on the shelf, not put the elf on the
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:17] shelf, elf on the shelf, reference Dave,
Dave Derington: [00:07:19] it is put your cells.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:21] This is like the recurring, it’s the recurring gag in all of our podcasts. Like we keep coming back to the shelf.
Dave Derington: [00:07:26] It is, maybe we’ll have to make a thing about it. Height, find the elf on the shelf.
So again,
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:30] put yourself on the shelf. Don’t put your software on the shelf
Dave Derington: [00:07:34] because it’s all about renewal and adoption. What does this mean? this is all about listening and learning. And for this one, I like this phrase because it specifically calls attention to a couple of things. Number one, Adam, I struggle with this.
Sometimes I think we all do is that. As we enter a new organization, a new company. I had a really good experience as a consultant in my career, and there’s nothing better than being formally taught. Okay. You’re there to listen and learn. Put your ego aside. It’s not about what you’ve done before or what you’ve seen before that comes later.
So set aside your ego. And then number two is actively listen and learn from the people within your organization. That means go talk to your peers, go talk to your leaders, get into their heads. What’s their language. What’s their own company dictionary, the things that they talk about. And then number three, be humble.
So that’s it’s overall
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:36] Kendrick. What’s up. Thanks Kendrick.
Dave Derington: [00:08:42] I guess if I were to sum this all up, Adam, I would say that there’s literally nothing worse than coming into a new place and being a know it all. it’s super hard. It’s disruptive. So what can we do to combat this?
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:53] Yeah, I agree. This is the, this is the Kendrick Lamar principle. We have to be humble about ourselves because when you’re going through your 30, 60, 90, we just talked about the first 90 days.
you have that natural tension between knowing what you’ve accomplished in the past and wanting to speak up and wanting to prove your value with really needing to frame what you’re doing and the strategy and the vision in terms of your new company and that company’s customers, right? You don’t really want to be the person who just comes in and, Keep saying, when I was at block company or when I was at this company, we did this because for a lot of the people that your new company, unless your old company is really, good at what they do and really relevant to your new customer base.
It actually, doesn’t always matter when you’re starting, right? So you have to be really intentional about being enlisted and learn mode. You have to say that to people. Hey, I have an opinion on this, but I’m in listening to learn mode right now.
Dave Derington: [00:09:52] Yeah. That’s often really hard when you’re coming in and go, Oh, I want to raise my hand here and say something, but you haven’t built that rapport or that trust yet.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:01] But you know who you are, you know what you’ve done, but people don’t know who you are and what you’ve done. And they don’t know that, just because this is something you’ve done in the past, do you think is right. That your opinion is actually valid. So you really do have to be humble and be explicit that you’re listening and learning.
and I think Dave, This is even more important if you’re coming into an existing team to lead them, because you’re going on that journey together. If you think about the forming storming norming performing model, where you go through the different stages of team development, you joining a team as a new leader, takes the team back to forming you’re on that journey with them.
before you start wildly changing everything and rolling out a bunch of edX and mandates. Make sure to get a sense of the team’s history and struggles and accomplishments and what they value, because you’re supplementing that you’re not necessarily here to just throw a wrench in. All
Dave Derington: [00:10:53] That’s and that’s really hard, as I’ve entered this new company, a new organization, there are things that you do sometimes have to make a command decision about. One example is one thing that I do, and this is just my personal preference as a manager is I have my team loosely track time, meaning, Hey, just bucket your time.
Are you working on just administrative email tasks or are you teaching or are you developing or, show me the big buckets so that I can come back and say, okay, now I know what we’re working on that might be constitute, or it might be falling in the storming camp piece, but it is more norming, I think, because.
That’s information about our team, still those kinds of things coming in, you might have to find yourself doing as a manager, as an, as a new manager of a new team. but I even did that with much trepidation.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:44] Yeah. storming is natural and it’s going to happen whenever there’s a change in the team makeup and especially a significant change, like a new leader coming into the team.
I really try to empathize with that situation. You don’t think about the times when. I’ve had a new manager come in and what’s important there. I think that, there are some things that are going to have to be command decisions, but I also think that it’s really important where you can to place a premium and an emphasis on going on the journey together.
And so instead of starting with a bunch of specific initiatives or pieces like that, what I do try to do is try to shape. A collaborative vision or design principles that we can use to move forward. So if we can get on the same page, at least about what’s important in our approach, for instance, to say, Hey, based on everything that the team has told me, and the first, in the first few weeks of being here, it seems like right now we’re really auto taking from our customers.
And we’re not really saying no to them ever. And it seems like in order to go where we want to go, even if that vision isn’t fully developed yet, it’s important that we start building a muscle around doing deeper discovery with our customers and being able to push back a little bit for what’s going to not just do what they ask for, but help them in the longterm.
So how can we put that principle into practice? And then everyone on the team will start to have ideas based on their own experience of how to do that. but if you can give a framework or a design principle, then sometimes the team will even come up with better ideas than what you might’ve mandated.
Dave Derington: [00:13:17] Yeah. That’s pretty amazing because right off the bat, you are humbling yourself and coming in and going, okay, I don’t have all the answers we’re going to get to those answers together. And it’s very much an inclusive
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:28] act. Yeah. And you’ve talked a little bit about the, the need to be an investigative journalist as an instructional designer.
And I think that. That journalistic approach is equally important when you’re a manager or a leader, because everyone on your team did something before they got to now and understanding what that was and what brought them to this point. And what makes them really feel like they’re operating in their zone and they’re using their superpowers.
Now I’m thinking about wrap again. We use the Kendrick Lamar quote earlier. Now I’m thinking about Kanye saying, don’t let me into my zone, but you got to let them into their zone. and then, also what maybe what don’t they like so much, what do they not want to be doing? Or what do they feel like?
They want to improve about themselves or about the team. So really, taking almost an interview approach to that and putting yourself in the role of the journalist with them as the subject, you can start to learn a lot, not just about what’s going on, tactically in the team, but really where everyone’s is coming from.
Dave Derington: [00:14:26] Oh my gosh. Yes. And I don’t know about you, but one of the things that I’m a big fan of is the one-on-ones. The
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:33] one on ones.
Dave Derington: [00:14:33] You, the first thing that I did is said, Hey, everybody, we’re going to start one-on-ones right away. We’re going to have longer ones to begin with and we’re going to shorten them later on.
But, and when I get into those sessions, the first thing I say, this is your time. Tell me about you. What are your career ambitions? What do you like here? What do you not like here? Tell me all the stuff. Let’s have a great dialogue and you get to know that person and you get into that person’s head. And immediately we start coming up with really great ideas and other things, and it starts getting the juices flowing.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:02] Yeah, absolutely. And I like to distinguish as well, the difference between just a regular one-on-one, first of all, I always tell my team that they own the agenda for their own one-on-ones because ultimately it’s their time. And I want to make sure that they get what they need. But I also like to silo off the regular one-on-one, which is usually more about updates or what’s top of mind from a development one-on-one.
when I first come in, I want to make sure to spend the time talking about each person’s. Career and what lights them up and what lets them into their zone and then make sure to come back to that deliberately quarterly at the very least. And to me, that’s not a check the box activity. That’s not just about, we’re going to say that we did development plans for the sake of doing development plans like that is continuing the deep conversations and pulling back from the day-to-day to really think about, okay, not just where are we going as a team, but where are you going?
Dave Derington: [00:15:53] Absolutely. that’s all good stuff. So let’s. Unpack this a little bit further. I think we have one more point in that, which is you’re also combating yourself. I do this all the time. I need to be that journalist. I need to learn about you and my team and where we’re going in the company and other peers.
But something I also struggle with personally is I feel like I need to prove myself and I probably need to do that quickly. some folks might have an imposter syndrome going on and we all know about that. It’s just something that happens and you have to overcome it. But if you’re the only learning person in your org, or maybe you’ve come in as a new learning leader, people are suddenly going to look to you and go, Oh my God, thank you for coming.
We’re so thankful. You’re here. We. Love the fact that you have this expertise, but you’re going to need to do it as your job from the position of really knowing your business. You’ve got to build credibility by framing your work. As a solution to a business problem, not just some ivory tower, new thing that you
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:57] have.
Yeah. I, specifically thinking about customer education, I never liked to come in with the assumption that people are going to get what we do or why it’s important to do it in the way that we do it. I think a lot of people underestimate the customer education as a craft. And so that’s something that I know that we’re going to be on a journey on with stakeholders throughout the business and.
Yeah. I like to frame what I do in terms of the business to help understand what I’m trying to do. not just because it’s abstractly a good thing to do, or this is how instruction works, but rather, Hey, I’m here to partner with you. I’m here to get business results. and yes, I did these things in the past.
Yes, I have this background, but there are going to be folks, who really don’t have a lot of time and patience to understand all the details of learning business, but we can still, Build connections. And again, I think it’s just really important to start with the customer. If you have a customer centric organization, your vision for the future should be customer centric and the information that you use to frame it should be customer centric.
So as you start to get those quick wins, which, super important to get quick wins when you’re coming in. people know that you actually do stuff. I like to frame it in the context of customer and stakeholder feedback. So for example, when I was a Checkr. When I was pitching the vision for customer education, cause there was no customer education team at all.
Before I walked into Checkr, as we were developing that one piece of advice that my manager actually gave to me was, Hey, why don’t you start with. The customer stories and the customer logos so that the executives understand that you’ve actually done this legwork and you’ve actually talked to the customer about their needs and how customer education will solve it.
Instead of just talking about an abstract vision. And I thought that was brilliant.
Dave Derington: [00:18:43] That is really great. I think I did something very similar. What I like to do is come in and just get the lay of the land and meet with people. And I think it was good for my manager to acknowledge my one-on-ones with him, where he said, Oh, you’re.
You just took off and just started finding the people that you needed to talk to and to learn from and stuff, and start having these conversations. And that’s another way that people immediately start seeing, Oh, you’re in, you’re not only here to do the job, but you’re also very interested in what we do and you’re learning from us and you’re helping towards, I think what I would Mark as our next big bullet, which is building allies and starting to share
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:24] vision.
Love it. All right, Dave, what do you think about that?
Dave Derington: [00:19:28] All right. We’ll stop. Talk about this because you and I, again, on this parallel journey, we are so super passionate about customer education. this is the thing now that’s happening. and I would, again, if you’re listening to this and you’re not quite in customer, and you’re looking at how this can help you out.
Take note, because this is a big part of our day to day, you’re here to build allies. you’re here to share your vision as that first, maybe 30 days to maybe 60 days time, you have a great job. You are this new customer educational leader. People are already looking at you saying, cool, can you do this?
Can you do this? Can you do this? Do this. The first thing you need to do as you’re meeting with people is you’re going to get a really clear sense of who quote. Air quotes time who gets it. And who does not, who gets what customer education is as opposed to just a training team or something like that.
Now I think Adam, tell me what you think about those, but allies can actually take any kind of shape that means, your team members should by default be natural allies. and they’ll have a lot of influence because they know people, they know each other, they are, or have been in the environment hopefully a lot longer than you have.
Not super helpful, but it’s not enough. So what other kinds of people do you actively connect with right off the bat?
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:52] Yeah. first of all, I hope that your own manager will be an ally
Of
Dave Derington: [00:20:55] course, they better be otherwise. You’ve got
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:59] a problem.
Problem. Of course. you’ll have other managers that are your cross-functional partners, or maybe your direct peers, who again, hopefully will be allies and really have a high, get it factor around why you’ve come in a lot of the time, customer success leaders.
If you don’t report directly into customer success are huge professional services, same thing. but I also think that sometimes you can find unexpected allies and I think there’s value here in, being able to have more informal. Chats and coffees. And what have you with other people at the company who you might just notice are talking about education in an interesting way, or just happened to bring it up or maybe even have educational backgrounds.
So you might find, for instance, a product manager who worked at an ed tech company in their past, or has done some in product education in a previous life. A lot of the time designers are really sympathetic to. Instructional design approaches as well, because there’s a lot in common between visual design and experience design and instructional design.
Dave Derington: [00:22:01] totally. It, somebody I’ve also found to be very helpful is sometimes you’ll find project managers, like onboarding project managers or a big program level managers. one in the company that I just met last. Month or so since I’ve been here, she’s amazing. And she’s Oh, I understand all this about the LMS, because we use this one here and then you run into people and you start talking with people and all of a sudden you find unexpected allies like you’re talking about.
but you can’t really just stop there. You should always be looking and asking and probing to find people that would help tell the story. for example, A lot of the people that benefit from the work that we do in education here at outreach are more on the SDR and, a sales development rep.
These are the people that are cold calling stuff and going for us and talking with them and doing a day in the life with them or shadowing them super helpful. And some of these folks have just amazing insight as well. If I was going to train, this is what I would do because you’re getting into their head.
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:06] Yeah, it’s great. Sometimes when you’re working with folks who will ultimately either be your subject matter experts or a proxy for your end user and, because if they’ve done what you’re learning audience is going to be doing, then they’re going to have a reasonable idea about what resonates or doesn’t resonate with them.
I do think it’s also important to know. Because those groups can cut either way. You might have some people that are super enthusiastic about what you’re doing and other people who might just think they know better. you have to be able to make a decision about how much time you’re going to spend, trying to win over folks who are resistant versus finding people who are natural allies.
And, for me, at least I always prefer to start at least with the latter, unless I know that somebody is going to be a clear blocker to the vision. But I’d rather work with people who. Get it and who are bought in because a lot of the time with customer education, when you start winning people over is once you start getting those quick wins and have something concrete out there, and you don’t want to spend too much time just pitching this abstract vision to someone who’s not going to be on board, no matter how many times you pitch it’s better to actually just start doing the work
Dave Derington: [00:24:14] and then show them through your actual vision as it comes to life.
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:18] Yeah. And the people who do get it and our body and they’ll help break down walls for you. They become your advocates. And in some ways it’s like a hiring someone based on a referral instead of, just having them in the applicant pool. And only being able to look at the high level details of their resume.
It means a lot when there’s someone who is willing to vouch for it,
Dave Derington: [00:24:37] They got your back there. They’re helping evangelize your talents. And yeah, that makes a big difference.
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:43] Yeah. And really make sure to appreciate those people. we’re talking when we’re talking about allies, it seems sometimes like that’s a, like a cynical thing or that we’re just playing corporate politics.
But I truly believe that having people in the organization who really want to partner with you and who believe in what you do, like sincerely appreciate them connect with them because they are really going to help do great things together.
Dave Derington: [00:25:07] Absolutely. So I’m going to put you on the spot here for a sec.
And as we talked about, you’re going to love it. You always do great here. vision. Now, if you’re like me, all the meetings I had with that as I go through the new organizations, one of the things that I do after I get them to brain dump and tell me their interest in their passions and how you think education can help is I go, okay, Now, I’ve got all that out of the way.
I want to share you some ideas that I have, and this is my vision for where things are going again, all stemming from an understanding which you have a book out Adam that really helps to frame up what education and customer education and specific is all about here. So this is really hard. We are seeing customer education as an emerging vertical.
It’s a thing it’s its own field in its own. So part of our vision, I, and I would. Say every one of you is listening to this podcast. Stop and think about this right now. The most important thing that we as a team, as a clan, as a network of people can do is really start to evangelize customer education is this is how we go about it.
These are the basic tenants of it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:17] and answer those two questions. Like how is customer education, a craft, not just an activity and what does it do at its best for your business? You’re going to go a long way.
Dave Derington: [00:26:27] And okay. So Adam, then if you could lightly summarize what you have written in your book.
Tell us about what that is.
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:38] in the book, I talk about the fact that your customer education approach has to match your business’s approach. So if you are a business that is really indexing on growth and trying to acquire a lot of new customers, a lot of early stage venture backed businesses are like this, then.
As customer education, what you’re really doing is you’re helping scale out your customer success function. And that means you might be indexing on providing a lot of free education and really focusing on reach. If you are primarily supporting, say education services in a more mature business. then you’re indexing a little more.
On revenue or at least on cost recovery, but you’re probably also focusing on providing a really deep, meaningful, experienced your customers. That’s actually going to drive longer-term adoption or retention. you know what I say in my book, because there isn’t just one way to do this, But I say in my book is match what your business is trying to accomplish.
Dave Derington: [00:27:40] And that’s, don’t you think though, that’s at odds with some folks that might come in from a more traditional, more stayed, educational world, right? Not customer education, not SaaS. Do you think this is a different,
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:56] are you talking about people who may have been doing corporate L&D their entire lives and have focused mostly on an internal audience?
Are you talking about. Folks who have been doing education services forever. who are you talking about?
Dave Derington: [00:28:07] I actually, I think I might be talking about the latter because it’s really, you mentioned a phrase order taker. And quite often in education, it’s really easy and I’m dealing with this right now.
We do a huge volume of live training. And basically that’s part of my responsibility is to manage that. But then I’m thinking about my vision at the same time. So I could have this, somebody could come in and be the me and not be really well versed in customer education to go, Oh, I’m taking orders. Okay.
I’m doing, I’m putting butts in seats. I’m doing this kind of thing. Whereas. what I’m trying to do is come in and say, look, I have this vision and understanding of what customer ed is. And in fact, one of the first things that I did at them is I pulled this out of a playbook from long ago. I’ve made a team charter and I sat down with my team and said, let’s all think about what we’re here to do, because what is the challenge that you have when you tell it, when you have to tell people?
No. No that no is a big part of why I said I made a team charter, which is in this case, I’m ready and I’m going to paraphrase it, but we’re reducing, we’re here to reduce barriers to learning our product by building, delivering world-class educational products, to all our customers based on common roles and workflows.
And then I go on to say, we focus on scale first. Developing modular material from on-demand to instructor led to get our customers up to speed quickly and improve the way they work. Now, if you’ll notice some of the things that I put in there come directly out of, some lines of your definition of customer education.
But what I feel is I put this on an internal intranet page. I share this and I say, this is what we do. And they immediately, for example, I might get a request from marketing to do a video. I could put an instructional designer on that. Is that education. So that’s why I think we could so easily get influenced or be order-takers or it come at the back and call of anybody that thinks we need to meet training.
This is why a vision clearly stated written down, shared with everybody. People go, Oh, they don’t even have to get us customer education to know this is what our mission is
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:10] we think about. Yeah. And you’re bringing up two interesting, and I think distinct concepts here, which are a vision and then a mission or a charter or.
A methodology or whatever you want to call it because a charter or a mission really talks about what you do and what you don’t do. So it helps to find some of those boundaries, or at least talks about what’s most important to you in what you’re going to prioritize. And then you can start, you can cascade a lot of that into your values, how you do what you do, or what you prioritize as you do that because every organization is going to have something.
That they probably uniquely value in their approach or what they prioritize in their approach that other people don’t do, but that all has to roll up to a vision. And the vision is something that’s a little more ambitious, a little more aspirational, aspirational, a little more forward looking where are you going?
What is your team going to look like when it’s at its best? What’s it going to be doing for the business? And I’m going back to your question earlier about folks who have maybe been operating in a more state. Environment. if that’s how you feel about the work that you’ve been doing, then a vision at its best will help you elevate what you’re doing while still resonating with the business.
Cause you’re still talking about business impact. You’re still talking about how you’re going to help your customers and your business succeed. But you’re talking about it in a way that elevates the work that you do to something more meaningful.
Dave Derington: [00:31:33] Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s a good way to put it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:37] yeah.
I think that all makes sense. and depending on when you come into a team and what you’re being asked to do, that’ll probably influence the way that you approach your charter and your vision and your mission. But, Dave, I think that a lot of it also comes down to execution. We
Dave Derington: [00:31:53] have to do stuff.
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:55] I think that brings us to our last point. You got to deliver,
Dave Derington: [00:31:58] you got to deliver. Okay. let’s. Let’s use the standard approach that we have in scaling and growing, which is crawl, walk, run, right? That comes into play here. You it, for example, I’ve come into organizations where there’s some stuff and I don’t have as much work.
I have coming over other organizations where, Oh my God, I’ve got to burn everything down and rebuild it from scratch. to help leadership see value. This is immediately where you’re going to have to start thinking, all right. Is there some low hanging fruit? I think you’d call it quick wins before, right?
Adam Avramescu: [00:32:33] Yeah. same thing.
Dave Derington: [00:32:34] What Adam are you seeing as some, and again, everybody, this is different for every business and every organization that you are in after you get the lay of the land, what is it that you start seeing as some of that low-hanging fruit to help start driving your delivery? So maybe you can give me some examples.
Adam Avramescu: [00:32:59] I’m thinking here about something that I heard Kristen Swanson say at a meetup, which is you should start by finding that one tricky wicket that is causing pain for customers and solve that. Now, sometimes that might be something that’s actually related to your product functionality, but education can help them address that and solve that if you don’t have, a good resource for it.
You can create one. So a lot of teams, when you walk in and you’re starting an education team from scratch, they probably don’t even have a lot of information in a knowledge base or a help center. And that’s something that can be easy to document. If you’re walking into a more established team, then this can be a pain point in the teams, operations that are, that are, excuse me, that are already in existence.
Here. I am starting over after I can’t say words. so you know, that could be potentially doing a gap analysis to find, where are the major gaps in your content? It might be updating a key piece of content that has gone stale, or it might be creating something new that solves a key problem.
Dave Derington: [00:34:05] Yeah. And now, I’ve had Adam some other problems too. One of them is my LMS, was just chock full of junk. and not serving anything. And also I think one of the, even more. Pronounced things you can do is to look at that team. We were going back looping back to the beginning of our discussion.
We were talking about one-on-ones and getting to know people. One of the things that I commonly see is that sometimes perhaps you’re in a team that hasn’t had a leader for some time and people just organically started to do things because they’ve taken leadership from others that haven’t been a customer education leader.
So I’ve done a lot of work to sit down and go, Okay, that thing you’re doing there. Why are you doing that thing? And can I get help get that off your plate? And can I free you up to do the things that we know are more important? And in fact, they want to do even they want to do.
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:55] Yeah. I think if you’re doing that journalistic approach at the beginning, and you’re talking to your team and hearing what’s important to them and what gives them pain on a day-to-day basis, and you’re doing the same with your stakeholders and people who really represent the customer and the customer experience.
Then you can, at least in the back of your mind be filtering that through what would the effort level to solve this be? And what would the impact of solving this be? And you’ll probably find some things that, how to approach this problem, because you have an instructional background. Do you have a customer education background?
And so you can pattern match against something you’ve done before to solve this problem. And some of those problems are going to be. Low effort, high impact. And those are your quick wins at the end of the day. And those are also the areas where people are naturally going to respect and appreciate your approach a little bit more because you’re using your previous experience to solve a problem that this business is facing today.
Yep. And when you can do those things, that’s when you start to create a little bit of magic,
Dave Derington: [00:35:57] totally eight you’re delivering on something and a little bit, Adam, one of the other things that I advocate for is. At first, when you come into an organization, you may have your work style and such, but one of the things I like to do is take what we’re talking about here are these quick wins, these low hanging fruits and build a short from an agile terminology, a sprint.
in my case, I’ve elected for a half a quarter a month and a half, which is a decent amount of time to do some, not so trivial stuff. But those things that we did. Our critical cleaning up our LMS and some other stuff. and then those set us up for broader successes because as well as I do a lot of the work we do can be longer term bigger programs.
You’re building out an entire program. it’s going to take a long time. Let’s focus on what’s right in front of me and be able to push off on things that are not important.
Adam Avramescu: [00:36:45] Yeah. that totally makes sense. And as you’re doing this, you might also find that there are things that are already working really well today, and you can.
Continue to support and amplify them. And I’ve walked in. I’ve been in the situation of walking in and just being very humbled by the level of execution and innovation on my team and felt like one of the quick wins is even just helping to amplify and support the great work that they’re doing.
And if the team has been without a leader for a little while, that might be something that, folks are hungry for.
Dave Derington: [00:37:17] So are you saying that you’re going to say dish out some praise evangelize in a Slack channel that you have for wins and stuff that Hey, Jane here is amazing and Jane did this really cool thing.
And Joe went off and took that thing that Jane did and made this even better, things like that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:37:35] Yeah. and, to be thoughtful and specific as well about what, you’re, what you’re giving praise and recognition around, to make sure that they are things that are. That are high value in terms of the accomplishments, but also that they really reflect some observation of what your team member did really well to make that happen.
Cause that goes a lot more, it goes a longer way than just saying, Hey, great job on this.
Dave Derington: [00:38:00] That’s really cool. And Adam, I want to add in one more thing here, and that is something that I end up struggling with and. I’m a pretty geeky techie person with an inquisitive mind.
I like to learn everything I can about environment, but one of the thing as you’re going to start delivering that. You’re a leader, you’re a manager. You have a team. Hopefully if you also may be in an environment where you’re the only person you’re doing it all, in my case right now, I am not. And in one thing that is a challenge.
And I think this is particularly appropriate for customer education because we’re developing a lot. We’re developing ourselves as new leaders as we go. One of the things that I struggle with is you’re coming into a team. You’re trying to help them out, but there’s also a trap in there. I’ve leaned into something too far, every once in a while, and have that risk of becoming an independent contributor.
That’s not me. I even had told my team look, while I want to go through all these enablement programs and all this training and all this stuff too. I’m going to do a little bit of that, but I’m here really to focus on helping to be a lever for you to be successful. You’re a manager now. So that’s, this may be obvious.
This may be something that we all should know, but. I fight that still, even to this day and when to bring that to the surface.
Adam Avramescu: [00:39:19] Yeah. I struggle with that sometimes too. And especially in a situation where you come in as a manager and not as, the one person show who built everything up, you’re not going to have to engage as deeply with the subject matter and that’ll come over time.
But if you spend all your time trying to build your credibility on your knowledge of the product and all the technical nuances, Then that also means that you’re probably not spending time focusing on driving other things. So that’s really have to think, and maybe we can have a different episode at some point about just, skills for, different ways for customer education leaders to lead.
But if you want to roll some of that up, you can lead through, being. More dictatorial or a command leader. Like we talked about earlier, you can lead through influence and trying to drive inspiration. You can lead through being a really, supportive, person or a force of stability, like the coach, or you can lead by being the domain expert in your area and having the most knowledge about the product or the most knowledge about training or instructional design.
All of those are valid ways to lead, but, by focusing on building your skills in one area, you might be sacrificing your ability to execute in
Dave Derington: [00:40:37] another, So are you a Jew? Denaris are you John Snow or are you a Tyrian? No, they all have different aspects of that
Adam Avramescu: [00:40:44] there. I’m just starting the series.
I think I’m a Ned stark. So I, I think good things coming for him.
Dave Derington: [00:40:52] All right. And with a nice solid game of Thrones reference, let’s wrap this up.
Adam Avramescu: [00:40:59] Okay. So if you want to learn more, we have a podcast website@customerdoteducationthatishttpscolonslashslashcustomer.education, where you can find all of the related material. Sometimes blog posts. We’ll keep posting content up there for you.
And please, if you found value in this podcast, share it with your friends, share with your peers, share with your network. And please leave us a review on your podcast app of choice to help us find the others on Twitter. I’m at
Dave Derington: [00:41:35] and I’m @davederington.
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:36] We’re on LinkedIn. We’re on all those places.
We’re everywhere. I reach
Dave Derington: [00:41:40] out to us. And once again, audience. Thanks for joining us. We’re really happy to have you here. We ask you to go out, educate experiment, and find your people. Thanks everybody.
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:53] Thanks for listening.