Dave Derington: [00:00:00] All right. Dumpster fire cheese. What shouldn’t happen? Parler Facebook integration.
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 growth. What dead
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:34] in its tracks track.
Dave Derington: [00:00:37] I am Dave Derington
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:38] and I am Adam Avramescu as always. Now I know Dave, we have definitely recorded on this day in a previous year because it is once again, national pizza with the works except anchovies day.
Dave Derington: [00:00:52] Why do people hate on anchovies? You know what, actually, I actually researched that real quick. I, we were really curious about this and we’re all about learning, right? Sure. So let’s so what I learned, because I’ve always asked this, like, why ant jokes? Why everybody hate Android as well? Not everybody hates anchovies.
Traditionally Italians have been putting fish on bread for at least 2000 years.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:12] Original fish sauce, were the original ketchup was more of a fish sauce that the Romans used.
Dave Derington: [00:01:17] Yeah, it’s good. It’s just an, at least in the United States, at least where we’re at, maybe not that big a deal. I
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:23] hear you. I would, I am a big anchovy fan on pizza.
Sometimes they can have super cell bombs, but, I’ll take it with the works with, or without anchovies. Anyway, we’ve definitely done this before, because I remember us, recording on national pizza, without anchovies day. But. I do think it’s a good time for us to be reminiscing a bit because this episode we are celebrating some milestones for CELab.
First of all, I know. so first of all, this is episode number. What Dave. number 50. and as bill who hosts the helping cells radio podcast, and he actually has a new one now called connecting the dots. He’s mentioned this to us, and I think we did an interview with him when we were first starting this podcast a couple of years ago.
And you said most podcasts don’t make it past episode 11. I believe.
Dave Derington: [00:02:10] Yeah, it was something like 11 or 12 because we’d made a big deal about how he wanted to be number 12 when we got there. And we did.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:16] Yeah. I blew that away. Super happy to be at 50 and to have spoken to so many greats from the worlds of customer education, along the way, including leaders, CEOs, practitioners, and all sorts of folks, as well as having explored a lot of hypotheses and debunked, many myths and misconceptions along the way.
Dave Derington: [00:02:36] Yeah. So let’s say, let’s see where we want to go next. We want to share those thoughts on where we been and where we’re going. As we step into 2021, good riddens hindsight is 2020 literally this time. and we’re going to have some fun along the way. So let’s start off Adam, by doing some Q and a, what do you think?
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:58] I love Q and a let’s open the mailbag.
Dave Derington: [00:03:01] Let’s do okay. We don’t have a, there we go. All right. We’ll get to the reflections in a moment. and we were just talking about this before we started this day. It’s been a really stressful time for many people, and I almost want to say all, but, I’m sure there’s some folks out there that are happy and that’s great, bless you for that.
But we wanted to have an opportunity for us just to let
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:22] loose. I agree. I think it’s high time for that. So we asked our followers to submit questions to us like we do in our typical mailbag episodes, but we had a cache and that catch was, we asked for off topic, silly, fun, random questions, and people definitely brought their a game with funny, intriguing, absurd, or otherwise random questions to the table.
So big, thanks to everyone who submitted questions. we’ll love a few of them back and forth, Dave, and I will take a crack at answering some of these and then we’ll do a lightning round later. and we’ll intersperse that with, just like you said, Dave, we’ve done two years of this podcast.
We’ll talk about what’s happened over the past two years and some of our thoughts for the year ahead. but yeah, let’s pick up a few of these questions. So question number one submitted to us. Dave, you want to read that?
Dave Derington: [00:04:10] I will read it. Okay. Considering that COVID-19 has turned so many things upside down in both work and personal lives, what has been one new or old hobby you picked up on during this time?
And. That has been giving you some joy these days. I like this question and I’ll go first. I was doing some thinking about this and what are the things that I enjoy doing or what I used to enjoy doing. I’ve found that well, number one, I’ve started to get a little bit more back into reading, as we’ve shifted to more digital stuff, I haven’t done that, but, I love games.
So board games, video games, whatever. we’ve been doing a lot of that. And that’s really brought me a lot of joy, especially it’s easy to put everything else on hold. when you fire up a long form gave them civilization six, and it just, the world melts around you. So that’s what I’ve been doing a lot more of.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:04] Yeah. I have to actually, I have, I got an Nintendo switch. For my birthday, which was right before the whole lockdown started. And so I’ve been really enjoying spending some time playing some new games because I didn’t have a console for years. Like the last console I actually had was, a PlayStation one.
So I’m catching up on many generations of games that have been published onto the Nintendo switch, including some new ones. I think there’s a temptation sometimes to say, Oh, I picked up all of these like super productive. Hobbies, but it’s a global pandemic. Everyone is stressed. You and I still have our jobs.
We still record this podcast. We’ve been speaking at conferences. Like I think it’s just as important to practice self-care and have, moments for yourself.
Dave Derington: [00:05:48] Yeah, it does. I think it’s funny that we both turned to gaming, which, it’s, It’s always been a hot button in my life when people are like, games, that’s a waste of time.
No, it’s not,
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:57] no promote creativity. And in fact, maybe we’ll do an episode on what some of our favorite video games have taught us about customer education
Dave Derington: [00:06:04] too. We absolutely should do that. okay. What’s the next question.
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:09] Question. Number two is when we get a lot, actually, I’m always curious about your recording setup.
What equipment do you use to record the podcast, Dave?
Dave Derington: [00:06:18] I have a lot of different things that I’ve picked up along the way, but my go-to is I have a Berenger directional microphone. You can pick up a bulker shard has a, I’ll probably put this in the show notes. Doka shard turned me on to these devices, the real sheep.
they don’t cost a lot of money. I’ve got a boom mic. I’ve got, pop guard and what I really love and the center of my entire setup has been my focus, Scarlet, I’ve, Scarlet to I, and, I can’t remember. It’s an eight port one. They’re amazing devices that make, have XLR connections, not USB.
it really helps. I’ve got great quality. I don’t often have a lot of noise, and it’s not really all that expensive, so it’s great stuff. But of course we use a Udacity.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:03] Yeah. We both use, or the Essity to record. we are using zoom for doing our backup recording. I am on the USB mic train, so I don’t have the audio input.
I use a blue Yeti. Mike, and I haven’t always set to the directional a cardioid setting. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:07:20] And that’s a key, that’s the first thing that people always ask when they go, Oh, my audio sounds like crap. Yeah. Get a decent quality mic. Go with what Adam has, blue Yeti’s are great. There’s a lot of Mike’s out there.
Look at what podcasters and YouTube is. Use Twitch, streamers. Not that expensive, but if you’re going to invest in you, the only thing I will say here is that if you invest in USB, make sure you get a really good quality mic that does filtering. Otherwise, if you get a cheap directional mic and you just stick it in via USB, the performance various.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:50] yeah, no, I’ve enjoyed my Yeti. it’s still all about the environment around you. Even if you set it to cardioid and directional, you still want some sort of soundproofing and sand damping. If you’re doing like truly. not professional audio. If you’re doing truly professional audio, you have a much fancier set up than what either you or I have.
if you’re doing recording for e-learning or something where you need a little bit of extra oomph. Okay. Dave, question number three. and this is number three, this is three. What are three learning objectives? You would want people to master to learn about us?
Dave Derington: [00:08:21] Oh my God. okay. So here’s my apolitical response that.
I was thinking about this and a lot of the questions that keep coming up and out in social media are, Oh, this can’t happen or this shouldn’t happen this way because something I heard hyperbole, I think we should. All of us, this there’s, nobody left out of us. Every single one of us should probably spend some time learning and refreshing civics because I had met, had spent a long time.
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:52] Yeah. How about you? I think so. I’m trying to phrase it as a learning objective by the end of my course on the U S election process, I would say, the learner should be able to, I think mine would be about the electoral college. Like the learner would be able to describe how, votes are allocated in the electoral college, and ultimately how they determine the outcome of the presidential
Dave Derington: [00:09:16] vote.
Yeah. I think actually if we learned a lot just by happenstance, but it would be good for us to all have a formal refresher in e-learning course, something like that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:27] it’s one of those things where as a learning professional, you often want to focus people towards the areas of high complexity.
You don’t want to spend a lot of time telling them the things that they already know, but really try to get them like deeper into the areas where the most misconceptions. And I think. For me, at least like you, you described it earlier. There are a lot of areas where people are speculating that something’s going to happen, but don’t actually know what’s behind it.
I think the, one of the most common ones is the electoral college. Should we pick a third one? You
Dave Derington: [00:09:53] have an idea for a third. Yeah. I, in my vote here, getting election day, my vote would be more to talk about how to make sure that you. Can you use your whole person, your whole mind to understand the options that you have looking, discounting bias that you, that we all have.
I know I have bias and being able to ascertain actual truth and from a lot of scurrilous data points.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:21] Yeah. I think that’s important, especially with so much misinformation around elections and around, Both the, the process and the candidates, how to do independent research. I would maybe nominate one around, I think again, from a learning perspective, it’s always helpful to provide people with, very practical, actionable takeaways.
So I might structure a learning objective around, if you’re looking to get involved in electoral politics, whether it’s, volunteering at the polls or helping with get out the vote, efforts or voter registration. like what are the actionable ways that I can do that? Maybe writing a job aid or something like that’d be like super easy to access.
Yeah, that’d
Dave Derington: [00:10:59] be really cool. I guess we’re really doubling down on the fact that we’re educators and being apolitical here, but knowledge is power don’t. Don’t all. Don’t let misinformation take hold.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:11] Absolutely. all right. Couple more questions. And then we can start to move towards some reflections.
Dave Derington: [00:11:18] Yeah, let’s get to the next one. I’ll read this one because I really liked this question. are our question or asked or says, I just got back from visiting several national parks and spent a lot of time reading interpretive science, those little panels that tell you what you’re looking at a trail or a Vista.
If you are friends were in charge of interpretive signage at a national park. What new thing would you introduce in either content or form? Super good question.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:47] Good question. I think you’ve done more national parks than I have recently, but I think there’s two that come to mind for me. One would be, and I don’t know exactly how I would implement this, but what I think is probably like accessibility considerations, right?
So if you’re at the national park and you have some sort of. Disability or consideration, I don’t know that the signs like as implemented have, ha have designed for all of those use cases. So I’m sure there’s work to be done there, but like the one company,
Dave Derington: [00:12:17] like your glasses fogging up because you have a mask on and you’re in an area where no, you can’t see
Adam Avramescu: [00:12:24] a new accessibility
Dave Derington: [00:12:25] consideration.
Some people literally happened to me. Literally happened to me. It was embarrassing.
Adam Avramescu: [00:12:29] No, the one I can think of though, That would be very easy to implement as or maybe not easy, but at least a very tangible is, when you have those signs and you’re looking at, a landscape in front of you, you always have to be looking up and down right.
Between the landscape itself. And then the sign that tells you what all the landmarks are. why not make it more of a plate glass or something like that, where it actually like align. Your viewpoint with maybe like a marker. That’s got like depth of field in front of it. so that you can actually look through the glass to the landmark, see information about it in front of you.
Dave Derington: [00:13:03] Yeah, I like that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:04] Alright. What’s yours, Dave.
Dave Derington: [00:13:06] me, I’m going to take a more technology approach with an app. I see these apps coming out all trails is a really good one. and it has a feature in it that I think the national park system could maybe even have it. So I didn’t look prior to doing this, but what I really want is a good mobile app that is offline.
Give you a CA give you an example. No, y’all I went to Yellowstone last year and Yellowstone was amazing for a lot of the interpretive stuff. Although there’s a lot of things in Yellowstone that had nothing, They had no marker. one of my favorite ones, there was a little river that’s near the North entrance, Gardner as the town.
So you go through gardener and you’re going up the path to the main, main center of Yellowstone. And this is amazing little river. And part of it is just. Absolutely freezing cold. And part of it is boiling hot, like literally. And there’s a lot of people that are, so you talk to them like what’s going on?
Oh, this is where the is coming, man. And they mix. And if you go sit right here, it keeps you like perfectly warm and not so freezing cold. And it was like amazing, but there was no background on it. I want a mobile app that I can just download. And I say, where am I going? It kicks everything on my phone.
And then as I’m going through, I can do an AR mode where you do like your class thing, you hold it up and I can see the landscape, or I can ask for more information. It’s most of what I would need would be there. Even those. Spurious type questions are like, Whoa, what if, yeah. I’ve got that. So it’s like your Wikipedia offline.
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:32] Yeah. that’s super cool. I asked to you who asked this question? what she would do cause she’s been hiking a lot of national parks recently and she said something very similar since she would do a QR code, on the signs that would give you a little bit more like context and more of a kind of a museum like tie in experience that’s digital.
So I think that’s
Dave Derington: [00:14:50] a goal. But the caveat in this case. So we just came back from Raniere and a few a month or two ago. Beautiful. It was one of the best national parts I’ve actually ever been to. And I could see her near from my house. It was just amazing experience near 11,000 feet up. But the problem is there is zero wifi in most of that part.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:09] so if you did
Dave Derington: [00:15:10] that, yeah, so close to
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:13] there should be wifi
Dave Derington: [00:15:13] everywhere. Starlink Mont Alon, a hundred bucks a month, something like that anyway. but no, I would just presume offline access. I don’t want offline access I’m out in nature. I don’t want to be getting emails and stuff. So if you have that QR code, it should be geared up to work with all
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:27] phones.
Really good point.
Dave Derington: [00:15:29] and also I want something to remind me to get gas because the one thing that I, the freak out moment I had is I’m way up on the mountain. I’m coming down the slope. There’s no guardrails on a lot of those Hills. I’m running out of gas. I’m starting to freak out.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:43] Yeah. And especially once you’re in the parks and the, there’s no gas for miles at a time.
Yeah. I hear that one. Okay. Last question for this round. And then we’ll share some reflections. We’ll come back and do another round of questions. if you weren’t leaders in the customer education field, what would you want to,
Dave Derington: [00:16:01] you want to start off with this one?
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:03] yes, a rock band, or I guess if I had to pick something in the working world, I don’t know. I love being a customer education leader. if I had to pick a parallel field to be a leader, I think I would probably be unqualified to do it. I’d probably need to work my way.
Up through the ranks, but probably one of the fields that’s a relative of customer education, like customer success or product model. Yeah. Customer marketing. Like I think those would be fun too.
Dave Derington: [00:16:30] Yeah. there’s definitely a track going upwards, professional services, getting into customer success and leading customer success.
I would advocate for that. that would be really good because I think. The DNA of customer success does include enough people with an educational background. A lot of people come in and either new or they come in from like sales or something. Maybe I’m getting that wrong, but yeah. Cool.
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:52] Okay. What would you lead Dave?
Dave Derington: [00:16:54] I want to have a little, the ambiguity here because my career has been odd. I started off as a scientist, but then I’ve done. I’ve been a web developer or I’ve had my own business. I’ve run gaming events for big companies. I’m a startup person. So for me, it would be an easy, it what you’re saying about product I lean towards.
I’d really love to be in development of a product from scratch. And I feel like having the background of education would change my thinking about developing that product, because I think a common thing, product developers, or product teams don’t necessarily consider because you get. And this isn’t a net, this is reality.
You get really busy and you get really focused and you lose attention on the customer and what they’re actually trying to do. And you think, Oh, my product is easy to learn.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:40] Of course. Yeah. So it’s really good to bring that insight. Plus you’re a product guy. You love understanding how technology works,
Dave Derington: [00:17:45] right?
Yeah. The other thing I really want to do is be a YouTube influencer of some sort like
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:50] the Paul
Dave Derington: [00:17:52] brothers. Yeah, maybe I really like Joe Rogan, don’t control is doing a good job. There’s, there’s a ton of podcasts out there and people that do it more full-time, is, it’s just really interesting.
the fact that, and I’ll get to why as we get into reflections, now, let me just cut it off there because then maybe I can explain a little bit why I love that and why it’s really
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:13] well. Yeah, let’s do that. So we wanted to share some reflections in both of us. but. Dave, you’re taking the first segment just to reflect a little bit on the past two years and what some of your observations have been.
Dave Derington: [00:18:25] Yeah. I think you scaffold a really good framework for us, Adam, to talk about like the breadth, the arc of what we’ve been doing over the past two years and, we want to talk about, okay, what’s it like been doing what has been like for us to do the podcast together? Who are the kinds of people that we really value that we’ve spoken to?
I’d say all of them, but of break that down a little bit more in my opinions, where have we been? What conferences do we go to? what was our career transition during this entire phase things we’ve enjoyed the most and where we’ve seen our industry, our new category go. so let me back into that by saying first, I’m blown away, you and I started.
The first time we really talked, I think was at Sedna. And it was just one of those fortuitous happenings where I want to talk to you. And you’re like, I want to talk to you. Let’s go talk. And we talked and kept that dialogue going. and then we decided to start this podcast. It’s it?
This is one of the things that I really value in my life. And it brings me energy to be able to set myself aside with a friend and a partner to say, we’re learning, We’re learning together and we’re open. and sometimes you do things that I really value. Like you say, no, I think you’re wrong on that.
And let’s struggle through this or, Hey, that’s a good idea. Let’s double down on that. having that kind of journey to explore this space has been refreshing. It’s just been really cool. in that is. This is a new category, right? So the kind of people that we’ve been interacting and asking to join us on this journey have been those that we’ve often had a parallel journey with too.
I can think of some of the people that, I’m going to give Bill Cushard first call out because if it weren’t for him, I don’t think I would be doing this at all. I know how you feel about that, but he’s just kinda been at that ally. definitely that he was doing it right. he’s podcasting, he’s doing stuff.
And I remember talking to him like, I’d really to try YouTube and I want to do my own podcast and he was always there to help always. so bill, I really appreciate you for that. but there’s a few other people, indeed. I think one of the, one of the, eyeopening. Podcasts that we did was the one with Wendy Hamilton that I facilitated.
And, I should get over this, but when you’re talking above the line with senior leadership and in this case, she’s the CEO. You have that first moment of, Oh wow. I’m talking to the head of this company. That’s a great company. And who am I to be talking with? a person of this ilk, but CEO’s are people too, right?
We’re all in this journey together in the fact that we’re the way that we’ve structured. This podcast has been really great where I am. I really appreciate the ability of, I have a message. We have a message and I can clearly engage with most anybody to discuss the market. And, Wendy’s episode was great.
We talked about a lot of cool things. This is some great insights. Other people I super valued. And if I don’t mention you in this podcast and I talked to you don’t think any less of it because every one of you has been really important. We’ve had great every single podcast, every single interview has been amazing.
Linda Schwaber Cohen. I want to call you out as great friend and ally. It’s been fun talking with you. Donna Weber. we’ve talked at length several times at some virtual walk and talks recently. It’s been great. I’ll talk about Daniel quick. I didn’t get to run to work with that interview, but I’ve talked with Daniel online a lot.
and then, last but not least, I would say Maria Manning-Chapman. if you’re listening, I’m speaking to you. Thank you so much for really bringing us into your universe of educational services. And thinking about TSIA is, engagement. I think all of these discussions have opened my mind a lot, challenged me to think about what we’re doing, but opened a stage of a conversation.
So it’s, that’s been exciting and I guess I should. we can talk a little bit more about stuff. I’m just going to go through my points. job changes, I was at Gainsight and then I moved to Azuqua. Then I moved to outreach. It’s been a wild ride. And, you could talk to yours too, but it’s, we’ve seen you and I both seen three different and totally different environments.
And that’s also helped in my perspective. I think it’s been a little crazy it’s wow. Okay. Here. And these are the things I deal with and I get, when I was at Gainsight, I saw the world one way and then I shifted to a much smaller company and I saw the world a completely different way and a much more technical way.
And then I went to outreach and now I’m learning about sales. It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn about, but I’ve never done. And it’s also a technology. So these have helped me and it, I don’t necessarily encourage that you job changed a lot, but if you’re. Up and coming, getting into this field, trying to learn things.
This is a great way to do it. you don’t necessarily want to seek out another job when you have an amazing one, but you should have your mind open and talk about those opportunities. because you never know whether they’re going to make a life altering change for you. and then finally, the last thing I’ll wrap on is like, where has customer education gone in the last two years alone?
Adam, I would say this, I feel very strongly that we, as a network of customer education professionals have declared customer education. As a thing know as a category, it’s its own market. It’s a small one. But I think that’s clearly in my mind, that’s clearly differentiated from two, three, four years ago.
And in those cases, several years ago, we didn’t know what we’re. we knew what we were doing, but we couldn’t really label it concretely. We talked customer education. Now I think the differentiation is, you see all of our peers and vendors and other entities alike are starting to be able to say.
and we’re doing this intentionally, this is what customer education is. And now we’re getting the gravitas and the people in the network around that. It’s not our thing. It’s our group’s thing. It’s come a long way to maturing. So I don’t, I think we got a long way to go, but I’m very optimistic.
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:28] Yeah, I am too. Thank you, Dave, for sharing your reflections and I’ll have a moment to share mine later as well. I agree with you in a lot of. Areas. So I don’t know if a mine will be even as long as yours. it’ll probably be a lot of, I agree with Dave, but, we’re, segmenting this out. So we’re going to return to our fun, random, Q and a.
Dave Derington: [00:24:50] Yeah. All right.
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:52] Question six, Dave, if you were to acquire a new non-work-related skill, what would it be?
Dave Derington: [00:24:59] I want to learn Ableton live. Ableton live as a digital audio workstation. Oh, nothing about it. I love music. I miss music and it’s, I listen to a lot of, I listened a lot of Soma FM is one of my favorite networks, ambient electronic kind of sometimes dance sometimes trance.
I just love to be able to look at that and say, I could make this whole thing by myself and have so much fun. So that’s what I want.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:26] Yeah. I think for me it would be similar. It would be music and audio production or guitar. I’ve I very poorly play guitar. I’d like to be able to play it.
Dave Derington: [00:25:35] you should do that.
Learn. Leeka Layli too. It’s always fun. we could have our own little intro version on ukulele.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:40] I don’t know about that, but a guitar for sure. Okay, next question is the opposite, right? If you were to unlearn something, what would it be and why?
Dave Derington: [00:25:51] Why don’t you leave? Cause I’m still thinking this is a hard one for me.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:55] Let’s see. Okay. I think the thing I would unlearn is I have a habit of interrupting people and, I’m definitely, I’m long-winded sometimes when I talk, so I think I would. Unlearn my habit of interrupting people or just like speaking for the sake of speaking and learn more, a more practiced way of like just stopping and listening.
Dave Derington: [00:26:24] I like that. And that’s been a recurrent theme as I’ve talked with people and I’ve been reflective and gone through performance reviews. It doesn’t really come up as a performance issue, but I think. I would I’m resonate. I resonate with us because I think I have the problem both at both you and I are vocal and outspoken.
And I feel like that almost comes in. Like when, for example, I was in a meeting with my leaders the other day or earlier today, and I wasn’t speaking up. You’re like, Whoa. Are you okay, Dave, as you’re usually pretty verbal, I’m like, no, I’m actually listening. And actually I would, in speaking to that, this is a, this is an unlearned.
I think I tend to like, just try to solve problems and I try to work on things quickly and then you want to fill the void. And I would like to unlearn that feeling of having to deliver so fast to allow myself the moment to allow. The knowledge and information to flood in and the process
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:30] to get into the problem before you solve the problem.
Dave Derington: [00:27:32] Yeah. I’ve been doing more meditation every morning. My family, we all of us, including the kids. We have meditation time every morning. And at first I’m like, ah, I don’t know about this. And then I realized how much of a change it is to open up the space.
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:45] Yeah. I love that.
Dave Derington: [00:27:48] let me take the next one.
How about this? What drives you, Adam and Dave every day, lots of people have certain rituals or things that they do to serve their lives, North star beacon. It helps them in their work, in their personal lives. So I’m interested in hearing what’s your, so Adam, what’s your North star.
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:07] Oh, to be such a big question. I. I think for me, like what drives me every day is the idea of doing things that are, that are innovative and making the world or the industry around me, better than I found it, but also doing it in a way that’s substantial. So I I guess in some ways, like what I usually wake up thinking is like, how can we build great things
Dave Derington: [00:28:33] together?
Yeah. And by we, it could be any group that you’re engaged with, right?
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:39] Yeah. It’s not just my team at Slack or it’s not just you and I working on this podcast, but that’s what I think. And I’m not always the person who’s going to lead that sometimes I’m part of a group contributing to a group that’s doing great things together and building great things together and it could be in personal life too.
Dave Derington: [00:28:57] Yeah. And that’s sometimes hard because I struggle with this in the context of I’m a leader. And I’m know I’m a leader, but I’m also a doer and it, and if I were to unlearn things and going back down, learn, one thing to unlearn is that as you transitioned from an IC to a manager, now I’ve done this back and forth several times.
You’ve got to let go learn to let go of that not letting other people do the work. Yeah. Yeah. I’d have to say for me, this is hard to like peel apart, but I’ve done a lot of work about those. I know I’ve taken a lot of surveys, I’ve I understand my Myers-Briggs type. there are a couple of other ones that are out there right now.
I’m an innovator. I like to ideate. I like to build. And what drives me? Is we, anybody I’m working with have a big audacious goal. And something super challenging, something that’s going to be hard, something that’s technically difficult. And we know that the value is going to be tremendous or we have a good hunch.
And I think that this is why we work well together, that I really love to come up with that big vision and then do whatever. Do whatever necessary within reason to get to that goal.
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:14] Yeah, I think you and I compliment each other in that sense. So we both value building and innovation, but we also take different approaches to it.
Like I think, like you mentioned, like you love having the big idea, you love thinking about the big meaty challenge. And then for me, I think I approach it a little bit more. Like I’m an editor at heart. I am a. I like to think about how to trans translate things into execution and how to break them down into steps and how to take like a very pragmatic approach towards building those things.
Dave Derington: [00:30:43] I value that a lot that questioning approach is, and me, I’ll talk out loud or I’ll say, Hey, what if? And I’ll throw a bunch of ideas together and you’re always super valuable at saying, Hey, wait a minute. Hey Dingleberry. Do you know how much time that’s going to take? And I’m like, Oh yeah, but what if, and then.
but, we’re all at underscores that we’re all like different team members and each leader has their own way of doing and going about it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:10] Yeah. And what I would say to our audience, too, if you haven’t done something like this is to do a personal values activity. I know I’ve done that in my own coaching and it’s been super helpful for me just to clarify, like, when I think about what my main values are, and why I value them and how I take those into my work in my life.
It’s been a super clarifying activity and it’s also helped me make big decisions in my life and in my
Dave Derington: [00:31:31] career. Yeah. something I would advocate for, there’s an app, and a platform called crystal knows. And it’s C R Y S T a L K N O w S not NOSC. dot com. Super fun and they do all the things and they will tell it will tell you like Evan Enneagram approach and the personality graph and they do your Myers-Briggs, go check it out it as a leader or even a practitioner is really important to you to know how you work so that you can interface with others a lot better.
Adam Avramescu: [00:32:01] Absolutely. Which actually brings me into the next question. What words do you say too much? And is this common with others, in customer education might actually is. Absolutely. as I listened to myself on this podcast, I become acutely aware of how often I say the word. Absolutely. And now, maybe some of our listeners won’t be able to unhear that either Dave what’s yours.
Dave Derington: [00:32:22] I recognize, I say that a lot too, because I think it’s a really positive affirming statement. there’s one. I say that, yeah, I say that. Okay. That’s another one.
Adam Avramescu: [00:32:31] Just those filler words.
Dave Derington: [00:32:33] Yeah. you recall Evan? Liberta, he’s my team member that runs our certification program. He and I actually got really intrigued and we’re working with an HR person at Gainsight, and we were talking about this very thing and she had said, what if you go to Toastmasters and what if you.
Challenge yourself as trainers and educators and instructional designers to take all that out of your language. And we actually used an idea around that, where we did internal betas and prototypes, but we had people do the Toastmasters thing where they marked off our homes and our eyes and challenged us to become better.
it was God brutal.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:10] He’s so stressed out the entire time.
Dave Derington: [00:33:13] if stress is a part of your day, Hey, sharp-edged
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:19] alright, Dave, I’m going to ask you this question because this is really a question for you. Not for me, three tech partnerships or integrations that need to happen in the next year.
And one that hopefully never happens because it would be a dumpster fire or detriment to all that is good in the world.
Dave Derington: [00:33:33] Good God.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:36] You’re the integrations guy.
Dave Derington: [00:33:38] I started thinking about this and I. I don’t have clear answers, so I’m going to talk my way through it. But one of the things that I know we have to figure out now, I am going to be talking to you as vendors, my friends and our peers who have products like this.
one of the biggest problems I have as I start going up market in building a program is I get an enablement person at a company, big company, X, whatever. I don’t know what company they are. But they say, Dave, can I get an export of all of the training records for my team? Okay. I do this pretty frequently.
You can automate it. There’s ways to do it, but you know what? I really want an integration I’d really love to have, and this would take some hubris. I think on a lot of companies, I want to wait for one LMS to talk to another LMS. I want it to be able to transition the records, not the content. So that enablement people can say, Oh yeah, my people are going through stuff and I don’t have to go ask you for anything.
And I know skills, or how’s the tool for those where you can actually have a customer log in and see those records. But I’m not quite, I want to go further. So if we can have an integration point that helps to bring stuff back and other systems, and I’m not talking to SCORM, I’m just talking the data. I would love to see as
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:57] part of one, part of the use case behind X API.
Isn’t it.
Dave Derington: [00:35:01] Yeah, it is, maybe we need to get our friend. Oh gosh. Why am I blanking on her name? Talk, talked to her list. Megan, maybe we need to get Megan and extended invite to Megan. Megan, if you’re listening, be nice to talk with you about how, because in customer education, we’re not quite ready to go to the SCORM level.
Always. We’re not ready to invoke X API, but we can be, and I’m there.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:22] I’m going to, I’m going to extend that invitation actually to any practitioner. In customer education, if you are doing really interesting things with X API, for customer education specifically, I would love to have you on the show.
Dave Derington: [00:35:36] Yeah, indeed.
A while I think. Are there any things that pop to mind for you?
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:43] no, I don’t. I don’t have a lot of great tech partnerships or integration ideas.
Dave Derington: [00:35:49] Okay. I can tell you that more of the things that I’m thinking of that I really would like to implement, and I know that there’s ways to do it. Let’s talk Pendo walk me.
Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:58] Digital adoption platforms.
Dave Derington: [00:36:00] Yeah. I feel like these are for me and this I’m not speaking for everybody. For me, I feel like they’re impenetrable and they’re complicated for me because I’m often not the one implementing them. So at least know at all three companies I’ve worked for somebody else in product marketing, customer success is own that platform.
I don’t get it. I get it, but. For me engaging, having the intervention in platform is something that I really want to do. And I know that there’s a, there’s other companies out there that are doing some pretty amazing stuff, Oh God, gosh. I’m trying to think about my friend that we interviewed earlier on Mason, Lev levy at swivel, AI platforms to help.
Yeah. Basically what I’m after is I want to learn more about microlearning. I know there’s apps out there, but I love some more integrative flow between my educational content in my LMS and a microlearning platform. I don’t want to really maintain multiple platforms. I want something that synergizes and seamlessly integrates everything together.
And then even ideally puts that somewhere in context of my application. So people aren’t hunting and pecking and going everywhere. a third thing I’d really love to see is, and I’ve seen this and you did it before it Optimizely. I want more, what do we call that? Federated content? Yeah. because it keeps coming up, somebody lost, they don’t know where to go and they’re over in support somewhere.
I need to get them back. You can do that through links and navs, and you did a really great job at optimized way to solve that problem. Did you do that with a platform or was that a non native JavaScript type overlay solution?
Adam Avramescu: [00:37:35] No, Dave, we’re getting awfully on topic on this. this podcast is supposed to be fun off topic.
Dave Derington: [00:37:40] Oh, I’m sorry. Hey, but this is, This is a question on customer. This is integration and partnerships to me. That’s how I interpreted.
Adam Avramescu: [00:37:46] we had three separate forums. We had an LMS, a knowledge-based platform and a community platform. They’re all three separate platforms with a federated search.
that was solar search powered as the standard. and then a lot of, CSS to unify the theming and branding and navigation.
Dave Derington: [00:38:01] Yeah. Okay. You went off topic, you went off topic.
Adam Avramescu: [00:38:04] Give me the top, give me the off topic. Dumpster fire. What’s the dumpster fire. When you don’t want to say.
Dave Derington: [00:38:08] Oh, don’t want to see.
Yeah. What’s one you don’t use. I was going to give you one. I didn’t give you
Adam Avramescu: [00:38:11] one. You do want to see,
Dave Derington: [00:38:13] I want to move. I want steam humble bundle EA X-Box to integrate one login so I can play all my games from one place.
Adam Avramescu: [00:38:23] Amazing. Love it.
Dave Derington: [00:38:24] All right. Dumpster fire cheese. What shouldn’t happen? Parlor Facebook integration.
Adam Avramescu: [00:38:34] Okay. moving on.
Dave Derington: [00:38:40] Oh, my God. Take a breath. Now it’s time for you. It’s time now, Adam, for you to reflect. So as you’re breathing deeply, what are you think about the arc of the past two years? We’re at 50 episodes. That’s three X where, four X basically where we could have been at 12 where post people turn out.
Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:38:59] I guess I’ll say first and foremost, I’m really happy that we, we kept doing this. I think it’s been a really. Fun partnership, working with you, Dave and exploring all of these concepts together. And I also think it’s interesting just thinking about the arc of the podcast. We started with our old hypothesis based episodes.
I hope we’ll come back to do some of those and dig into some meaty topics together. but a lot of that was based on, you and I sharing a lot of the things that we had done up to that point as customer education leaders and some of the myths and misconceptions conceptions that we had run into.
and trying to share those with other folks who maybe were coming into the field, or hadn’t worked, at companies like the ones we were working at, and it evolved over time where we started to do more interviews. we started talking to more practitioners and leaders this year. We did the CEO series and I think that’s some of my favorite episodes.
when I think about this actually were episodes where I learned something new. so you mentioned, Evan, I loved that episode just interviewing Evan on the power of certifications and how he was thinking about doing some of those things, or even, when we talked to Matt Mulholland and he shared his views on, why he thinks a lot of customer education is boring and what he was doing to solve those, I just, I love learning new things, seeing how other people are doing it.
And, I don’t want to cannibalize the. The section at the end where we talk about what’s coming up, but I hope we’ll do a lot more of that. And I think my views of the industry and, the conferences we’ve been to, I really appreciate that. We’ve been able to, go out to, DevLearn and skills are connect and thought industries, cognition, and said my conference, like we’ve been to quite a few of them, but more than that, I’m just really happy to see the presence of customer education.
as a discipline growing over time, it’s been super rewarding to see more conferences, more chances to connect more people coming into the community. and in general, just seeing how this field has grown, I feel really honored to be a part of it and to be. for us to be a voice in the industry.
Yeah. And like you and I have mentioned, we’ve we both been through some job changes, right? You and I started where you are a Gainsight. I was at Optimizely. I was a checker in the interim. You were at Azuqua, and then you went to outreach. I went to Slack. So just. I think for us, again, just being on these parallel journeys where we continue to learn new things and then also try to share them back with the community.
And I think it’s been cool. It’s been a way for us to work out loud.
Dave Derington: [00:41:31] I like that work out loud. That’s all, that’s almost a t-shirt worthy comment.
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:36] I can’t take credit for it. I don’t remember. Who first introduced me to the idea of working out loud, but I think, for anyone who’s doing the work, just sharing what you’re doing as you’re doing it is super important.
And that’s really part of what we’re trying to do with this podcast too. Yeah. Okay. Dave, an exercise and conciseness, cause we’re back to Q and a, we got some really good short questions from people. So let’s do a lightning round. we’ve done lightning rounds before and has always. we’ll try to keep the responses short and sweet, but the catch is, again, these questions are all pretty off the wall, cool.
Okay, Dave, which book are you reading now?
Dave Derington: [00:42:09] Oh, show the book of understanding and I’m also finishing Michael Ellen’s guide. E-learning cool.
Adam Avramescu: [00:42:14] I am reading, extremely loud and incredibly close. and next I’m going to be reading Americana. Ooh,
Dave Derington: [00:42:20] neat. Yeah. We want to exposition. What’s the last movie or show you watch Adam?
Adam Avramescu: [00:42:25] I have just finished rewatching Archer.
Dave Derington: [00:42:29] Oh, good. we just finished a, we’re going to Mo Marvel, MCU rewatch. So we finished the dark world Thor, and we are tearing back through psych. Which is a great series,
Adam Avramescu: [00:42:41] which you keep referencing to me. When I went to Santa Barbara,
Dave Derington: [00:42:43] I went to Santa Barbara.
I’m like, did you go see where Sean and Gus did this?
Adam Avramescu: [00:42:47] I don’t know who those people are. Are those my friends? Do I know them? Okay. Davis should be, what is an ice cream flavor? You’d never eat
Dave Derington: [00:42:54] anchovies and cream. I had to make it relate to, but God, come on.
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:01] Okay. I would never eat the, poo flavored yogurt from Nathan Fu.
everyone watched Nathan for you. That’s a brilliant show.
Dave Derington: [00:43:09] I’m like, okay. What cartoon character do you most closely identify with?
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:17] Oh gosh, I don’t know, Dave, what’s yours.
Dave Derington: [00:43:22] I thought about this. I thought Dexter from Dexter’s laboratory. Oh,
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:26] that’s a good one. I’m gonna go with, Oh no. dr. Orpheus from the venture brothers.
Dave Derington: [00:43:32] Oh, that’s a good, yeah. What
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:37] was that? Okay, Dave, what was your favorite band in seventh grade?
Dave Derington: [00:43:40] Genesis? Mine
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:42] was, I didn’t actually listen to a lot of bands. I was a late bloomer when it came to like rock music. So I was probably listening to like musical soundtracks, play something from Lloyd Webber.
Dave Derington: [00:43:51] all Yeah. For favorite game to play,
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:53] I am playing final fantasy 12 right now.
Dave Derington: [00:43:56] Good choice. Yeah, the remasters that
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:59] remastered one?
Dave Derington: [00:43:59] Yeah. on, Nintendo
Adam Avramescu: [00:44:02] Switch.
Dave Derington: [00:44:03] I have cool. I am, I have to say I have a, an absolute addiction to slay the Spire. only second is civilization.
Somebody got me back into that again. Darn use Sean, John, you Jim.
Adam Avramescu: [00:44:19] When does it stop being partly cloudy and start being partly sunny?
Dave Derington: [00:44:24] Yeah. These days who goes
Adam Avramescu: [00:44:25] outside? Yeah. Okay. We’ll take that as the answer.
Dave Derington: [00:44:29] It’s COVID why does grape flavor smell the way it does when actual grapes don’t taste or smell anything like that?
Adam Avramescu: [00:44:39] This is an answer for the flavor industrial complex.
Dave Derington: [00:44:42] Play for industrial conflict. All I can think of when I read this question is Hubba bubble, grape Hubba, Bubba, bubblegum, grape, or grape Fanta or something like that. Grape drink. what do we think?
Adam Avramescu: [00:44:55] I think, the earlier, probably the earlier an artificial flavor was invented, the less technology they had to make it taste like the actual thing that it’s supposed to represent.
And
Dave Derington: [00:45:05] it would like red dye, which. Number five or something that got people amped up.
Adam Avramescu: [00:45:10] Yeah. Like stuff like that. and so probably people got used to those artificial flavors. And so like artificial grape now has to taste like artificial grape. If they made one that tastes like real grape. it would probably just like people wouldn’t like it cause it’d be weird and confusing to them.
Dave Derington: [00:45:26] That’s fun. All right. Next question. Next question. Oh, I like this as a pessimist blood type B
Adam Avramescu: [00:45:34] negative. I’ll get outta here with that.
Dave Derington: [00:45:38] See, you always talk about me being positive. I’m an OPA I’m a positive, so
Adam Avramescu: [00:45:44] that’s good. I’m going to be positive about this one, but move on. what house would you be in at Hogwarts?
Dave Derington: [00:45:51] the test I took showed I’m unfortunately, or fortunately, so they’re not all bad. I think they’re just motivated.
Adam Avramescu: [00:45:57] I think I’m Raven claw. Cool.
Dave Derington: [00:45:59] Yeah, that’s a good mix. A favorite TV show in the nineties. Ooh. Benwell
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:08] what’s your zip?
Dave Derington: [00:46:09] My mine’s X-Files hands down. I love that show.
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:13] I’m trying to think of one from the nineties.
Dave Derington: [00:46:16] Was it nineties though?
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:17] nineties? Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:46:18] Yeah. I thought so.
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:19] hard for me to think of one off the top of my head. Daria. I don’t know. That was good.
Dave Derington: [00:46:26] Beavis and Butthead.
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:29] Hey Adam. Nope. No, we’re not doing that. I’ll cut that. You leave your camera on in a zoom meeting if you’re eating sometimes a sane.
Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:46:40] Depends on who I’m around. if we’re having a lunch and learn or just hanging out, I’ll leave it on.
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:45] Okay. This next one is a very loaded question.
Dave Derington: [00:46:48] how can you,
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:49] how can someone possibly enjoy cats more than
Dave Derington: [00:46:52] dogs? That’s really biased.
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:55] Yeah. I don’t like that. I don’t like the construction of this question.
Dave Derington: [00:47:00] if anybody, if those who wrote this, are more dog bias than cap bias, you need to meet my cat. Pippin is, a ragdoll and he’s just chill as cat I’ve ever seen. Everybody keeps saying, it’s the most dog-like cat. I think is around.
Adam Avramescu: [00:47:16] Apparently their brains are more similar to humans and dogs are cats.
Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:47:21] they’re often jerks, but I liked that. You have to evergreen your toes.
Adam Avramescu: [00:47:26] I think that’s it. You have to earn it with a cap.
Dave Derington: [00:47:29] Yeah. It’s you don’t get love on spec. All right. here’s a really good one is a hot dog, a sandwich, Adam, what is your take? Hot take on hot dogs.
Adam Avramescu: [00:47:41] I’ll take on hot dogs.
no, I don’t think a hot dog is a sandwich. there’s a site that you can go to. And now I don’t remember the name of the site. We’ll have to put it in the show notes, but they basically detail every different type of configuration of meat and bread and the number of sides on which the, the meat is surrounded.
And so if it’s surrounded on three sides, it’s a taco, not a sandwich
Dave Derington: [00:48:06] or a Chalupa.
Adam Avramescu: [00:48:08] That’s a fried taco.
Dave Derington: [00:48:10] Okay.
Adam Avramescu: [00:48:11] What’s your answer?
Dave Derington: [00:48:12] I looked it up, I say no, because if you look up the strict definition, it’s food consisting of two pieces of bread with meat, cheese, or other filling between them eaten as light meal.
Yeah, it depends on whether you are you in whether that bone is cut in half.
Adam Avramescu: [00:48:30] Okay. I just looked it up. It’s cube rule.com cube rule. So it’s the cube, visualizes, every food as a cube.
Dave Derington: [00:48:41] Wow. you bought a Tesseract,
Adam Avramescu: [00:48:45] Dave, what do you always spell wrong?
Dave Derington: [00:48:49] Jeez,
Adam Avramescu: [00:48:49] for me, it’s exercise. I always have to double check myself on the word exercise
Dave Derington: [00:48:53] actually size.
I probably ever, I get caught up in like the stuff sometimes. Yeah. And it, usually I work it out. They’re looking at it just a minute longer, but I would say like there and stuff like that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:10] Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:49:11] I thought that question said, why do you always spell wrong?
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:14] Oh,
Dave Derington: [00:49:16] I don’t know why I thought it was calling me.
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:18] It’s a spelling. Isn’t the problem. It’s reading.
Dave Derington: [00:49:20] It’s reading. Apparently. It’s a hard, it’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:23] a hard
Dave Derington: [00:49:24] where it’s our hard. I get that from Evernote. I gotta give him attribution. all right. Let me read this next one because I love it. Let’s say I have a startup called synergy scape. What kind of business am I
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:34] a fraud?
Dave Derington: [00:49:37] I thought it was a modular landscaping firm. I don’t know.
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:42] Last question. I love it to create a show for Netflix about the interaction of us elections and customer education. And what would the title be? It could be tragedy or comedy.
Dave Derington: [00:49:52] Do you come up with anything glib on this one?
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:54] No, I’m going to have to make one up on the spot.
The interaction of us elections and customer education.
Dave Derington: [00:50:03] Oh, okay. So we got to do it now analysis then so we take over thinking about the voter as the customer and what’s the product.
Adam Avramescu: [00:50:12] And so we could ask all that. We could do it, we could model on this whole thing, but I have come up with a title and I think it’s going to be relevant.
It’s going to be called a, it will be like a documentary and it’ll be called a lot to learn.
Dave Derington: [00:50:25] What’s. That’s good.
Adam Avramescu: [00:50:27] Thank you,
Dave Derington: [00:50:28] actually. It’s really good. I like that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:50:30] All right. So why don’t we share a few thoughts for the next year lab?
Dave Derington: [00:50:35] Yay. Okay. All right. We wanted to talk about this for a long time, so let’s do it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:50:41] Okay. So Dave, let’s share a little bit. what are we thinking when we think about the next year of CELab and the podcast specifically? What are we planning for the podcast?
Dave Derington: [00:50:49] table stakes, if you like or hate that term. I like it. I’m hungry too. We want to talk with a lot more practitioners and leaders, both.
And what I mean by that, and those of you have conversations with recently. one of the things that I like to do and Adam, I think you do as well sometimes is, if you’re listening right now, Chances are, something we don’t. And I think the biggest strength and the biggest value that this venture that we have going is here to bring to us is to network and connect and find the others.
We keep saying that, find the others get out there. and network. So I feel like we still have a lot of people, a lot of you to connect with, if you’re new to this show and you want to talk, let’s talk, we are actively looking for, let’s talk about leadership. One of the things I want and I’ll vote for is I want, I would really like to talk with strong customer success leaders.
It coming into the next year. And the reason I say that Adam is because I feel like customer success is the organization that benefits first and foremost, from the work we do every day. And you even say it in your book, the scale engine of customer success. But I also feel like we’re not resonating yet with that market.
Adam Avramescu: [00:52:08] There’s still a lot of opportunity for customer success and customer education to converge into really work together. yeah, we’ll definitely be talking to more customer success leaders.
Dave Derington: [00:52:17] Yeah. And practitioners, I’ll complete my thought. So we’ve talked a lot about, certification, I would like to talk more with people that split the line with enablement, for example.
there’s just, yeah. there’s somebody that I know that I work with pretty closely. That is she’s really great. She has a really great background, but what we want to open up more, we want to talk to you, but we also want to have a good resonating theme with our entire market. Yeah. that’s big.
Adam Avramescu: [00:52:42] Yeah. What else we got? Yeah, I think we think so. Like you, you called it out. We spent a lot of this year talking to leaders and talking to CEOs. I think it’ll be great to open it up and talk to more practitioners at the same time. I think it’ll also be fun to go up the funnel a little bit.
So hopefully in the coming year, we’ll also talk to some venture capitalists, some of the VCs who are investing in customer education products and, the post-sales experience.
Dave Derington: [00:53:06] to speak to this directly, and I’m not going to call out the actual equity from that we were talking about.
But, someone came to me and said, Hey, this. This farm wants to talk and learn about how we’re addressing our customer journey through education. And I’m like, Oh my God, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. That’s freaking phenomenal. And actually I was talking with a friend of mine. Who’s a VCA person, these starting a new org, new a firm.
And he and I did a podcast a long time ago. His name is Kellen Carter and VC is very interested in education because. They know, maybe others should cue in on this, that we’re always learning and we can’t learn a product. You can’t assume that the product is going to be well-designed even with our best intents, we’re always going to have a need for education.
Adam Avramescu: [00:53:54] Yeah. Especially now with COVID kind of accelerating, the switch to online learning. I think we’re seeing more investment there. So it’ll be interesting to hear a little bit there. And, I think we’ll also probably experiment with some new formats.
Dave Derington: [00:54:07] Yeah, I’ve got some ideas I’d like to try out and we’ll talk more, but, even for interviews and such, there’s a lot of room.
talk to us, email us, reach out to us. we’re wanting to work on it. we have, I also, I was talking with, the friend of ours recently and she had mentioned. We should consider working with product marketing and product leads in peel apart, how a product team thinks about the education process too.
Adam Avramescu: [00:54:33] Yeah, that is that’s fair. So good. Hopefully we’ll talk to a lot more folks. I also think you’ll probably see some returns to form in terms of us cracking the old hypothesis format out. yeah, lots of fun to come. How about in the industry, Dave? Any thoughts about what we should look forward to there next year?
Dave Derington: [00:54:51] Yeah. I feel like our industry is lurching forward into really grappling with the education thing, but it’s slowly and it’s in fits and starts. cure purely we’ve seen. and we just did an episode of the last episode, 49 was about the conferences that are happening, which actually are speaking to us now.
And. I know you and I both see this, that the vendors and the organizers that have these conferences are now questioning what their approaches and their they’re seeing the dire need to understand our space because we are not education surfaces. First and foremost, we are customer education, which somewhat.
Aspires to be an education services team, but it also does another thing. So I’m thinking I’m starting to see that the industry is beginning to grapple with this. I think it’s going to take all of us. So if you’re listening to this and you’re an edge customer education leader, make sure you’re armed with the definition of what customer education is and make sure that you’re sharing that with leaders.
I’ll call out, Some of our network or our Slack channel network is starting to do like pitches to talk about how we can practice to get better, to do an above the line discussions. So it’s being heard, we’re being seen. And now I think it’s time for us to be included.
Adam Avramescu: [00:56:08] Yeah, I agree. I think we’ll see a lot more of that as time goes on, we’ll see more of a, kind of a maturation of the customer education space as such.
and I think there’ll be more we’ll start to see more methodologies. Like I think one that was one trend coming out of the passenger conferences that we saw in some of the releases from the vendors. there’s just going to be a lot more discussion about what the customer education, program is and what the roles within customer education are.
I think we’ll see more. More definition there and hopefully we’ll continue to see, an evolution of the technology. I hope that they all become easier to use a little bit more consumer grade, even though they’re enterprise products, and hopefully some consolidation or at least more partnerships among some of the vendors in various related spaces.
So hopefully we will see more LMS as team up with certification vendors, and assessment platforms and, even community and knowledge bases, hopefully we’ll jump on the train as well. In product
Dave Derington: [00:57:00] education,
Adam Avramescu: [00:57:01] digital adoption, right? Like I hope they’ll all come
Dave Derington: [00:57:02] together. I hope.
So I’d also like to see our certification universe, adopt some changes that fit more with what we need. what I mean by that is, I’m going high stakes. I think you are too. It gets difficult. Who really be nice to have a nice middling sweet spot where, you have the advantages of a proctored platform, but you don’t have the rigor the same needs for Rick.
Adam Avramescu: [00:57:25] Yeah, exactly. For those who are doing like middle stakes certifications.
Dave Derington: [00:57:29] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. there was another thought I had about, the conferences in general are really great. We’re starting to see that. Oh yeah. one last one that just popped into my head just now, but I thought about it before is I think about, organizations like PayScale for, an example.
I think we need to do more of a level setting of what titles are. Because this has been a big question. What role, what people do I hire? What are their titles going to be? what roles do they fill? I think we’ve started that conversation, but I would like to make it a lot easier for, HR recruiter.
To go, Oh yeah. This job titles out there. And it’s an industry standard. And like PayScale does a lot of this like competitive salaries, but they also do job titles. There’s other organizations that do it too. I’d like to see a little bit more structure around what we call ourselves. Cause I, the question comes to mind for me all the time.
Isn’t an instructional designer in customer education. The same as an instructional designer in the real world, same goes for a trainer. What do you think about that?
Adam Avramescu: [00:58:30] I don’t know that you can buy the real world, but yeah, no, I think we will see, we’ll see what we’re thinking. yeah. And I think the last thing that yeah, I would call out over the next year is, for us in CELab, we’ve been doing a lot of podcasting.
We’ve been doing article writing, you can check out a lot of the work that we’ve done on customer.education, our site, and we’ll continue working out loud. But I also just want to acknowledge that the community has grown. So much, and we’re so appreciative for everyone that we’ve heard, from, conferences through Sedna and other organizations, the customer education, Slack channel, LinkedIn, like all the places where we see them work done, we are learning so much and seeing so much.
so I really wanted to share just a sincere thanks to those who are really doing the work and creating and growing innovative programs and sharing it with others, because I think. Ultimately that’s, what’s helping the customer education, discipline grow and mature.
Dave Derington: [00:59:22] Yeah. and I want to add on one thing to that, Adam, is that if you’re listening and you’re doing that kind of work, feel free to reach out to us.
Like we don’t own the space, but we do connect. And we want to understand where you’re coming from. It might warrant a discussion. Maybe I, a podcast episode, we talked about Daniel quilt. You were talking just a moment ago about frameworks and things that are coming out to really help, getting folks like Daniel quick back on the show to talk about.
That will be really great.
Adam Avramescu: [00:59:48] Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Derington: [00:59:50] All right. we’re coming into the final Q and a, do you want to go through a few more quick questions, few more?
Adam Avramescu: [00:59:54] We’ll do. Yeah, we’ll do three questions and then we’ll close out. Dave. What methods or what do you do to fill and maintain your creative energy?
Dave Derington: [01:00:03] Oh my, for me, it’s usually late in the evening. Everybody’s gone to bed. It’s quiet for the first time in my house, except the cats. That’s annoying me. I love to do late night. Music filled brainstorming sessions on Evernote, where I just brain dump everything out in the back.
Adam Avramescu: [01:00:19] That’s why I get emails from you then
Dave Derington: [01:00:21] that, sorry, that’s my thing.
Usually it’s I try to send them on schedule, but sometimes I fail.
Adam Avramescu: [01:00:29] I have a morning person. I do my best thinking in the morning and I actually do my best thinking when I’m walking. So what would I do to fill and maintain my creative energy is actually I take really long walks and I’ll usually have, a podcast on or music or something that, you know, at least.
Kind of keeps me occupied at least, but yeah, it’s usually when my mind starts to wander.
Dave Derington: [01:00:49] Yeah. So next question, Adam, what is the best advice you’ve
received?
Adam Avramescu: [01:00:55] I think for me, it’s, at least the one that I think might resonate with folks here is like, Because I’ve gotten so much good advice in my life is the idea that foster syndrome is real and affects all of us.
But it’s a construction in your mind. And the negative thoughts that you tell yourself or the negative voice that speaks to you and your head is, it’s a construct, right? It’s not necessarily validated or rooted in reality. Don’t let imposter syndrome stop you from valuing, like objectively the good and valuable things that you do every day in the world.
Dave Derington: [01:01:35] That’s wonderful,
Adam Avramescu: [01:01:36] Dave,
Dave Derington: [01:01:38] the first thing that popped into my head is, and I’m a fan of doing the hard things. When in university, I elected to be a physics major idiotic. And in retrospect, now I learned a lot from it, but, I struggled with math a lot and university level, especially.
And a moment of, like where the, veil was lifted from my eyes about what math is all about is someone said, and this was a good friend of mine. he was a whiz at music, but he was also a brilliant musician. I think the two go hand in hand and he said to me, Dave, you’re doing this all wrong.
Stop trying to understand it. Stop trying to understand math and just do it. And when I think about that kind of statement and actually has a lot of value in my entire life, when a lot of the times I will actually sit down and try to figure something out. But for us in our market, you just got to jump in and you’ve got to start somewhere and you’re going to learn, and you’re gonna make mistakes.
Understanding isn’t necessarily where you have to begin. I love that.
Adam Avramescu: [01:02:47] All right. It’s hard. Such hard. yeah, but great advice on the loss. Okay. Final question. Your breath, take a breath. let’s end with a fun one. What is the favorite ice cream flavor of people in customer education?
Dave Derington: [01:03:02] Anchovies. A cream.
Adam Avramescu: [01:03:03] Okay, nice. We’re ending where we started. People love asking ice cream questions. I think so. I think Customer education. People come in a couple different flavors. you’ve got folks that are like delivery trainers and then you’ve got folks who are more like instructional designers.
So if I had to map those back to like very traditional, ice cream flavors, I would say that like the trainers, like the delivery folks are a Rocky road, because they’re big, they’re bold. They’ve got a lot going on. Sometimes they’re big softies and they’ve got marshmallows in there, but there’s just like a, kind of
Dave Derington: [01:03:35] a,
Adam Avramescu: [01:03:37] it’s like a louder, more dynamic flavor.
And I think, I think, instructional designers are more like, what is it like pistachio or something like that, where it’s like a little bit more of an eclectic flavor, a little bit more like acquired taste, like with more subtlety. To it. And it might be like a bit more like muted and understated, but a lot of complexity in the flavor itself.
Dave Derington: [01:03:59] Yeah. I take that. That’s really cool
Adam Avramescu: [01:04:00] with great flavors that go well together. I don’t know. I don’t know if I ever get both of those flavors together, but that’s my thought. I don’t know which one I am. Maybe a little of both.
Dave Derington: [01:04:10] Yeah, I’ve got to stay. We’ll stick with your answer and
Adam Avramescu: [01:04:15] going for
Dave Derington: [01:04:16] a while.
I liked it. I liked that, that we have a lot of different kinds of, but that was really cool. you, your sons it’s evocative of the. The character that we have, you can’t just say we’re vanilla or chocolate or strawberry, Rocky road is that tumultuous life of a trainer that has to deal with an ever changing platform and get content out right.
And help people when they might not know everything and instructional designer who has. Per perhaps a little bit more internalized and thinking on their own and then going out and in burse, talking with people and trying to process something. yeah, it’s a little nutty and
Adam Avramescu: [01:04:53] yeah, that’s a good way of putting it, but not, none of us are anchovies and cream.
No. Okay. Let’s finish that with some calls to action. So listeners, we really appreciate your support over the past few years, and we are committed to continue to provide you with quality content from the front lines of customer education. Now that said, if you’ve been listening and enjoy what we have to offer, we have a couple of things to ask that would really help us grow and continue to grow this endeavor over the next couple of years.
Dave, what’s our first call to
Dave Derington: [01:05:22] action. our first call to action is spread the word, get out there, share your favorite episode or a link to our site, to customer.education, or on LinkedIn and Twitter. We, you can help. You can help yourself by helping us to expand the locus of our network and bring more voices in, bring more for diversity in particular diversity, because we want to hear from people that don’t share our opinions too.
Because that’s how we grow.
Adam Avramescu: [01:05:49] Absolutely. yeah, if there’s an episode that you liked or mental out to you, please share it. LinkedIn and Twitter both really helped us grow. number two would be sign the manifesto. So we have our customer education manifesto up on customer.education. there’s a link right in the top nav and we would love to have more people sign.
We have 70 co-signers already and would love to reach 100 by the end of the year.
Dave Derington: [01:06:10] Yeah. I’d like to make a comment on this too, that I think this is really foundational people ask me a couple of times. what happens when I sign this? Nothing right now, what we’re trying to do is get people that share a similar opinion, that this is how we’re trying to structure what customer education is and have a strategy about approaching it.
So we’re going to evolve that over time. What will happen is those of you have signed it your first go-to people as we start to evolve this as a team. So let’s go. One more question. one more thing to do. number three. Is leave a review on Apple podcasts. So we know that we have a lot of listeners out there who you’re listening.
You’ve told us you’re listening. I’ve received great emails, Adams to receive great emails and texts and slacks. What we need more than anything is your help to go spend a few moments. Find something you liked about our podcast and share a five star review on iTunes or Spotify or whatever
Adam Avramescu: [01:07:12] Apple podcast is the big one now.
Dave Derington: [01:07:13] Sorry, Apple podcasts. Yes. they’ve transitioned that, I do put that, put things like this off, but there’s that moment in the evening or in the morning when I’ve reflected on something that I learned from somebody in a podcast and I go, you know what, this is awesome, or I’ve even gone to other things.
So we don’t do this now, but I’ve also gone to other sites and. Fill the Patriot out to support that. We’re not asking for that. We’re just asking for your help to promote and to publicize. Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [01:07:38] Not asking for your money, but yeah, I agree. Like I, I hear how many podcasts do I hear in a day where. Everyone says, please leave us a review.
And then I just forget. And I move on with my day. So if you’re listening now, you’ve been putting it off. set a reminder for yourself. make a calendar invite, do a slash remind in Slack, or if you’re your computer, we’d really love it. if you left us a five star review,
Dave Derington: [01:08:00] We would. All right, so that’s a wrap.
If you want to learn more, we have a podcast website. If you didn’t know, already at HTTPS slash will a :// customer that education there, you can find. Okay. A lot of content. We have show notes, we have other material, you can see a blog. it’s great. And if you want to resource on Twitter, I’m @davederington,
Adam Avramescu: [01:08:26] for best skew and special.
Thanks to Alan Koda for two years of great theme music and to everyone who submitted questions for this episode, specifically, Kaitlyn Lisa Sylvie, Linda Yeesheen, and Mark David Kelly, Christie, Daniel, Sam, and Brandon.
Dave Derington: [01:08:42] Awesome. And to our audience. Thanks so much for joining us. This is a long podcast, but we’re glad you’re here.
Get out there. Educate you. Find your people.
Adam Avramescu: [01:08:53] Thanks for listening.