Adam Avramescu 00:00
Welcome to CELab home of the CELabs. I’m Adam Avramescu. And I am here with special guest, Lisa Rothrauff. We’re off. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Adam. How’s it going today?
Lisa Rothrauff 00:15
Great. It’s great to be here.
Adam Avramescu 00:17
Yeah, great to have you on the show. Now, listeners may not know this, we you have, I think been alluded to on the show before. And in fact, by the time this episode airs, I think you will have had a contribution in the 100th episode. So we’re playing with time here, because this is this is a pre recorded, but maybe listeners will have heard your voice already. But anyway, I’m really glad to have you on the show. Because, again, you you’re actually one of my first friends in customer education back when I was newer to the Bay Area and trying to figure out who else was was doing this thing? Yeah,
Lisa Rothrauff 00:55
many, many moons ago. We discovered each other I think.
Adam Avramescu 01:00
I think so this this had to have been about a decade ago, which is actually wild to think about.
Lisa Rothrauff 01:05
Yeah, yeah, I think you were at Optimizely. I was at Zendesk. And yeah, a lot has happened since then.
Adam Avramescu 01:12
Indeed. And now you are leading customer education at amplitude?
Lisa Rothrauff 01:16
I am yeah, I’ve been here for at amplitude for about a year and a half. And, you know, just continue to feel a huge amount of gratitude for the opportunity before me. And before my team.
Adam Avramescu 01:29
Well, why don’t you talk a little bit about that opportunity? Because you have, I think a pretty robust scope within your team might be helpful to talk about, what are some of the things that you’re looking after?
Lisa Rothrauff 01:40
Yeah, so great, great way to start the conversation, I think so. So amplitude is a digital product analytics platform. And we have a huge amount of opportunity there to really educate our customers, and even prospects, not just about the product itself, but what value an analytics platform like amplitude can bring to their business. It really is about what we’re really trying to do is help people understand through the product and around the product, how making data driven decisions can help them grow their grow their business, and grow their product lines in a variety of ways. So we have a huge amount of opportunity to develop both product based and more strategic education. And being about a year old, my team’s about a year old. We’re just we’re just really starting out and excited to expand our scope even more than we already have.
Adam Avramescu 02:53
Yeah, this this goes along really well with a lot of the topics that we’d like to cover on, SEALAB, especially with Dave often talking about product telemetry, and really knowing what users are doing within your product. Amplitude is one of the the pieces of software that you use to actually find something like that out, like how users are actually adopting your software, right?
Lisa Rothrauff 03:13
Yeah, amplitude is an incredibly powerful tool. So you can see, you know, there’s so much that you can see, you can just basically count what customers are doing within your product, how many times they’re in your product, how long their sessions are. But more than that you can understand, you know, what is their trajectory through your product? Where are they having a difficult time? Where are they? Where are they succeeding? And where are they really building on your product, and then help them understand how they can expand their usage. We’ve actually on my team, we’ve actually just started to use amplitude to instrument our amplitude Academy. And when I say we, it’s one of the LX DS in my team who’s very enterprising, who decided that, you know, we needed to do this sooner rather than later, everybody at amplitude had asked us have we instrumented the academy itself. So even as we think about our own education product, were excited to gain just, you know, so much more insight about what it is that our learners are doing and seeking to learn and how that maps to product usage. So lots of potential for deep, deep insight from the amplitude product suite itself.
Adam Avramescu 04:27
I love that. And usually we don’t we don’t do a whole product plug on the show. But I think in this case, really. No, but I think really important I wanted to go there because I think for a lot of our listeners as well. There’s always this need for us to have more analytics, not just to find out what people are doing in our products so we can tie our education programs through adoption, but as well just like you described, to actually have deeper analytics about the usage of our educational platforms themselves. So really cool to see that you are working On a product that that helps people do that. Yeah. Now, before we get into the topic today, I have to ask you, Lisa, can you think of any ways to protect a horse?
Lisa Rothrauff 05:15
Any ways to protect a horse?
Adam Avramescu 05:17
Yeah, like if a horse were in danger, how much you think to protect it?
Lisa Rothrauff 05:20
I wouldn’t actually, the first thing that comes to mind is a group of people holding sort of locking arms, and creating kind of a protective barrier around the horse and moving as the horse wanted to move.
Adam Avramescu 05:38
Yeah, yeah, assuming the horses and going too fast.
Lisa Rothrauff 05:41
Otherwise, those people are going to need to run pretty fast.
Adam Avramescu 05:44
Exactly. This is kind of a stationary horse. Yeah, well, I like that. Because, you know, today on national horse protection day, we are constantly being asked to figure out how to look after our horses. So thank you for that great idea. And Happy National horse protection daily. So
Lisa Rothrauff 06:01
yeah, I really hope our listeners can take that away.
Adam Avramescu 06:06
We’ll put that in the show notes really useful. All right, good. Well, we have a cold open now. Okay, let’s, let’s get into the topic. So you and I wanted to talk about building a customer education team, which is a topic that we come back to every once in a while on C lab. But it’s one that continues to be important, because we’re not just talking about, you know, making a hire or going through the interview process. We’re also talking about growing and evolving your team’s skill set as your your business changes. And we haven’t really talked about that in that way yet on the show. So kind of in in our ongoing series of customer education leaders rapping about customer education, I think that this is going to be a fantastic addition.
Lisa Rothrauff 07:00
Wonderful, and I’m excited because I mean, of course, you could talk about this. And it’s an interesting topic at any time. But I think right now, any leader, really, in any organization, especially in the tech environment, right now, is just faced with so many, so many layers of challenge, right? We’ve just come out of the COVID crisis, although of course, it persists as an issue. And now we’re facing this macro economic challenge. And so it really begs the question, I think of, you know, what it what is a leader need to do and what isn’t either need early to be to develop a really strong and functioning and healthy team that can weather challenges like this. So I feel like the timing is right.
Adam Avramescu 07:45
Yeah, I think so. Because at first blush, you might say, oh, building a customer education team. Well, not not that many people are hiring right now. So you know, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about hiring new roles? Well, sort of, but we’re also talking about really building resilience on your team, so that even the people that currently are part of your organization, can adapt to all of the changes, and perhaps, shifts in business focus that a lot of our companies are really needing us to step up to the plate on.
Lisa Rothrauff 08:16
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, I think it really, I think it really goes back to, you know, what is it that you need from your team, and it’s something that, you know, you really need to think about from the very beginning, kind of, regardless of what the larger environment is, because life is always going to throw you its challenges, and you need to try to hire people into this space and function, who can evolve with you and really kind of rebuild that team you were talking about, you know, people aren’t really building that many teams from scratch these days, which is true. But I think in many ways, the way I the way I think about my own team is we’re just constantly remaking ourselves, to rise to the occasion. And the reason that we can do that it comes back to a really, to me a really interesting combination of skills. That, at least in my mind, I break down in a few different ways.
Adam Avramescu 09:15
Yeah, so why don’t you walk me through that when you think about like, whether you’re forming a team from scratch, or you’re reforming a team to, you know, kind of figure out how you might fill competency gaps or evolve with the strategy. Like, what would you say is the the type of team profile that you shoot for?
Lisa Rothrauff 09:34
Yeah, well, I think it’s, it’s there’s like a constellation of skills that I look for, at any point, whether, you know, whether I’m hiring into the organization, or really whether I’m partnering and I think I think about them in this way, Adam, I think about sort of constant skills. Some people might call them soft skills, but I call them I think of them as constant skills, I think of education specific skills, and then I think of more fluid hard skills. So let me explain a little bit what I mean by those. So, for me, the constant skills are the skills it’s really about communication, and empathy toward your user. So, as I think we all know, in customer education, you have to be able to imagine yourself as your learner, you have to be sensitive to the user experience, in many ways, just as much as a, as a designer, as a product designer is because really, that’s what you’re developing, right, you’re developing, you’re designing a product or program experience. And so that needs to be second nature for you. I also think that a critical skill, and this is something that I look for, I really scrutinize when I’m bringing people into my organization is just communication and consulting. So I look for people who are good listeners, and can ask clarifying questions, and are good analytical problem solvers. Because as you know, as you are developing a new program, you need to really understand and work with people who you can rely on to understand like, what is the problem you are trying to solve through a piece of education or through a program, you never just want to put a program out there because you think it might be a good idea, you want to be a tackling a problem or a challenge that the business or your users are facing. And then I would say that another, maybe the final one to rest on here under constant skills is just adaptability, right? You mentioned the word resilience, but it’s really about, you know, being able to adapt to the technological changes around us the changes that our users or learners are going through, and then be willing to rethink, okay, well, what does this mean for a learning program, maybe we don’t think about Bloom’s in quite the same way that we used to think about it, or maybe we don’t come up with the same solution we used to. So constantly evolving. And again, that’s that opportunity that we spoke about spoke about earlier. So those are the constant skills I think about for the education, specific skills. Those relate to the empathy, right, that I talked about earlier. But it’s more about pedagogical best practices, really understanding how to teach concepts and break down abstraction, and communicating in multiple modalities. I really love the Julie Dirksen book around the you know, the design thinking, and I always I always look to that and go back to it when I
Adam Avramescu 12:37
just gotten to design for how people learn or did you? Exactly right.
Lisa Rothrauff 12:41
Yeah, I think it’s I just think it’s a really good primer on for learning design. And then I would just say, the other piece is fluid skills. It’s it’s really the ability to learn new ways to develop content, to deliver content. So new ways to think about writing and content authoring and for delivering skills, and those can also affect the way that you approach problems like accessibility or localization. So those are the that’s kind of the constellation of skills that I tend to look for that I think can carry me through whether I’m developing a program from scratch with a small team or have a large team like the one we did it Zendesk.
Adam Avramescu 13:24
Yeah. So it’s interesting to hear you put it in that way. Because I mean, first of all, as you called out, what you described as constant skills and fluid skills, you know, someone might describe as soft skills and well, I don’t know if the fluid skills or hard skills per se, fluid skills might be more like I don’t know, like tools and techniques and like, like sharpening your craft or something like that. But you’re calling them constant skills in the sense that no matter what situation you’re going to be in or what specific role you’re going to shift into. Those seem to be at the core of what would make you effective at any role within a customer education team. Am I Am I getting that? Right? Is that what the constancy is? Yeah,
Lisa Rothrauff 14:12
that’s right. I mean, I think if I if I think about the different organizations where I’ve led teams, I look for those skills, no matter what it is, and who it is that we are serving.
Adam Avramescu 14:24
Yeah, and then education skills, there’s like a certain level of non negotiable understanding of your domain that you have to have to be effective at your job. So that might shift depending on what role you’re in. If I’m understanding you correctly, like an instructional designer, probably needs to go deeper than just what’s in Design Pro people learn. But they really have to like yeah, it depends on what role you’re in. So so someone doing facilitation or training delivery, probably needs a certain set of education specific skills that are that are centered around facilitation and you know, managing cognitive load in a live setting, whereas an instructional designer is going to need to know how to do that more from, from a content perspective. Yeah, you’re managing someone in community, like they have their own craft related skills. Is that right?
Lisa Rothrauff 15:18
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I would just say, a word that I forgot to mention here. But paired along with education skills, it’s just the passion for education. And, you know, the the desire to help people remove blockers, from their success in their platform, or product or wherever it is that you are teaching them.
Adam Avramescu 15:38
Yeah, I often talk about this as like an I know, we don’t love the word mastery. But I often struggle to think of a better word for it, but it’s like mastery of craft. So not not just your passion for it, but your ability to continue to invest in like, learning the theory and then being able to apply it. And now the application of that is what might get you into the the fluid skills, knowing what to use, when depending on the subject matter that you’re you’re teaching or who your learning personas are, etc, etc.
Lisa Rothrauff 16:12
Yep, that’s exactly right. It’s more to me, it’s, you know, the mastery allows for evolution, and the continual effectiveness of what it is that you’re trying to do. And yeah, the the fluid skills, the fluid skills are interesting, right? Because I could not have imagined the the, the tools and platforms that we use today, for example, at amplitude. With my team, I don’t think I could have imagined those 1015 years ago, or using some form. And certainly when I started off even at a company called digital thing, many, many years ago, we had, we just organized our teams very differently based on the technology. So it’s an interesting problem.
Adam Avramescu 16:55
And if you’re really deep into the lore, by the way, listeners digital thing. You might also remember Alessandra Marinetti being on the show. She was also part of this original digital think mafia, as well as perhaps some future guests that we’ll talk about. But there’s some real deep lore about digital think. And I always, always like when this comes up. But you’re right, like having seen the craft evolve over a number of decades. You’re right, there’s some things that are going to evolve pretty slowly in terms of like, what what is evidence based, you know, adult learning principles, versus what is more a factor of the tools and technology we have today, like an example of a fluid skill, actually, I’m thinking about this today might be, like effective prompt engineering in chat. GPT. But that’s, that’s contextual, right? Like that will change quite a bit. Next time. Yeah.
Lisa Rothrauff 17:52
Yeah. And I mean, that’s a great example of how, you know, it’s hard for us to anticipate how, you know, some of these developments, whether they’re technological or not, might really challenge us and provide us with new opportunities to rethink the way it is that we get through to and educate people.
Adam Avramescu 18:12
Yeah. When I think about those constant skills versus fluid skills, and I’m really I’m sinking my teeth into this topic now, because this is a really interesting way to think about it. Often, we hear like, you know, you and I read our fair amount of LinkedIn, thought leadership. And a common trope that you hear is, like hire for attributes or hire for potential, don’t hire for experience, or maybe like hire for attributes and potential over experience. I’m curious what you make of that philosophy? And how how you think about it when like, if you’re talking to a candidate, for instance, who maybe they seem to have those constant skills, but they don’t have a background in education. And so they wouldn’t necessarily know the formal principles of instructional design, or their fluid skills? I don’t know maybe that’s, that’s a question mark, and they need to be taught some of these things on the job. How do you approach that when you think about hiring for a role?
Lisa Rothrauff 19:08
Yeah. I always think this is really interesting. Because I So overall, I would say, Adam, I agree with that, that I tend to hire more for attributes and for those constant skills than I do for the, you know, the, the fluid, the kind of the, the tactical skills that I’m looking for, or even for the education based experience, although I would be hard pressed to say that I would hire somebody with no education experience at all. But we have definitely I have definitely brought in people even recently, who don’t have experience in customer or external education and have experience teaching internally, say for an l&d organization or even just teaching I we just we just is brought in somebody who had experience as a yoga instructor actually, and, but I will tell you that what I can see in people and what I look for in people is their ability to listen. And to ask questions, and to problem solve. In the course of a conversation, I have encountered many people across, you know, a couple of different roles that I’ve had, I’ve interviewed them they’ve had, you know, very, I would say, rich resumes, in terms of their experience in education, or, and even in education technology. But in the course of an interview, they may not, they may not help me build on, build on our learning together. And that’s really what I try to have happen in an interview when I try to screen for is, can we have a discussion or conversation that helps us learn from each other in the moment? And if someone can’t play back to me and ask questions that will help evolve that conversation, then to me, that’s a concern. And an even bigger concern, actually, is when people come to an interview when they really don’t have questions at all. Because I look for people who are deeply curious. And as I said, analytical. I like people who question a lot, because I think you have to question the way things have been done before, why do we do things? Why are we teaching something the way we’ve done? And that is much, much harder to teach a new employee than even the principles of instructional design? Or certainly the domain that they will be, you know, helping to support? So that’s fundamentally, you know, back to that attributes question. That’s where that’s where I come down on that one.
Adam Avramescu 21:54
Yeah, that’s a really, I think it’s a really healthy way of looking at it. Because to your point, it’s, it’s difficult to hire someone who has, say, no background in customer education, or in any sort of education or anything that ties to the job skills, because at a certain point, like, you’re probably going to be really left guessing about that person’s ability to succeed on the on the job, but if someone is coming from, say, a related field, or you know, something where there’s a tie to the role that they’re going to be performing, and you’re seeing enough of those constant skills that they can really show you that they have that curiosity and that understanding of how they’ll be able to perform in the new role. That is probably better in a lot of cases than someone who, like has the right experience on paper, but isn’t really applying it or isn’t, you know, bringing any of it like contextualizing any of it for how that role might look and feel differently on a different team supporting a different product with different customers?
Lisa Rothrauff 22:55
Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s interesting, right? Because I think so often, too, we also, depending on how mature the organizations are, where we work, we often hear also the question of, should I hire a specialist? Or should I hire a generalist, and even when I think about that, I come back to, you know, what we have just been talking about, right, is that you’re really hiring for somebody who can ideally be both, right? Who can be the kind of specialist you need at a certain point in time, but that specialization is going to evolve over time. So you don’t want them to be so hyper specialized, that they can’t evolve, and build their skill set and help you build your organization. So I think, you know, I generally think I want both I want somebody who can be a generalist, but then who can dip into different areas of, with with different skill sets, different areas of the business at different moments. But it really comes it really comes back to those constant skills and, or attributes or whatever you want to call them. Because I think those are, you know, those are really more about the way people think and the way they approach problems. And certainly they will hone those over time and hopefully working within your team but again, much harder to teach from scratch, then you know, the the skills around a particular product or even a particular learning strategy.
Adam Avramescu 24:25
Yeah, I, I agree. This is I always think of it as like, do you teach the basketball player to act or do you teach the actor to play basketball and it’s usually usually easier one way than the other let’s say but like when you when you think about that generalists, specialist dynamic. I’m curious like to what level of general generalist Would you hire? Because I know there are some people in fact, I’ve done this in the past where you hire people who are just generic quote unquote, customer education managers, and they can develop you know, comp didn’t cease within a very, very broad generalist titled role. Or you can start at least on the level of saying I’m going to hire for instance, delivery people, Instructional Designer learning experience design people, and maybe like programs or ops people, and then I’ll specialize them with within that, do you have a starting point that you usually use when you are hiring someone into a role?
Lisa Rothrauff 25:24
Yeah, I mean, I try to I try to think about, like, what is the problem that we need to solve? And who is it that we’re asking them to serve? Right? So I do, I do think that the dichotomy between the the Learning Strategist and the delivery, delivery person is important, because because there are many wonderful learning experience designers who would have a very difficult time teaching in a live setting or delivering training in a live setting, and vice versa, right. You know, the kinds of skills that you need for I would say, professional, effective training, delivery, really stand out in in their own right. And so those are specialized skills that I think you really do need to you do need to hire for. If you can, if you’re hiring one person to start your organization, then sure you need to hire somebody who’s general and who can deliver, it may not be their most passionate, you know, field or what they’re most passionate about. But as long as they can do it, you’re that’s, that’s really what you’re going to be looking for. But I think the minute you can think about, okay, what is the greatest need, and among you know, which type of customer or which type of learner, then that’s what I would lean towards. So in that case, I might develop, or a might bring on a trainer first, so long as they have some level of skill and developing content. So, you know, a lot of it, it’s really about the intersection of, you know, the maturity of your organization, who it is that you’re serving and what problems you’re trying to solve.
Adam Avramescu 27:09
Yeah, that that makes sense. And maybe maybe a helpful way to talk about this would actually be kind of talking about it in the negative like, are there? Are there examples that you can think of where maybe you’ve been trying to hire or recruit for your team, and you are talking to a candidate where you actually feel like, they’re not going to be additive to the team? Like, what do you look for there?
Lisa Rothrauff 27:36
Yeah, that’s a really that’s a really good question. I think it’s more it’s pretty rare, actually, that I don’t I don’t find a way or I don’t see people as being additive. Like, I think everybody brings their own passion and skill, whether it’s the right fit at the right time for my team is kind of another question. And I think that what I what I have found is that, you know, there have been times where I have, I would say, with a slightly larger team, right. Where I have a set of generalists, a learning experience, designers, let’s just focus on that function for a minute. And then you have people with specialized skills, even within that, right people who are designers who are very adept with video production designers who are very adept at visual design. And so if you are bringing on another person, and you understand that the candidates passion project is visual design, and you already have two people kind of in line for that kind of work, it probably doesn’t make sense, unless you can uncover other areas and other specializations that the candidate would, you know, would want to pursue. So you do, do try to kind of, I would say, build up bench strength by building out more levels of specialization as you go along.
Adam Avramescu 29:09
Definitely, and the other thing that’s challenging I think, often with instructional designers is specifically is when you think about those education skills, maybe, you know, mixed with the other skills that you describe, probably especially the the constant skills. You often find, I would say, like click two flavors or two orientations of instructional designer, you have your theory, instructional designers and practice instructional designers. And this is, of course, a big debate in the l&d world where, you know, you have some instructional designers who will not actually touch the content, they really want to be involved in the broad design. And then you have other instructional designers who really are like content developers and they want to be hands on in the tool and they want to be like, doing all sorts of cool stuff in Articulate Storyline. That’s not exactly what I’m talking about here. When I’m Talking about is more that you have some instructional designers who, above all value the instructional quality of what they’re creating and making sure that it’s instructionally sound and and adheres to evidence based adult learning principles. And then you have other instructional designers who are, I would say, like much more oriented around action and moving things forward and like getting the content out there and learning from it. How do you how do you approach those types of orientations and find the right balance for your team?
Lisa Rothrauff 30:35
You know, it’s so funny that you’re asking me about this, because we just had this conversation. Team meeting, I think it was yes, it was yesterday, because there’s this balance right of you create content and you you craft that content very carefully, right to create an effective and holistic learning experience, you’re building out. Gradual a gradual program of learning objectives, and you understand why you’re doing that, right. So that you’re building, you’re elevating the learning as you go through a course. But then what can happen and this has happened to my team is you do a very good job. And other people want to expose and promote your content within say the product. But they just want short snippets. So then what does that do to that holistic learning experience? Right? And so then, do we think about if you’re trying to think about how do you repurpose your content? And I don’t know an education leader who doesn’t think about this? Right? How do you hit the it’s the two or three birds with one stone? But how, with one,
Adam Avramescu 31:48
one, scone?
Lisa Rothrauff 31:53
Depending on how hard rock and stale but really, like, how do you do that? Without one losing the instructional effectiveness, but also, you know, while serving the business in the best way, and it’s a really hard challenge, because you know, you don’t want to be a purist and say, well, we can only expose the content in this way. And people can only get, you know, derive value from the content if they’ve taken the full 30 minutes or 20 minutes of the course. But at the same time, you know, you do lose something by pulling out so you know, snippets in that moment, and I don’t know that I have the perfect solution, yet. It’s something that we’ll be testing. I’m very grateful that I, you know, I work for an organization that, you know, depends on the willingness of its employees to experiment. I mean, we have an entire part of our platform. That’s and you’ve have come from this background, also where experimentation is paramount, right. And that’s really something that we are going to be trying to learn is like, what is that balance between providing a holistic experience and then providing a very, like hyper, hyper chunked, or very micro experience within product? And you can you do it behind the scenes with one overall solution? And, you know, I’m interested, Adam, if you know, what your experience has been with that. I mean, you’ve you’ve had so many different experiences, you’re building out different kinds of content now. If you found anything that you think works well,
Adam Avramescu 33:32
yeah, I mean, in terms of that whole, like, theory versus practice, it’s, you know, I try, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, in fact, with some of those, you know, constant skills, like I think one thing that I increasingly look for, with LX D is, and in fact, with, with most roles that I hired for, is that contextual awareness of like, and curiosity, I guess, is the way that we put it earlier around, who is the learner? What is the product? What are all the different possibilities for how we would be able to educate alerter about that product. So even if you’re only working on one slice of that pie, you can see the bigger picture. And I really have come to value that skill that that like context seeking self awareness, curiosity above a lot of other ones, because to your point, you know, I’ve had this experience where I’ve had people who are incredibly commanding instructional designers on the team, and they can do everything in a way that is completely evidence based, and they can create a beautiful and precious instructional experience, which is great in the context that it’s delivered. But then you try to start editing it or re mixing it and things start to fall apart. So I think being able to actually start from the bigger picture, and starting with, let’s say, a little bit more business acumen around, why are we instructionally? designing this content to begin with? I don’t know, I found that to be more helpful. And you know, I still hire people and manage people who are on on different parts of that spectrum. But in general, I feel like, overall, I’ve been indexing more on Fox who really bring that curiosity, if not more of the business acumen to the fold.
Lisa Rothrauff 35:42
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it’s, um, you know, it’s, it’s, it can be just, you know, lots of opportunity to try out new things there. But definitely challenging. And I don’t underestimate, you know, for my designers, how challenging it is to do that, to think about all those different contexts, right in their mind at once, like, you know, they, they, I think when they think about the delivery, or the consumption of their learning content, they’re now trying to kind of keep different tracks in their mind, it’s kind of, you know, it’s kind of like making a video where you have the audio track, the video track, you’re seeing all these tracks, and all these different plays, depending on who’s consuming your content, where, and I think if, if you’re trying to optimize for all learners, that is just a very difficult thing to do. So I have a huge amount of empathy for my team. As they do that I when I was developing content, more in a full time manner, I never had that level of challenge, because we weren’t talking about, you know, delivering content in all of these different contexts at once. And it’s very exciting. But I don’t underestimate the challenge that it presents to, you know, somebody who does feel a lot of pride in their craft,
Adam Avramescu 36:59
it’s incredibly difficult to keep all of those straight. And in fact, one of the ways that we mitigate that on my team at personeel is we do actually have, in addition to our LX DS, we have content teams who work on other channels. Now, that creates a different challenge, which is keeping everyone aligned around how we repurpose content, and how we keep everything, you know, aligned to the same curriculum. But because we have, say, a team who works primarily on in app content that is different from my team who works more on course based content, as long as we can build good alignment and connection between those teams, it does at least allow people to focus and specialize more on delivering content through their respective channels, and then connecting those experiences. Yeah, so trying to build that, that balance between on one hand being able to see the big picture. But then on the other hand, being able to really then go in and focus on creating a specific type of experience that that ultimately supports the instructional goals. And like I by the way, I don’t mean to pick on instructional designers who are too far on the the like the evidence based instructional theory side I had in the past also, you know, I think bad experiences, hiring customer, education, instructional designers who are like, go, go, go, go go, but then every time they release something, it’s like full of typos, or just hasn’t been quality checked enough. And kind of back to your point about constant skills, I think attention to detail cannot be taught very well.
Lisa Rothrauff 38:32
Yes, I would agree with you. And I don’t think anybody would think you were picking on it.
Adam Avramescu 38:39
It’s like one of those things like when you see the practical activity, often, if someone’s going to do a presentation are going to give you a core sample, if that practical activity has a bunch of typos and design errors and stuff like that, like I always one thing I’ve learned during the interview process is, whatever you see during the interview process is probably the best thing you’re ever going to see from a person, even if they didn’t have a lot of time to work on it like this is their moment to shine. And so it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be the most sophisticated thing that they’ve put together because they probably don’t have nearly as much time as if they were working on a real instructional problem. However, it’s probably like when someone would feel under the most pressure to fix their typos and design errors and things like that. So if you’re seeing a bunch of that, in the practical activity while you’re interviewing, like without fail, it does come back to roost on the job.
Lisa Rothrauff 39:35
Yeah, I mean, you’re you’re getting the plus one emoji for me right now. I completely agree with you.
Adam Avramescu 39:42
Yeah, so I Yeah, go ahead.
Lisa Rothrauff 39:44
Yeah. What I was gonna say Adam was, you know, it’s an interesting conversation, just whether you are talking about Alex DS and the challenge they have with multiple contexts or even trainers, right. trainers have that same challenge when they’re doing more generic one to many training versus services training that may be highly. I mean, I think I think and I’m, I am currently right now thinking really hard about cross functional alignment around these different content types. It’s a big, big challenge. I think the way though to, for me, at least, is, is that I always tried to remind myself and remind, either my team or the people who are helping toward me achieve a certain goal and initiative is that as long as we understand what impact we’re making on the business, and that we, you know, we have a shared vision and common goals and shared values, that goes a long way so that people don’t, in fact, feel like their profession or their methodology is being is being disrespected, right? It’s really about understanding, you know, the virtues of how their skill sets when flexed, and kind of stretched in certain ways can bring to bear so much more value for the business for which they’re working.
Adam Avramescu 41:03
Yeah, one of one of the ways that I’ve looked at this in the past as well and have I’ve been on both sides of this activity is to actually go through, like a set of competency cards. So there’s, I don’t know if you’ve worked with these before, like the LA manager competency cards, or like Korn Ferry, I think makes them if you search for, for competency cards, I think you’ll you’ll find them. But you do this card sort activity where you can see a bunch of different competencies, and you sort them into different piles, where there are some where you say, hey, here are the competencies that I think I’m really good at. And then you flip over the card, and you see that they have descriptions of what those same competencies look like, when you lack them, like how might that show up. But equally, and I think this is really, this is like the brilliant part also what those competencies look like overused. So for instance, like attention to detail overused, might mean that you are getting really distracted and bogged down with completely insignificant details, and thus aren’t able to execute or reach like any sort of speed or velocity. So you sort them into like, which ones are my strengths, which ones are underused? Which ones are overused, which ones don’t apply, because there are like, there’s one, there’s a card for like, six sigma, which I don’t know, I don’t need to use Six Sigma, my jobs doesn’t really matter. And having having that level of awareness, and being able to do that, that sort of activity with someone on your team, where you really say, hey, you know what, let’s talk about the competencies needed to be successful on this job. And now let’s talk about how you are performing against those. But let’s do that in two ways. Let’s get your point of view on how you think they show up. And let’s get my point of view as the manager on what I’m seeing. And what I’m not seeing. It also kind of gets you into that realm of the understanding, which of those strengths are over uses, or under uses are known to you as the person doing the work? And might not be known to anyone else that you work with? Or, you know, in the reverse? Where might you have some blind spots about, hey, you know, what, this skill that you’re you’re using really well and seeing yourself show up with every day, you might actually be overusing it, and you might be causing some problems for you in terms of the way that you’re executing on work.
Lisa Rothrauff 43:14
Yeah, I think I think that’s really interesting. I mean, we we tend to do something similar, not with cards, but with our with our current ladders, right, we sort of check in and ladders and try to make sure that kind of what the manager is seeing and what the individual is seeing that we’re we’re seeing eye to eye, right, and where we’re not understanding Okay, well, what, what does that look like? And to your point, like, how does that actually impact the organization? You know, one really interesting another really interesting exercise, I think, at the team level, Adam is something that I’ve done with the help of we have an amazing, small but amazing talent team, where I am currently at amplitude, and we’ve done an exercise around called the lands work, exercise, its collaboration is really interesting. I had not heard about it till about a year ago. And really, what it does is beyond the individual competency and individual strengths, it really asks you asks you to prompts you to think about and identify, what are your team’s strengths? And then what is your brand within your organization? And how can you again, bring that to bear to the benefit of the larger organization? And excuse me, and we’ve had some interesting conversations about it, we haven’t so what that looks like as you start to think about, you know, you really start to think about okay if you are basically on an island or in another land of what would you want to export and what would you want to import? And when you think about what you want to export to other parts of the organization, what you what you start to do is you start to understand okay, what are other parts of the organization or what are the other depart Amongst other functions, what have you that are much more akin to what we’re doing or the way we work than we might have otherwise thought. So for us like for sometimes it’s very often, we think about product design, right? Where we’re big fans of product design, the product design, team, and amplitude is amazing, great partnerships. But we might also think about the enablement team, or we might think about the Talent Team, or we might think about a different team altogether, based on what it is that we want to export and import. So I, myself don’t have expertise to facilitate that type of session. But it’s been a really interesting way to think about not just individual strengths, but team strengths. And it goes back to what you and I were talking about earlier about, like when you’re thinking about building out a team, and making it, you know, at recruiting in an additive way, you know, it’s given me like a whole new lens from which to think about, okay, holistically, what does my team need to need to have to thrive? And then how is it that we then contribute back to the larger organization in different ways?
Adam Avramescu 46:11
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we’ve, we’ve kind of been on this journey, we’ve talked about individual competencies and skills. Now we’re talking about team skills and composition, like, what else would you say, is the key for you in terms of having a highly performant and functioning and thriving team?
Lisa Rothrauff 46:29
You know, it’s, it’s, it’s so interesting, because, you know, you go to one place, and you know, you work there, and you lead a team, and you think, Okay, I’ve got this down, right, it’s a little bit. For those of you who have children, it’s a little bit like, when you have a first child, and you think, Oh, I’ve got this down, I’ve got it figured out. And then you have your second child, and you realize, wait a minute, that doesn’t work for this one. Sometimes it’s the same thing when you go to another organization. And certainly just coming back to the theme that we talked about, at the very beginning. That coming out of our I think we talked about this coming out of COVID, you know, as we’re in this macro, you know, difficult macro economic environment. You’re having I’m having to rethink what does it mean to have a functioning team, it’s, I now have a distributed team, it’s completely distributed. We’ve all kind of got our, you know, had our experiences. And I think we all think about work differently. And so one thing that we have done in a very intentional way is develop what we call team agreements, where we’ve really thought about at the beginning, because we were all starting a new in one organization, how is it that we want to function together? Like what are our shared values? And we took some time to in a couple of different sessions to really build those out. And so, you know, my answer of what does it mean to be a functioning team normally, you know, what I think of is like, empathy and trust, and for sure, that’s what came out for the team. But what that looks like to them on the day to day basis, I needed to hear from them, like, what was it that they needed from me? And what was it that I needed to be able to say, Okay, this is what I need from you, in order to be able to give you the kind of autonomy and trust that you know, as a leader, and it was important to be able to articulate that at the very, very beginning and not assume that we all knew what, what we were doing, and what we were thinking. So I think it was about articulating values. And, you know, for us, it was the empathy and trust, I think, above all, but also taking the time to express those very outwardly. And then to come back to those. As we have added more people to the team. Actually, we’re just about to go through another session where we’re going to revisit our original team agreements, since we have new people on the team and ask ourselves, are those still valid for the larger team? So you know, I think what it means to be a functioning team, that definition evolves over time.
Adam Avramescu 48:57
Yeah, and that pairs well as well with something you can do at the individual level, which I’ve seen be successful in the past as you do a personal operating manual activity. Have you ever done something like that? Oh, I haven’t. Okay, basically, it’s you have a template that you can fill out and I’m sure you can find a lot of templates online for this. But you’re writing your own personal operating manual, where you talk about what are your preferences how to work well with you? Yeah, like what what what might some of your I say bugbears? There’s someone told me that that’s a Canadian term. I don’t think it is, but what’s the real word for that, like your pet peeves? You know, like what gets on your nerves. But anyway, you’re you’re basically helping others understand then how you work as well as an individual and how to work best with you. And you could read someone else’s personal operating manual to understand how to work best with them. And I think that paired with these team agreements can can actually help everyone on understand each other’s points of view and maybe take some things out of the subtext and make them text.
Lisa Rothrauff 50:05
Yeah, I agree with you. I think I think just having those, you know, having those explicit conversations and actually, I think building a culture within a team where you can have those conversations. And understand, you know, that whatever it is that, you know, you need at a certain point in time again, having permission to change that and to evolve that over time within the culture of your team, I think is is important. We have somebody on my team who he’s he’s it’s wonderful he when he has somebody new on his team, or somebody who he’s anybody who he’s meeting with, he actually very expressly schedules time with them. And I think he calls them the meet to learn sessions. And it’s, it’s exactly what you’re talking about Adam, we some, I think we all we all do it in some form. But he, he really dedicates time each time, and I think it’s well invested time to really understand what is it that makes people tick? What do they need to, you know, do their best work? And what do they need from you to partner in a way that’s collaborative and fruitful?
Adam Avramescu 51:12
Yeah, it’s often surprising when you you realize like, whether it’s a team dynamic, or an individual dynamic, that you’re making a lot of assumptions about people’s preferences, or how they might best like to work together, or whether everyone looks at the world the same way. You do. Yeah. But you’re talking here about evolution. And maybe this is a good note for us to to cover here. Before we wrap up, which is, you know, the reason we’re talking about this is talking about both the individuals and the composition of the team, and the team needing to meet evolving expectations from the business. So how do you, I guess, build and manage your team to keep up with the constant opportunities? And then on the other hand, challenges of, you know, an evolving and fast moving business and macroeconomic environment?
Lisa Rothrauff 52:04
Yeah, it’s really, it’s really challenging, isn’t it? Given what is going on? Yeah, I mean, so in terms of, you know, keeping up and finding opportunities in the change that lies before us. I mean, that’s, I guess, that’s the spirit with which I try to communicate the way our own business is evolving and meeting the challenges of the day, right. So you, I try to provide as much information and try to be as transparent as I can with my team. So they understand why are we making certain decisions within the business, what we will contribute to it as a team. And, you know, but I, but I tried to make sure that they’re not feeling whiplash, right? That, that I am plugged in enough, and this is my job, right? This is my responsibility to them to make sure that I am aligned enough with the leadership in my organization to know that the strategy that I start to, that I develop for one quarter, is the strategy that we can stick to sometimes that has to shift. Actually, in one case, it’s we’ve shifted, but But overall, I think, you know, so that they understand why it is that we’re doing what we’re doing. And then they they understand, like, the context and the rationale. And I think that gives them the opportunity to, to see this all as an opportunity, even if they are being pushed to develop something that’s, you know, maybe not exactly in their wheelhouse or not what they expected. Then I also learned from them, though, like they provide me a lot of information, keep an ear to the ground around new strategies around learning experience design around new technologies. And I really look to them to say, oh, you know, should we be doing this? Or should we be doing that? I absolutely invite them, we have a couple of different meeting cadences where this can happen. To kind of question what it is that we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The only thing I ask is that if we’re going to propose a change to something, or the adoption of a new tool, or the exploration of a new tool, I asked my team to always think about what problem is that we’re trying to solve? Or why would we do this? And how would it help the business? So again, it’s thinking about more strategically, like, why is it as a customer education organization that we would want to shift our strategy? So So I think it’s a two way street, right? I learned from them as much as they do for me and and we’re just trying to keep in constant communication around that evolution in our thinking.
Adam Avramescu 54:40
I agree. And I feel I feel very similar in the sense that I love learning from my team members who often have now way deeper specialties than I do or are way more immersed in a certain world than than I am. And what I try to do is, support them then in achieving their goals. But to me, that requires a two way agreement that I will provide as much context as I can on the strategy. And I will be as available as I can be in terms of, you know, blocking and tackling along the way. But equally, then I asked for that same level of context are my team members about what they’re thinking, why they want to drive certain strategies, what data or evidence or insights that they’re seeing, and how we then adapt our strategy to respond to those. So it’s kind of a different way of coming at the same problem, and really making sure that we’re very intentional about what we do and why we do it.
Lisa Rothrauff 55:40
Yeah, yep. I, I agree with you completely. And I think the one thing, you know, is that I think, as long as we, as leaders see ourselves, as you know, in many ways, just like, right, the people on our team, right, we’re constantly, we’re constantly learning about how to do our craft, and I think set that example. As somebody who’s just trying to do the best job we can with the information that we have, then we’ll all you know, we, that way, we can all kind of come to the table. You know, I think just eager to learn and grow as as we need to, and as the environment requires.
Adam Avramescu 56:18
Yeah, I mean, even just thinking about the number of changes that I’ve seen among our customer education leader peers, the different scopes that they’ve taken on the different things that they’ve been asked to do the changes in the team’s team composition or strategic focus, I think, you know, anything that we’re saying here about a team that you’re building, I would apply that lens, double or triple to ourselves, like our success, or failure in this industry depends on our willingness to adapt and evolve with it, we can’t be stuck in the past and continue executing the same playbook that, you know, worked for us in previous roles, because otherwise, we’re not going to be successful in leading our programs to really meet an evolving set of business challenges.
Lisa Rothrauff 57:07
Yeah. 100% 100%?
Adam Avramescu 57:12
Well, Lisa, this has been a really good candid conversation on a tough topic that we all think about constantly as customer education leaders, anything that we haven’t talked about yet that you would want to leave our listeners with.
Lisa Rothrauff 57:29
Um, I think the only thing is just, you know, opportunity. It’s like opportunity and privilege, right, like customer education, I think is a really, really exciting space. Exactly, for the reasons that Adam just said, right? Like, customer education is now evolving into so many different shapes and sizes, and it’s, it’s touching on experience, it’s going in product out of product into communities. And, you know, writ large, there’s so much opportunity that this, this, this function in this set of problems that customer educators take on, there’s so much opportunity that it presents, and I think anybody who is in a privileged position of leading an organization, you know, should hold that at the front of their minds that this is an opportunity to grow and be pushed ourselves. And, you know, when it’s also just a lot of fun, you get to meet great people like Adams. I think that’s what I knew Lisa.
Adam Avramescu 58:25
Oh, my gosh, okay. No, I like it. And I think that I really, I really agree with you. I see a lot of folks in our industry who, you know, they’ve they’ve built a really deep set of expertise, but they’re, they’re struggling to stay relevant to the business. And I think that, to me, that’s the key. It’s really continuing to have that curiosity and the, you know, kind of the willingness to humble yourself and really figure out what it is that you don’t know yet so that you can, so you can embrace those those opportunities as well as overcome those challenge and build that kind of adaptability and resilience in yourself. It’s like the it’s the skill. Definitely. Well, thank you, Adam. Thank you, Lisa. And, yeah, so so glad that at least, both of us a decade ago, decided to peek our heads outside of our individual worlds and try to find someone else who was doing customer education. I’m really glad that we have kept the relationship going for this long and that finally, we see it come to fruition on the podcast. I’m really glad you were able to come on.
Lisa Rothrauff 59:37
Thank you so much.
Adam Avramescu 59:39
And if you listeners want to learn more, we have a podcast website at customer dot education where you can find show notes and other material. If you found value in this podcast. Please help us find the others and share it with your friends, your peers. Maybe write a nice LinkedIn post that has your favorite episode or something that you learned that’s That’s an easy way to get that hashtag engagement on LinkedIn. And thank you to Alan Coda for providing our theme music. Please leave us a nice review on Apple podcasts or Spotify podcasts if you can. And to our audience, thanks for joining us. Go out and educate, experiment and find your people. Thanks for listening