CELab: The Customer Education Lab

Customer education programs in fast-growing companies rarely stall because the content is bad or the tooling is wrong. They stall because the organization around them changes faster than any curriculum can keep up: reorgs, new products, a shifting ICP, a new leader every few quarters. In this episode, Dave puts that hypothesis to Mikaron Fortier, an organization development practitioner who earned her stripes training customers at a Seattle legal-tech startup that grew from 12 to 150 people, spent two decades as a learning consultant and instructional designer, and just completed her Master’s in Organization Development at Pepperdine. Her answer reframes the job: the secret to speed isn’t shipping more content, it’s managing how the team works.

Mikaron hands customer educators the OD toolkit our field rarely gets: complexity and chaos theory applied to a company that won’t hold still, the foundational team dynamics (how decisions get made, who owns what, how often people actually talk) that quietly decide whether a cross-functional program moves, and her new research on what people learn, and lose, when they work across company boundaries. You’ll hear why “knowledge leaks” happen every time a field expert returns from a customer engagement with no time to reflect, why trust has to come before anyone shares their IP, and why so much partnership work stays invisible to the organization that depends on it. If you lead Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the vocabulary for diagnosing what you’ve been feeling; if you’re in Enablement, L&D, Product, or Marketing, it’s the case for breaking down the silos where five teams quietly build the same thing.

Highlights from this episode:

Slow down to speed up. Why the fastest education teams build in time to reflect instead of shipping more courses.

Knowledge leaks. What your organization loses every time an expert comes back from the field and nobody asks what they learned.

Tugging on the known unknown. How an outside facilitator surfaces the conversation a team never knew it needed to have.

Room for both. Mikaron’s case for making space for emergence and co-creation with customers alongside the hard-coded curriculum.

The OD reading list. Where to start: Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute, Meg Wheatley on leadership and complexity, and David Teece on dynamic capabilities.

Connect with Mikaron on LinkedIn to talk organization development, fractional OD work, or her research on how learning happens when companies collaborate.

Producing customer education content has never been cheaper, and that’s exactly why making more of it is no longer the answer. The teams pulling ahead are the ones making smarter decisions about what to build, when to show it, and where it should live. In this episode, Adam sits down with Talya Reynolds, Head of Product Education at ClearCo. Nearly ten years ago, Talya found the name for the work she was already doing by listening to CELab. Today she’s rebuilding product education as a data-driven system designed to teach customers in the moment, inside the product, instead of sending them off to a course.

Talya gets refreshingly specific about what that system takes. She covers when contextual education works and when screen real estate means a deeper format is still the right call. She explains why ClearCo is building a user maturity score from entitlement, product telemetry, support tickets, and call sentiment instead of trusting usage alone. She describes how her team is consolidating Gong, Zendesk, product data, and Slack into a customer hub, and how skills in a shared GitHub repo are starting to turn PRDs into first-draft docs and learning plans. She’s just as candid about the costs, the human review that self-healing content still needs, and the two months her team lost chasing a perfect AI model. If you work in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is a practical blueprint for contextual learning. If you’re in Digital CS, Product Marketing, Enablement, Support, or L&D, it’s a clear look at how shared customer data can make every team’s content smarter.

Highlights from this episode:

Stop sending users to a course. Why “take a course to learn our guides” is a bad signal for any product, and what changed when Talya moved repeat questions into the app.

Usage isn’t health. A busy account can still be an unhappy one. Here’s how a user maturity score triangulates entitlement, telemetry, and sentiment.

Docs drafted from the code. Skills, schemas, and governance rules in a GitHub repo that produce first-draft documentation, adoption plans, and learning plans.

Self-healing content has a price tag. How a tiering calculator decides when the update agent runs, and why a minor UI tweak can break 50 embedded guides.

Write for humans and LLMs at once. Governance, alt text, heading order, task-based jobs-to-be-done articles, and the table problem nobody has solved yet.

Connect with Talya on LinkedIn; she welcomes DMs and ideas on cracking the content intelligence model.

Customer education doesn’t have a confidence problem. It has a visibility problem wearing a confidence problem’s clothes. Thought Industries’ 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report found that 99% of leaders are confident their program influences business outcomes and 72% say they have the data to prove it — yet education is still one of the first functions on the block when budgets tighten. Both of those things can’t be true. In this episode, Dave puts that tension to Irana Wasti, CEO of Thought Industries, a product leader who spent twenty-plus years at IBM, Intuit, GoDaddy, Typeform, and BILL before stepping into the learning category a year ago — and who calls customer education “the best hidden secret” in every company she’s met.

Irana’s outsider lens is the whole point. She explains why the customer journey looks so much bigger from the education seat than it ever did from the product seat, why declining academy logins are an opportunity rather than a loss, and why the fix isn’t a better dashboard — it’s getting your best content out of the gated portal and into every place your prospects and customers actually ask questions, from ChatGPT and Claude to in-product chat and the help center. You’ll hear how Thought Industries’ Omnichannel Learning and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) work, why “two-second answers or a PhD” is the new customer expectation, and what changes on the vendor’s side of the table. If you sit in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is your case for a bigger seat; if you’re in Enablement, Marketing, Support, or L&D, it’s the argument for one shared source of truth instead of five teams educating in silos.

Highlights from this episode:

The best hidden secret. Coming from product, Irana had barely interacted with customer education teams — then she saw how much of the customer journey they actually own, and how little of it reaches the executive dashboard.

Falling academy traffic “screams opportunity.” Customers left for ChatGPT overnight. Irana reframes that drop as the moment to insert education into every touchpoint instead of asking people to come to you.

Everybody thinks they do customer education. Product tours, community, help center, academy — five teams, five versions of the truth. The team with the richest, most accurate content should own the fabric, not just a platform.

Why budgets get cut. When education is measured as “just another platform,” it looks redundant every renewal cycle. Tie it to the full customer journey and the metrics finally climb the dashboard.

A new goal for the industry. Irana’s closing challenge: stop at 99% of education leaders being confident and go for 99% of CEOs confident that education drives business outcomes.

Connect with Irana Wasti on LinkedIn, explore Thought Industries’ AI Wave — Omnichannel Learning and Conversational AI Learning — at thoughtindustries.com, and watch for the 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Thought Industries.

At most B2B SaaS companies, the customer comes last. Product announces, internal enablement scrambles, marketing drafts, documentation piles on — and the customer-facing material gets slapped together at the end by whoever’s left. Anna-Lena Kress, Senior Learning Experience Designer at quantilope, decided that order was exactly backwards. She pitched leadership on building the polished, customer-facing asset first and letting marketing and internal training derive from it — and got an immediate yes. The result: a help center rebuild scoped at six months shipped in two, a team that trained itself just by using the customer content, and a one-person education function that now runs like a system instead of a cleanup crew.
In this episode, Anna-Lena walks through the three pillars that made it work — Customer Education First (create once, publish everywhere), Capture at the Source (SMEs recording asynchronously in Camtasia Online instead of being interviewed), and Amplify with AI (Clueso for step-by-step articles, Claude for finished Zendesk HTML). Then the conversation turns to attention itself: how her family farm’s social channel went from 1,000 followers in March to 50,000 by recording day with strictly educational soil-health videos, and what hook–arc–payoff can teach Customer Education about getting people through the front door. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the playbook for going first. If you’re in Enablement, Marketing, L&D, or Support, it’s a look at what you get when the customer asset already exists on day one.
Highlights from this episode:
“Who actually sends our content to the customer? Our team.” — Why Anna-Lena treats internal colleagues as her first customer, and how that reframes the whole launch sequence.
The waiter effect — When the team trains on customer-facing material, they recommend it like a server who’s already tasted tonight’s special. Confident referrals, zero extra enablement lift.
The “it’s not baked yet” objection, answered — Last-minute product tweaks are cheaper to patch on a finished customer asset than to rebuild from internal drafts. The fear is legit; the conclusion is backwards.
Six months to two — 100+ help center articles rebuilt by one person: SMEs record in Camtasia Online, Clueso turns video into screenshots and steps, Claude assembles the final Zendesk HTML — and the leftover video library later powered an unplanned course update.
Fix the front door, not just the interior — We obsess over the inside of our academies while the entrance is off its hinges. Why 30-second, one-lesson, myth-buster videos are a scroll-stopping way in — and how Dave’s viral Atlassian short-form program got killed anyway.
Connect with Anna-Lena Kress on LinkedIn, explore the quantilope Academy to see the modular, customer-first model in action, and find her farm, Better Together Acres, on Facebook for the soil-health videos that stopped the scroll.

Every Customer Education team eventually hits the same wall: you build something genuinely good, and it quietly dies behind a portal your customers never log into. We call that an engagement problem. It isn't. It's a distribution problem — and most of us are still solving it one channel at a time. In this crossover episode, Dave replays a July 2026 webinar recorded with Casey Trujillo of BrainStorm, a digital transformation coach who has spent 20+ years helping Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies get their people to actually use the software they bought. The topic is content syndication, and the argument is blunt: "come to my site, create an account, take my course" is a losing pattern, and everybody in the chain knows it.

The through-line is build once, distribute many — build a genericized version of the material once, then split it two ways: one copy inside for enablement, one copy outside for customers, delivered where they already work and shaped to the slice of your product they actually own. Casey and Dave walk the two-sided standoff that keeps this from happening — vendors terrified of losing control of their content, customers exhausted by asking permission for every change — and land on the mechanism that resolves both at once. You'll leave with a way to think about shared reporting, a churn signal you're probably already ignoring, and a low-risk experiment you can run with a single existing customer this quarter. Primary audience here is Customer Education and Customer Success, but if you sit in Enablement, L&D, Support, or Marketing and you build content for people who don't work for you, this is your problem too.

Highlights from this episode:

"Why are you rebuilding this?" — Dave on watching enablement teams reconstruct fundamentals for content that already exists, in excellent form, out in the world.

It was never an LMS problem. Why the LMS mental model — completions, seats, box-checking — quietly caps what your education program can ever do.

The two-sided standoff. The vendor's fear of losing content control versus the customer's fear of asking permission forever — and why private portals resolve both at the same time.

Shared reporting, both directions. What changes when the vendor and the customer see the same engagement data, and nobody has to play reporting concierge at 7am on a Monday.

The signal you're throwing away. If a customer isn't touching the training, they're probably not touching the product — and that's a proactive play for your CSM, not a lagging metric.