What are the best practices for partnerships with Product Management and Education Services?

Beverly van de Velde

I'm looking to offset training content development resources to report into product management, but who will have a dotted line reporting to education services. I'm curious to know if anyone else is doing this already, as I believe it will be a paradigm shift in the education services industry. I realize that the two teams always work closely and that the challenge is usually developing training content as close to product GA as possible, which usually means 'technical' (not pre-sales) education content releases 30-60 days post-GA. (Other challenges come about when product changes occur and training content needs to be updated.) But, does anyone actually have education services content developers dedicated on the product management team, whose sole purpose is to develop technical training content at the same time as product management is developing feature/function product documentation, for example? If so, I'd love to hear about any best practices.

Jerome Peck

Hi Beverly—Good question. @Maria Manning-Chapman and @LauraFay, I'm wondering if you have thoughts here, and am also interested in this topic, myself.

Also, @StevenForth, @Alyssa Ortiz, and @DeniseStokowski—any insights into this?

StevenForth

@BeverlyvandeVelde

We are taking a somewhat different approach to this. Education has been made part of customer success. We have done this for two reasons.

1. It plays better to the strengths of the two teams (a poor reason but sometimes one has to work with what we have).
2. Customer success is in constant contact with customers and has a better understanding of their needs.

One way to think this through is to look at how this plays out across the customer journey. Look at what learning needs to happen around each touchpoint. We define this in terms of skills.

• What skills and knowledge does the customer need t have or develop at each touchpoint?
• What skills, knowledge, attitudes do our people need at each touchpoint?

(I may be silly leaving out attitudes for customers but I am not sure that one has much direct control over that.)

The argument in favor of making this part of product is that a good product delivers the learning and supports the skills needed to get value.