Manager of Customer Enablement

Overview

You run the customer enablement function at ChurnZero, a 138-person customer success platform. Your job is creating and delivering training programs that teach CS teams at client companies how to use ChurnZero's platform effectively. You work with product, customer success, and the new customer marketing leader (your predecessor in this role) to design learning experiences, certification programs, and onboarding paths.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth-stage private company (138 employees suggests Series B/C)

Size: 138 employees

Growth: Investing in AI agents to differentiate in a competitive CS platform market

Market Position: ChurnZero competes in the customer success platform space (Gainsight, Totango, Catalyst, etc.)—it's a crowded category where product adoption and customer stickiness are critical

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Content Creation (40%) | Live Training Delivery (25%) | Strategy & Measurement (20%) | Cross-functional Collaboration (15%)

Key Activities

• Build learning paths in your LMS: You're scripting courses, recording videos, building quizzes, and maintaining a certification program that walks new customer admins through ChurnZero's features. This is instructional design work—storyboarding, writing scripts, probably using tools like Articulate or similar.
• Run live webinars and office hours: You host onboarding webinars for new customers ("Getting Started with ChurnZero"), plus ongoing "office hours" sessions where customers can ask questions. These happen weekly or biweekly, and you're repeating the same foundational content a lot.
• Create help documentation and knowledge base articles: When product ships new features (especially their new AI agent capabilities), you're writing the "how to use this" docs, updating the help center, and making sure customers can self-serve answers.
• Analyze usage and engagement data: You track who's completing certifications, which modules have high drop-off, where customers get stuck. You report on these metrics to leadership and use them to iterate on your content.
• Partner with CS and Product: CSMs tell you where customers struggle. Product tells you what's changing. You translate those inputs into training priorities and updated curriculum.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're always playing catch-up with product changes: In a growth-stage software company, features change constantly. You spend significant time updating existing content that becomes outdated, not just creating new stuff.
• Balancing depth vs. scalability: Some customers want detailed, role-specific training. Others just want a quick "getting started" path. You're constantly deciding what to build vs. what to deliver live vs. what to leave to CSMs.
• Measuring real impact is tricky: You can track course completions, but connecting that to retention or expansion is fuzzy. You'll be asked to prove ROI on your programs without clear attribution.
• You're not customer-facing in the sales sense: This isn't a path to quota or commission. Your wins are internal—adoption metrics, customer health scores improving, support ticket volume dropping.

What Success Looks Like

• Customer admins complete core certification within their first 30 days, and you can show that certified customers have better retention or faster time-to-value
• Support ticket volume decreases for topics you've covered in training, proving your content is deflecting questions
• CSMs report that customers feel more confident and are using advanced features (not just basic functionality)
• You build a sustainable content engine where updating a course takes hours, not weeks

Who You're Enabling

Primary Audience:

• CS Ops managers and administrators at ChurnZero's customer companies—these are the people setting up the platform, building playbooks, configuring integrations
• CSMs at customer companies who need to learn how to use ChurnZero to manage their own customer base

What They Care About:

• Getting up to speed fast—they're busy and don't have time for 8-hour training sessions
• Practical, "how do I do this specific task" guidance, not conceptual overviews
• Ongoing support as they hit edge cases or advanced use cases months after onboarding

The Transition Context

What's Unique Here:

• You're inheriting a program that Peter Adams built over "several years," so there's existing infrastructure (an LMS, probably certification tracks, some content library)
• Peter is moving to Customer Marketing but staying at the company, so you'll likely collaborate closely—he's not disappearing
• The role is described as "leading and evolving" the business, which suggests you'll have autonomy to change things but also expectations to maintain what's working

What's Unknown:

• Whether you'll have direct reports or be an IC
• How mature their content library actually is (are you maintaining 80% and building 20%, or rebuilding half of it?)
• How their new AI agent features impact the training roadmap—this could be a major lift if it's a significant platform shift

Requirements

• Instructional design experience: You've built learning programs before—ideally in a B2B SaaS context where you're teaching software, not soft skills
• Comfort with enablement tools: LMS platforms (Skilljar is mentioned in Peter's profile as a partner, so possibly that), video recording/editing, quiz builders, potentially SCORM packages
• Customer empathy without being customer-facing: You understand how customers learn and what blockers they hit, but you're not in sales calls or doing implementations
• Data-driven thinking: You track engagement metrics, measure outcomes, and iterate based on what's working
• Cross-functional collaboration skills: You work with Product (for release notes and feature training), CS (for customer pain points), and Marketing (for customer-facing content)
• B2B SaaS background preferred: Understanding how CS teams work and what they need from a platform like ChurnZero helps you build relevant training

What This Isn't

• Not sales enablement: You're not training ChurnZero's sales team or creating pitch decks. This is customer education.
• Not CSM work: You're not managing customer relationships or owning renewals. You're building the training that helps CSMs do their jobs.
• Not pure content marketing: While there's overlap with Peter's new customer marketing role, your focus is product education and certification, not demand gen or community building.
• Not a player-coach AE path: This doesn't lead to carrying quota or managing a sales org. This is an enablement career track.