Overview
You're designing and running the customer education function for ChurnZero's CS platform. You'll partner directly with the VP of CX to rebuild how customers learn the productâmoving from traditional training to embedded, AI-enabled learning that drives actual product adoption. You're not just delivering training; you're architecting certification paths and in-product education systems.
Role Snapshot
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Role Type | Customer Enablement Leader |
| Primary Focus | Product education, certification design, adoption frameworks |
| Team Size | Individual contributor or small team (likely 0-2 reports to start) |
| Scope | All customer learning - onboarding through advanced product adoption |
| Internal Partners | Product, CS ops, CSM team, Marketing |
| Success Metric | Product adoption rates, time-to-value, certification completion |
Company Context
Stage: Unknown (139 employees suggests Series B/C range)
Size: 139 employees
Growth: Building AI agent capabilities into their CS platform, active hiring for strategic roles
Market Position: Established CS platform competing in a crowded category (Gainsight, Totango, Catalyst, Planhat)
Customer Education Reality
Current State: They have "what's worked well" but the VP explicitly says it's time to redesign for 3-5 years out. Translation: you're inheriting something functional but dated.
What You're Building Toward:
- Embedded learning experiences inside the product itself
- AI-enabled education (using their own AI agent tech or other tools)
- Formal certification programs
- Scalable adoption frameworks that reduce human CSM touch
The Challenge: Most CS platforms have complex feature sets. Customers struggle to move beyond basic usage. You need to get them to actually adopt advanced features without requiring expensive 1:1 CSM time.
What You'll Actually Do
Time Breakdown
Strategy/Design (30%) | Content Creation (25%) | Platform/Tech (20%) | Stakeholder Management (15%) | Delivery/Iteration (10%)
Key Activities
- Audit and redesign the learning journey: Map out current customer onboarding and training, identify gaps, design the future state for embedded/AI-enabled learning
- Build certification programs: Create structured learning paths, assessment criteria, and credentialing for different user roles (CS Ops, CSM leaders, analysts)
- Develop in-product education: Work with Product to design tooltips, walkthroughs, contextual help, and progressive disclosure that teaches while users work
- Create scalable content: Build video libraries, knowledge base articles, interactive demos, and self-serve resources that reduce repetitive training asks
- Partner with Product on adoption metrics: Define what "good adoption" looks like for each feature, build measurement frameworks, design interventions for low-usage segments
- Enable the CSM team: Make sure customer-facing teams know how to guide customers through learning paths and use education as a retention/expansion lever
- Vendor/platform evaluation: Potentially implement LMS, digital adoption platforms (Pendo/WalkMe/Appcues), or AI tools to deliver education at scale
The Honest Reality
What's Hard
- You're building the plane while flying it: This is a redesign, not a maintenance role. Customers still need training today while you're building the future system
- Product complexity: CS platforms have deep feature sets. Explaining segmentation rules, journey orchestration, health scores, and integrations in ways that stick is difficult
- Measurement is fuzzy: Unlike sales enablement (win rates, ramp time), customer enablement success is harder to quantify. You'll need to establish new metrics
- Cross-functional dependency: You need Product to build in-product education, Marketing to promote certifications, CS to deliver content. Lots of influence without authority
- AI is a buzzword: "AI-enabled enablement" sounds good on paper. Figuring out what that actually means in practice requires experimentation and likely some failures
- Adoption is cultural, not just educational: Even perfect training won't help if customers don't have exec buy-in or resources to implement what they learn
What Success Looks Like
- Certification program launched with measurable completion rates and adoption correlation
- Time-to-value for new customers decreases (faster onboarding, quicker feature adoption)
- CSM team spends less time on "how do I..." questions, more on strategic advice
- Product usage data shows customers activating advanced features at higher rates
- You've built a scalable system that works without adding headcount linearly
Who Your "Customer" Is
Primary Audiences:
- CS Ops professionals who admin the ChurnZero platform
- CSM leaders who need to train their teams to use it
- End-user CSMs who use it daily to manage accounts
- Executives who need to understand dashboards and ROI
What They Care About:
- Getting to value fast (execs are impatient, they bought this to reduce churn)
- Not looking dumb in front of their team (CS Ops people need to be the expert)
- Time efficiency (CSMs are slammed, won't watch hour-long training videos)
- Practical application ("just show me how to build the segment I need today")
Requirements
- 5+ years in customer education, enablement, or learning designâpreferably in B2B SaaS
- Experience building certification or structured learning programs from scratch
- Familiarity with learning platforms (LMS), digital adoption tools, or in-product education strategies
- Comfortable with ambiguity and designing new frameworks vs. running existing playbooks
- Strong stakeholder managementâyou'll partner with Product, CS leadership, and ops without formal authority over them
- Understanding of customer success metrics and how education drives retention/expansion
- Bonus: Experience with AI tools for education (adaptive learning, chatbots, content generation)
- Bonus: Background as a CSM or CS Ops person who knows what customers actually struggle with