In this week's Field Notes edition of The Adoption Curve, we look at why customer education teams keep getting reorganized, re-scoped, and asked to prove themselves all over again, even when the content is good.
The challenge is rarely the content. It’s that the content isn't tied to a problem the business is already trying to solve.
This edition examines how customer education teams become a growth engine by owning one business problem (retention, activation, or acquisition) instead of defending a catalog.
What you'll learn
- Why customer education looks like a cost center in whichever department it lands
- How to pick the one business problem your program should own right now
- What changes inside the company once education is tied to a result the business already cares about
About Field Notes
Each week, we speak with industry experts and iorad users around the world to understand how they're solving challenges in Enablement and L&D. We share those stories through The Adoption Curve.
But across those conversations, patterns have started to emerge.
Field Notes is where we capture them: distilling insights from interviews, customer feedback, and real world experience into the trends that matter most.
A team without a fixed address
Ask a customer education lead who they report to, and you will often get a pause.
Support last year. Marketing before that. Customer success now, for the moment.
Each move brings a new leader, new goals, and the same question:
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What is this team actually for?
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Where should customer education live?
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What should it be measured on when it moves?
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How does a small team earn credibility with a department that just inherited it?
For most teams, the answer comes down to one thing: Ownership.
Why customer education keeps starting over
Todd Kirk, VP of Software Engagement Advisory at Brainstorm and host of the SaaS Therapy podcast, has worked alongside customer education teams for years. When he interviewed Sean on his own show, he described the pattern he sees most often.
"If they're under marketing maybe they have to figure out how to get prospects to go through education so that they get some qualified leads that come from an effort. If they're in support, they're trying to figure out how to reduce the cost of the support system. If they're in CS, they're trying to figure out how to increase renewal rates. [In] every case, usually the only data point they have access to is somebody watched a thing. And that's not good enough in most cases."
Each department wants a different result. The team brings the same evidence to all three: views, enrollments, completions.
That evidence answers none of their questions.
So every reorg resets the clock. The catalog might be excellent, and it still reads as overhead to the new leader, because nothing in it says what problem it solves for them.
The issue isn't where the team sits. It's that the team never claimed a result of its own to carry from one home to the next.
Courtney Sembler, Senior Director of HubSpot Academy, leads a team that has lived in customer success, then marketing, then customer success again. She doesn't treat that as instability. In her view the moves helped, because each one built relationships with a team that wouldn't otherwise have known them.
The difference is that the Academy knew what it was for.
Pick the problem already on the whiteboard
Courtney's advice for a team trying to get leadership's attention starts with listening, not pitching.
Retention, activation, acquisition. Almost every leadership team is worried about one of those right now.
And it usually lines up with the department you report into. Customer success worries about retention. Product and onboarding worry about activation. Marketing worries about acquisition.
That is the reframe. Your current department isn't a random home. It tells you which problem to pick first.
Courtney's team didn't launch certifications, a localized catalog, and a lead engine at once. They started with live webinars aimed at one problem, and looked past attendance to what happened to the customers who came.
Today, HubSpot Academy reports against all three: about 700,000 content leads a year, a perfect CSAT score on guided onboarding, and a 10 to 13 percent lift in customer dollar retention for portals with at least one active Academy certification.
That came later. It started with one.
Each problem asks something different of the program.
Retention: make staying easier
Retention is where many customer education teams already sit without saying so: support deflection, help center content, onboarding for new admins.
Samantha Murray, who led global customer education at Shopify, frames the job around the person on the other end. Your user is an employee somewhere with work to do. The program's role is to take friction out of that work, not add more things to complete.
The customer who renews is rarely the one who finished the most courses.
It is the one who stopped getting stuck.
Activation: define what "activated" means
Kevin Dunn leads customer education and community at Airtable, after eight years on the HubSpot Academy team. He argues the first job of a new program isn't to cover every use case. It is to cover the moments every successful customer passes through.
At Airtable, one of those thresholds is the moment a user builds an interface on top of their data. That's where the real value shows up, so that's where Kevin's team focused its early content.
Activation is where customer education can be most precise. The target is a specific behavior inside the product, not a general sense of having been trained.
If you can't name the milestone, you can't own it.
Acquisition: teach before they buy
Acquisition is the problem customer education claims least, and often the one it could defend best.
Gating education behind a contract treats it as a perk. Opening it up makes it part of how people decide to buy.
For companies that sell through partners, that reach extends further. Merav Ammar leads global partner enablement at SentinelOne, which sells almost entirely through partners. For her, education is the route to market.
A product partners can't explain, demo, or deploy won't get sold, however good it is. So Merav's team builds win kits and preconfigured demo labs that let a partner show value without building an environment first.
That is acquisition work, even when it's labeled enablement.
Whichever problem you pick, the pick is the strategy.
What good looks like: speak in outcomes
Owning a problem changes how a team describes its work. Samantha is direct about why most program updates don't land with leadership.
A catalog is an output. The outcome is the thing the catalog changes.
"We launched twelve new courses" describes the team. "New admins reach their first working workflow in half the time" describes the business.
Courtney learned this the hard way. She used to bring a fifteen-slide deck on education into executive meetings and got shot down every time, because nobody got past the second slide. What worked was starting from the business goal, then letting the educational decisions follow.
A program that owns its problem has it written down in one sentence, agreed with the leader it reports to. Content decisions trace back to it, including the decision not to build something.
That doesn't require a bigger team. It requires a clearer one.
How you know it's working
The first sign usually isn't on a dashboard. It's in how the rest of the company treats you.
Courtney describes the difference between a team that waits for requests and one that other teams already know how to use.
A ticket taker hears about a launch on launch day. A team that owns a problem gets pulled in while the work is still taking shape.
Watch for specific signals. Product brings you in during beta, not after release. Your leader uses your metric in their own reviews. Someone asks whether education can help before the plan is set, not after it stalls.
The numbers still matter, and our earlier edition, Adoption Metrics That Actually Matter, covers how to build them.
But the numbers follow the positioning. They rarely create it.
The cultural shift: walk most of the way
Owning a problem doesn't mean solving it alone. It means being the team others know to call, and that takes more effort than most leaders expect.
It's uncomfortable advice for a team that already feels stretched. Content that isn't strictly for your customers can feel like a detour.
It isn't. It is how a team with no fixed address builds credit in every department it might land in next.
Give first. Then ask.
The tactical starting point
You don't need a reorg or a bigger team to start. You need one decision.
- Name your current home. Write down who you report to this quarter and the one number they're measured on.
- Match it to one problem. Retention, activation, or acquisition. If you're unsure, ask the leader directly which of the three worries them most right now.
- Point one initiative at it. Something already in flight or quick to ship: a webinar series, an admin onboarding path, a course opened to prospects.
- Name the milestone. The specific customer behavior that shows the problem is moving.
- Write the one-line version. "Customer education reduces X for Y." Open every update with it.
- Give before you ask. Find one goal of a neighboring team you can serve this quarter.
Don't try to own all three problems at once. HubSpot Academy didn't, and it now reports against all of them.
Customer education doesn't need a permanent home to be a growth engine.
It needs a problem with its name on it.