Training courses for new starters

It’s a typical story in start-up land. At launch, it was all hands on deck pitching in to do what we could to make our product a success.

We were all in one room, so we’d turn around and ask a dev if we weren’t sure of something. Our featureset was small, and we knew how new features worked because we all helped shape them.

As we scaled, we started building out a Customer Success team across the world. Our product was much bigger and we were no longer in the same room—or even the same country!—so we needed a more robust training process.

I worked with leadership to create training resources for new starters in our Customer Success roles. As well as knowledge of our system, we wanted to pass on our ethos and the way we talked to customers.

I created a variety of training tasks, including:

• Cheat sheets summarizing a feature, linking out to key guides.
• Quizzes and interactive games.
• Roleplays based on real customer conversations.
• “You Drive” challenges, where new folks would demo how to do something.
• Customer case studies to introduce new folks to our target market.
• Short presentations on things like our tone, brand, and way we talk to customers.
• Ticket review sessions, where we’d review real tickets and talk about what was good and bad.

I designed each task to appeal to different styles of learning to include everyone. As we onboarded new folks, I gathered feedback and improved our resources for the next batch of new folks.