CELab - Ep 190 - The Secret to Speed Isn’t More Content: Mikaron Fortier on Customer Education Through an OD Lens
CELab: The Customer Education LabShow Notes
Customer education programs in fast-growing companies rarely stall because the content is bad or the tooling is wrong. They stall because the organization around them changes faster than any curriculum can keep up: reorgs, new products, a shifting ICP, a new leader every few quarters. In this episode, Dave puts that hypothesis to Mikaron Fortier, an organization development practitioner who earned her stripes training customers at a Seattle legal-tech startup that grew from 12 to 150 people, spent two decades as a learning consultant and instructional designer, and just completed her Master’s in Organization Development at Pepperdine. Her answer reframes the job: the secret to speed isn’t shipping more content, it’s managing how the team works.
Mikaron hands customer educators the OD toolkit our field rarely gets: complexity and chaos theory applied to a company that won’t hold still, the foundational team dynamics (how decisions get made, who owns what, how often people actually talk) that quietly decide whether a cross-functional program moves, and her new research on what people learn, and lose, when they work across company boundaries. You’ll hear why “knowledge leaks” happen every time a field expert returns from a customer engagement with no time to reflect, why trust has to come before anyone shares their IP, and why so much partnership work stays invisible to the organization that depends on it. If you lead Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the vocabulary for diagnosing what you’ve been feeling; if you’re in Enablement, L&D, Product, or Marketing, it’s the case for breaking down the silos where five teams quietly build the same thing.
Highlights from this episode:
Slow down to speed up. Why the fastest education teams build in time to reflect instead of shipping more courses.
Knowledge leaks. What your organization loses every time an expert comes back from the field and nobody asks what they learned.
Tugging on the known unknown. How an outside facilitator surfaces the conversation a team never knew it needed to have.
Room for both. Mikaron’s case for making space for emergence and co-creation with customers alongside the hard-coded curriculum.
The OD reading list. Where to start: Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute, Meg Wheatley on leadership and complexity, and David Teece on dynamic capabilities.
Connect with Mikaron on LinkedIn to talk organization development, fractional OD work, or her research on how learning happens when companies collaborate.
More from CELab: The Customer Education Lab
Producing customer education content has never been cheaper, and that’s exactly why making more of it is no longer the answer. The teams pulling ahead are the ones making smarter decisions about what to build, when to show it, and where it should live. In this episode, Adam sits down with Talya Reynolds, Head of Product Education at ClearCo. Nearly ten years ago, Talya found the name for the work she was already doing by listening to CELab. Today she’s rebuilding product education as a data-driven system designed to teach customers in the moment, inside the product, instead of sending them off to a course.
Customer education doesn’t have a confidence problem. It has a visibility problem wearing a confidence problem’s clothes. Thought Industries’ 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report found that 99% of leaders are confident their program influences business outcomes and 72% say they have the data to prove it — yet education is still one of the first functions on the block when budgets tighten. Both of those things can’t be true. In this episode, Dave puts that tension to Irana Wasti, CEO of Thought Industries, a product leader who spent twenty-plus years at IBM, Intuit, GoDaddy, Typeform, and BILL before stepping into the learning category a year ago — and who calls customer education “the best hidden secret” in every company she’s met.
At most B2B SaaS companies, the customer comes last. Product announces, internal enablement scrambles, marketing drafts, documentation piles on — and the customer-facing material gets slapped together at the end by whoever’s left. Anna-Lena Kress, Senior Learning Experience Designer at quantilope, decided that order was exactly backwards. She pitched leadership on building the polished, customer-facing asset first and letting marketing and internal training derive from it — and got an immediate yes. The result: a help center rebuild scoped at six months shipped in two, a team that trained itself just by using the customer content, and a one-person education function that now runs like a system instead of a cleanup crew.In this episode, Anna-Lena walks through the three pillars that made it work — Customer Education First (create once, publish everywhere), Capture at the Source (SMEs recording asynchronously in Camtasia Online instead of being interviewed), and Amplify with AI (Clueso for step-by-step articles, Claude for finished Zendesk HTML). Then the conversation turns to attention itself: how her family farm’s social channel went from 1,000 followers in March to 50,000 by recording day with strictly educational soil-health videos, and what hook–arc–payoff can teach Customer Education about getting people through the front door. If you’re in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is the playbook for going first. If you’re in Enablement, Marketing, L&D, or Support, it’s a look at what you get when the customer asset already exists on day one.Highlights from this episode:“Who actually sends our content to the customer? Our team.” — Why Anna-Lena treats internal colleagues as her first customer, and how that reframes the whole launch sequence.The waiter effect — When the team trains on customer-facing material, they recommend it like a server who’s already tasted tonight’s special. Confident referrals, zero extra enablement lift.The “it’s not baked yet” objection, answered — Last-minute product tweaks are cheaper to patch on a finished customer asset than to rebuild from internal drafts. The fear is legit; the conclusion is backwards.Six months to two — 100+ help center articles rebuilt by one person: SMEs record in Camtasia Online, Clueso turns video into screenshots and steps, Claude assembles the final Zendesk HTML — and the leftover video library later powered an unplanned course update.Fix the front door, not just the interior — We obsess over the inside of our academies while the entrance is off its hinges. Why 30-second, one-lesson, myth-buster videos are a scroll-stopping way in — and how Dave’s viral Atlassian short-form program got killed anyway.Connect with Anna-Lena Kress on LinkedIn, explore the quantilope Academy to see the modular, customer-first model in action, and find her farm, Better Together Acres, on Facebook for the soil-health videos that stopped the scroll.
Every Customer Education team eventually hits the same wall: you build something genuinely good, and it quietly dies behind a portal your customers never log into. We call that an engagement problem. It isn't. It's a distribution problem — and most of us are still solving it one channel at a time. In this crossover episode, Dave replays a July 2026 webinar recorded with Casey Trujillo of BrainStorm, a digital transformation coach who has spent 20+ years helping Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies get their people to actually use the software they bought. The topic is content syndication, and the argument is blunt: "come to my site, create an account, take my course" is a losing pattern, and everybody in the chain knows it.
Most companies handed the internal AI rollout to whoever sits closest to revenue — Sales Enablement or RevOps — and adoption promptly stalled at the login screen. In this episode, Dave reunites with his old Gainsight colleague Eve Kedar, EdD — Revenue Execution Architect at EK Consulting, author of Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and creator of the Four Faces of AI Resistance — to make the case most org charts get wrong: the team that should own internal AI adoption is the one nobody put in the room. Customer Education.Eve brings a combination almost nobody else in this conversation has: a doctorate in Education and Leadership for Change plus 15+ years inside revenue teams at Apple, Seagate, PayPal, Cisco, Gainsight, and copy.ai. Whether you sit in Customer Education, Customer Success, L&D, Enablement, Marketing, or Support — if your job is helping people genuinely change how they work, this episode hands you a diagnostic for the resistance you’re up against and two plays you can run on Monday, no platform purchase required.Highlights from this episode:The Four Faces of AI Resistance — status fear, displacement fear, change aversion, and rollout fatigue — and why naming which face you’re looking at tells you exactly which intervention to run.Why not Enablement or RevOps? Neither function is chartered to own learning — and real “adoption” means use-in-workflow, not logins.Attendance is a vanity metric. If all you can show is headcount and quiz clicks, your team may be next to get cut — bring KPI movement instead.The master glossary play: become the anchor for canonical learning with two-minute mini-trainings — without critiquing Enablement’s content and losing them forever.The cheapest AI enablement in the world: prompt-based roleplay with Claude or ChatGPT — twenty minutes per rep, no purchase order.Learn more: get the Four Faces of AI Resistance framework — plus Eve’s speaking and workshops — at evekedar.com, explore EK Consulting’s revenue-execution work at ekconsulting.io, read her book Build a KickA$$ Sales Team, and ask her about the AI roleplay prompt workbook. And connect with Eve on LinkedIn!