Chapter 04
Focused Strategy
Using the Education Priority Roadmap
You've now got a lot of raw data around your current state. And this is where we get to the exciting part: turning all of your insights into a real plan. This is where the Education Priority Roadmap is useful. It helps you align all data by looking for overlapping themes:
- Customer Pain Points – Recurring questions or blockers.
- Product Usage Gaps – Low adoption of key (often high-value) features.
- Business Objectives – Targets such as "reduce churn by 20%," "increase usage of advanced analytics by 30%," or "cut support tickets by half."
These overlaps reveal your top priorities for your CEd program - which trade-offs to make and where to focus first in your customer education strategy.
1.1 Building Your Education Priority Roadmap
Let's explore what building the roadmap would look like in a real-world scenario:
Example 1: Analytics Platform
| Product Usage Shows | Customer Goals Show | Business Goals Show |
|---|---|---|
| New users log in frequently at first. | They want immediate, digestible dashboards. | Increase feature adoption – Specifically the advanced analytics module. |
| Complex analytics modules are barely used. | They want to skip time-consuming, manual report creation. | Reduce support costs – Too many "how do I do this?" questions. |
| Most usage is by single individuals rather than larger teams. | Collaboration or user permissions are confusing. | Improve retention – Renewals hinge on proving the platform's ongoing value. |
| Users frequently ask for help generating or interpreting reports. | Executives want clear metrics to justify analytics investments and prove ROI. |
Finding Education Priorities
1. Identify Overlaps: Look for overlapping signals that point to specific education gaps. In the example scenario of the Analytics Platform, we can observe:
- Drop-offs in complex analytics modules (Product Usage)
- Customers wanting faster insights and automated reporting (Customer Goals)
- The company's push to increase feature adoption and retention (Business Goals)
2. Define Education Priorities: Based on these overlaps, the CEd initiatives might focus on:
- Advanced Reporting Training: In-depth resources on setting up automated dashboards.
- Team Collaboration Guides: Best practices for user permissions and sharing.
- ROI-Focused Content: Templates, tutorials or webinars showing how to quantify performance improvements.
Use this Education Priorities Roadmap Template for your own product or scenario to map out your customer education priorities.
Starting Small, Thinking Big
Remember: You don't need to tackle everything at once. Start with one initiative that will yield the biggest impact, but plan for growth:
- Choose your primary focus based on current needs
- Document gaps in other areas
- Create a roadmap for expanding your program (quarterly or annual goals progression)
- Set clear success metrics for each initiative.
A good starting point is to collect common customer questions from support tickets and to build a help centre or knowledge base to address those questions. This helps you validate and demonstrate the impact of a CEd team and build a foundation for more comprehensive programs.
Roberto Aiello
Sr. Learning Experience Designer, Personio
