Setting Goals

Q1. What are your customers telling you?

Your customers are often the first to reveal where your product—and your education—might be falling short. The signals they provide can pinpoint both obvious issues (e.g., setup challenges) and hidden gaps (e.g., undiscovered features). Gathering and interpreting these "customer signals" gives you a direct line to their pain points and desired outcomes.

The signals you gather from customers need to fit into the larger picture of what customers want to accomplish with your product. Your customers don't care about your product or its features; they care about solving their problems with your product. They've purchased your product to get specific jobs done that help them succeed. Instead of treating signals as isolated complaints or feature requests, interpret them through your customers' Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). The JTBD framework helps you dig into three key areas:

• Desired Outcomes: What does success look like for the customer? For example, a project manager might want to streamline workflows to deliver projects on time and within budget.
• Barriers: What's stopping them from achieving these outcomes? Perhaps they're bogged down by inefficient processes or lack of visibility into team workloads.
• Your Role: How does your product help them overcome these barriers? Your solution might automate task tracking, provide real-time collaboration, or offer analytics that clarify progress.

By using the JTBD framework, you ensure that your educational content speaks directly to customer challenges.

Use this template to map your own customers' JTBD:

Instead of trying to track everything, a good approach is to have regular monthly (or quarterly) check-ins where you collect recurring themes from support tickets, community forums, and direct customer interviews. This helps you track emerging trends without getting lost in every small request. Here's how:

This monthly check-in helps you spot trends without getting overwhelmed by data. Focus on identifying patterns that reveal where education can make the biggest impact.

Use this monthly check-in template to track these insights consistently:

Q2. What is your product usage telling you?

While direct feedback is invaluable, it can be incomplete. Some customers might not openly share their struggles, or they might not realize what they're missing. That's where product usage data comes in - giving you objective clues about how customers are interacting with your product. It reveals bottlenecks in the user journey, highlights underused features, and even points to the behaviors tied to renewals or expansions.

To help you get started, we've compiled some common product usage patterns by company growth stage you should dive into.

At this stage, companies typically haven't rolled out a formal CEd program - they're still building out their product and processes. And that's okay; you can still gather valuable insights by tracking how users interact with your product.

Key Usage Patterns to Track:

• First-time user behaviors
• Feature discovery paths
• Team expansion patterns
• Support contact rates
• Return visit frequency

Possible Education Opportunities:

• If new users fail to complete the primary setup or task within 24 hours → Focus on onboarding resources that guide them through essential workflows, ensuring they reach their first major "aha" moment quickly.
• If support channels see repetitive questions about fundamental features → Focus on making onboarding materials more accessible or self-service documentation to reduce reliance on support.
• If users stick to 1-2 features → Focus on bridging the gap between basic and advanced usage.

Possible Education Opportunities:

• Analytics show users mostly sticking to basic functionalities → You may need to create step-by-step guides or short videos highlighting the benefits of advanced features.
• If you notice that one user group (e.g., admins) is highly active, while others (e.g., managers or end-users) barely use the platform → Create role-specific "getting started guides".
• If there is high usage but team members not being added (i.e. low expansion) → Focus on learning content that better explains the steps and benefits of usage across teams or use cases.

Education Opportunities:

• If advanced features are underutilized → Focus on creating targeted tutorials or certifications to help users extract more value from your product.
• Low or nonexistent integration usage might indicate that users aren't aware of these capabilities → Focus on helping users better understand how to implement them.
• If you notice high adoption depth signalling product "stickiness", but no champions are emerging → Focus on creating paths to expertise and knowledge sharing

Track these patterns regularly alongside your customer signals check-in to build a complete picture of your customers' educational needs across their journey with your product.

🤖 AI Tips and Tools: Your product teams may already be using tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, or Gainsight PX to track and monitor product usage. These tools provide AI-powered reports and insights across a host of usage patterns mentioned above. Gathering these reports from your product teams or getting access to these dashboards will make it easier and more efficient for you to glean information about product usage patterns.

Q3: What are your business goals?

Finally, you have to factor in the business outcomes that leadership truly cares about: reducing churn, increasing expansion revenue, lowering support costs, and so on. While your overall "why" includes customer needs and product data, you must also align with core company objectives if you want your CEd program to have real strategic value.

Business outcomes differ depending on your company's stage and priorities - some might focus on quick wins (like slashing support tickets), others on deeper adoption (like driving advanced feature usage). Mapping your customer signals and product usage findings to these outcomes ensures your CEd strategy supports the bottom-line goals of the organization.

Let's look at common goals and what they mean for education:

Here are typical business goals companies usually have across growth stages:

Here's a sample Goal Assessment Template that you can use to start mapping your business goals. You can build on this to create your own.