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Home > Product Marketing > Creating Effective Training
In larger organizations, there may be a whole group devoted to developing and implementing training materials. In other organizations, the Product Manager may have to do the creative work on her own. In either case, the Product Manager should be able to clearly articulate the key aspects of the product that must be explained to the various training audiences and, where possible, work with training developers to determine the best format for conveying that information.
I've found the following process effective in developing and delivering product training for customers:
Creating Effective Training
My favorite part of being a Product Manager is living at the hub of product-related information flowing through the company. The Product Manager has master product knowledge and must be vigilant about ensuring that everyone in the company knows what they need to know about the product to be successful -- including the Sales and Customer Care teams, the Development and QA teams, the executives, and even the receptionist at the front desk greeting clients, partners, and investors.In larger organizations, there may be a whole group devoted to developing and implementing training materials. In other organizations, the Product Manager may have to do the creative work on her own. In either case, the Product Manager should be able to clearly articulate the key aspects of the product that must be explained to the various training audiences and, where possible, work with training developers to determine the best format for conveying that information.
I've found the following process effective in developing and delivering product training for customers:
- Take a walk in your customers' shoes. Free yourself from all the assumptions you have about the product because you're living and breathing it on a daily basis. Pretend that you don't know what's going to happen when you click that blue button in the upper-right corner that you wrote a whole MRD for. If you were a customer of your product, what are your goals and biases when you sit down to use your product? Write them down on a piece of paper and refer to this paper every time you catch yourself making an assumption about your product.
- Start from the beginning and proceed logically, from the customer's perspective. I once worked on the training materials of an enterprise software company that was running into difficulties deploying its product at its customers' premises. Although some deployments took only a few days, others dragged on for weeks, and these customers were frustrated because they couldn't use the product since it was stuck in deployment. It turned out that the existing product training materials were focused on the detailed usage of the product after it had been installed. The company was operating on the assumption that installation wasn't officially part of the product and so it didn't require special training materials; however, problems with installation were actually the cause of the customers' headaches. We re-worked the training materials to focus 80% on installation and condensed the existing training materials on product usage into the remaining 20%. These re-worked training materials formed a replicable and scaleable methodology for deploying the product. Moral of the story: start from the customer's first interactions with your product, not necessarily the product itself.
- Break down the product usage into a numbered sequence of tasks. Strive for about three to five major tasks. If there are more tasks than that, your audience will get dizzy trying to keep track of everything and may get lost in the detail. Studies show that up to 80% of what we learn on any day is forgotten by the next day. If you have too many tasks, think at a higher level and roll up some of your smaller tasks into larger ones. It helps if you can create a catchy acronym based on the first letters of the tasks. For example, tell your audience, "If you remember nothing else about today's training, I want you to remember the four steps of STAR." Then explain the four steps and how they fit together into a logical whole.
- Reinforce learning. We all know from personal experience that you really learn something when you have to teach it to someone else. Avoid creating training materials that simply feed information to a passive audience. Instead, brainstorm creative ways to involve the audience in the learning process. This could be in the form of hands-on activities where the audience must perform certain tasks with the product, quizzes, "show and tell" opportunities for the audience to demonstrate the product to each other, or an informal or formal certification program.
