CELab: The Customer Education Lab

For years, customer educators have been the handful of people in the back of every L&D conference wondering if anyone else teaches customers. So CELab went to DevLearn 2026 with one mission: Find the others. In the first of two DevLearn "minisodes", recorded live at booth 668, Dave sits down with Mark Oehlert, a DevLearn speaker and former SaaS customer education leader, and longtime friend Matt Pierce of TechSmith, plus a lightning round with three practitioners from the expo floor.

You’ll hear why customer education should be an awareness gate for every product release, how to tie certifications to revenue, and Mark’s fox-and-hedgehog take on how customer education and L&D differ, and why each needs the other. Matt makes the case for what it really takes to earn a seat at the table: speaking the business’s language. It’s built for customer education and customer success teams, and for any L&D, enablement or support pro creating learning for an external audience.

Highlights from this episode:

The fox and the hedgehog. Why customer ed knows many things, L&D knows one big thing, and you need both.

“I didn’t know you guys still existed.” Making customer ed an awareness gate on every product release.

Revenue, not completions. Dashboards that compare certified and uncertified customers.

A home for customer education. Matt Pierce on finding critical mass at DevLearn.

Earning the seat. Why the table opens up when you speak the business’s language.

Thanks to Lenore Higgins and the Learning Guild for bringing CELab to DevLearn. Stay tuned for Part 2, on the craft of teaching. Prefer to watch? The full episode is here on the CELab YouTube channel.

Remember when getting good output from AI meant writing the perfect prompt? That era is over, and customer educators who still write formal, structured prompts are leaving their best thinking on the table. In this CELab "minisode", co-host Adam Avramescu sits down with Clea Mahoney, a learning experience designer and customer education leader who is always experimenting at the edge of AI. Together they do a live, unvarnished teardown of a real help article from Parta.io. Clea’s method is simple: turn on dictation, ramble, and let AI do the organizing.

Clea walks through the whole loop on screen. She dictates stream-of-consciousness feedback to an AI agent, has the AI run its own “blind” critique against instructional-design rules (cognitive load, multimedia that earns its place, active language), and then hands her brain dump to Claude with a short prompt that separates facts, guesses, and open questions. Adam adds the guardrails that keep it honest: define what good looks like before you ask AI for feedback, because taste is the one thing it can’t replace. He also shares a system-prompt line that makes Claude restate your goal before it answers. If you lead Customer Education or Customer Success, you can try this practice on your next content review. If you own customer-facing content in L&D, Enablement, Support, or Marketing, the workflow carries straight over.

Highlights from this episode:

The “Yapper API.” Why talking to AI the way you’d onboard a colleague gets you richer feedback than typing ever will.

Human vs. AI critique. What Clea found when she compared her ramble with the AI’s rubric-based review of the same article.

One prompt, zero engineering. The four-line prompt that turns a brain dump into a prioritized change list, and why “don’t invent details” matters.

Restate before you answer. Adam’s instruction that makes Claude confirm your goal and ask for missing context first.

Taste is the job. Why constraints, judgment, and a clear picture of “good” stay human, and how AI gets you past the blank page.

Connect with Clea on LinkedIn, and stay tuned for Part 2, where she builds interactive walkthroughs in HTML. Prefer to watch? The full screen-share is on the CELab YouTube channel.

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.

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.

Talya gets refreshingly specific about what that system takes. She covers when contextual education works and when screen real estate means a deeper format is still the right call. She explains why ClearCo is building a user maturity score from entitlement, product telemetry, support tickets, and call sentiment instead of trusting usage alone. She describes how her team is consolidating Gong, Zendesk, product data, and Slack into a customer hub, and how skills in a shared GitHub repo are starting to turn PRDs into first-draft docs and learning plans. She’s just as candid about the costs, the human review that self-healing content still needs, and the two months her team lost chasing a perfect AI model. If you work in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is a practical blueprint for contextual learning. If you’re in Digital CS, Product Marketing, Enablement, Support, or L&D, it’s a clear look at how shared customer data can make every team’s content smarter.

Highlights from this episode:

Stop sending users to a course. Why “take a course to learn our guides” is a bad signal for any product, and what changed when Talya moved repeat questions into the app.

Usage isn’t health. A busy account can still be an unhappy one. Here’s how a user maturity score triangulates entitlement, telemetry, and sentiment.

Docs drafted from the code. Skills, schemas, and governance rules in a GitHub repo that produce first-draft documentation, adoption plans, and learning plans.

Self-healing content has a price tag. How a tiering calculator decides when the update agent runs, and why a minor UI tweak can break 50 embedded guides.

Write for humans and LLMs at once. Governance, alt text, heading order, task-based jobs-to-be-done articles, and the table problem nobody has solved yet.

Connect with Talya on LinkedIn; she welcomes DMs and ideas on cracking the content intelligence model.

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.

Irana’s outsider lens is the whole point. She explains why the customer journey looks so much bigger from the education seat than it ever did from the product seat, why declining academy logins are an opportunity rather than a loss, and why the fix isn’t a better dashboard — it’s getting your best content out of the gated portal and into every place your prospects and customers actually ask questions, from ChatGPT and Claude to in-product chat and the help center. You’ll hear how Thought Industries’ Omnichannel Learning and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) work, why “two-second answers or a PhD” is the new customer expectation, and what changes on the vendor’s side of the table. If you sit in Customer Education or Customer Success, this is your case for a bigger seat; if you’re in Enablement, Marketing, Support, or L&D, it’s the argument for one shared source of truth instead of five teams educating in silos.

Highlights from this episode:

The best hidden secret. Coming from product, Irana had barely interacted with customer education teams — then she saw how much of the customer journey they actually own, and how little of it reaches the executive dashboard.

Falling academy traffic “screams opportunity.” Customers left for ChatGPT overnight. Irana reframes that drop as the moment to insert education into every touchpoint instead of asking people to come to you.

Everybody thinks they do customer education. Product tours, community, help center, academy — five teams, five versions of the truth. The team with the richest, most accurate content should own the fabric, not just a platform.

Why budgets get cut. When education is measured as “just another platform,” it looks redundant every renewal cycle. Tie it to the full customer journey and the metrics finally climb the dashboard.

A new goal for the industry. Irana’s closing challenge: stop at 99% of education leaders being confident and go for 99% of CEOs confident that education drives business outcomes.

Connect with Irana Wasti on LinkedIn, explore Thought Industries’ AI Wave — Omnichannel Learning and Conversational AI Learning — at thoughtindustries.com, and watch for the 2026 State of Customer Learning & AI Report. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Thought Industries.