Built Muck Rack's Customer Education function from scratch, including LMS strategy, curriculum design, and a multi-channel learning ecosystem that helped users reach value faster and reduced repetitive support load across the customer journey.
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I led the design and development of Muck Rack's first formal customer education program, joining as the company's first Instructional Designer before eventually hiring for and leading the Customer Education team.
The program was about creating the foundation for how customers learn the product, connect features to real workflows, and stay engaged over time. Everything that followed – the LMS decision, the curriculum, the multi-channel educational ecosystem – was built to support it.
When new users arrived at Muck Rack, there was no structured path for learning the platform. Product knowledge was fragmented across help articles, CS conversations, and institutional knowledge. Customers who wanted to go deeper had nowhere to go, and those who struggled quietly churned without ever reaching the value the product was capable of delivering.
Meanwhile, Support and CS teams were absorbing a steady stream of repeatable questions that, with the right resources, didn't need to be asked at all.
The opportunity was clear: build a system that reduced learning friction, helped users reach value faster, and gave customers a way to grow their product fluency in a way they preferred best.
Before building anything, I ran a comprehensive needs analysis, cross-referencing product usage data, support ticket patterns, and direct input from customers and internal teams. This surfaced not just what users didn't know, but where in the journey that knowledge gap was costing them most.
From those findings, I designed a learning system that integrated directly into the customer journey, not bolted on as an afterthought, but threaded through onboarding calls, email touchpoints, in-app performance support, and a self-serve Academy.
The curriculum was divided by role and customer segment (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise) to reflect the reality that a solo PR professional and an agency team lead have meaningfully different learning needs. The LMS (Skilljar) was selected, configured, and integrated with existing customer systems to connect course completion data to product engagement metrics, making the business case for education visible and measurable.
Program Foundation
I set the Customer education strategy and roadmap, defined learning objectives mapped to product workflows, and instructional design standards and documentation.
Core Learning Experience
I worked with stakeholders across Product, CS, and Marketing to develop the Essentials Curriculum; a multi-course, self-paced onboarding path with video tutorials, guided walkthroughs, and a comprehensive final assessment. I handled initial LMS configuration and learning path architecture.
Ecosystem Integration
Learning was embedded across onboarding touchpoints; including email sequences, onboarding calls, and in-product resources. Segmented experiences were created for SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise users.
Expansion Strategy
Early exploration of a cross-channel education system: in-app guidance, resource hubs, community integration, and federated search across learning surfaces were explored for the longer-term roadmap.
The system offered multiple ways in, depending on where a customer was in their journey:
Self-paced learning for users who wanted to go at their own pace, available on-demand through the Academy, tied to their actual workflows.
Instructor-led sessions for higher-touch segments who benefited from live facilitation and real-time Q&A.
Embedded resources at friction points, including dynamic in-app tooltips, onboarding sequences, and in CS touchpoints, so help was available at the moment of need and from a consistent model.
Reinforcement was intentional across channels to keep learning accessible and continuous, not a one-time onboarding event.
Recognized with the Success in Practice award at Skilljar Connect 2022 as a model for how SaaS companies should build customer-facing education.
I believe customer education works best when it's not treated as content, but as infrastructure. This program established a scalable foundation for how users learn, adopt, and grow with the product, connecting onboarding, support, and ongoing engagement sequences into a single system.
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