Slack Certified

Slack customers vary widely by size, industry, location, and role. I was tasked with meeting the unique needs of key customer segments with relevant, accessible, and scalable learning experiences.

This included supporting the launch of Slack Certified, a portfolio of in-depth certifications, bite-sized badge courses, live training, and interactive learning.

Output
Slack Admin Certification
Slack Developer Certification
+13 Slack Skills Badge Courses
Localized to +3 languages

Responsible
Design strategy
User/Learner journeys
Development & testing
Project management

Summary

  • Outside the Slack Help Center and Blog, customers had little access to self-serve learning, especially tailored to their role, workflows, business needs, or service level. This presented challenges with time-to-value realization, adoption, usage, and maturation.

  • I prioritized key user personas, mapped essential knowledge and behaviors that nurture adoption and usage, and identified pivotal entry points for education along the customer journey.

    To kickstart the launch of Slack Certified, I developed scalable learning experiences for Slack end users, Admins, and Developers, with an emphasis on user-centric, engaging, and productive learning experiences.

  • For Slack Admins and Developers who require in-depth expertise, we built comprehensive certification courses against top industry standards. We also built a running catalog of bite-sized badge courses dedicated to specific tasks or features, enabling all end users to mix and match their own learning journeys. This portfolio is marketed as Slack Certified, and is now a child of Salesforce’s Trailhead ecosystem.

  • Authoring: Articulate 360, Figma, Camtasia, Vidyard, Illustrator & InDesign

    Hosting: SkillJar, Accredible, Caveon, & Trailhead

    Proctoring: Examity

Outside the Slack Help Center and Blog, users had little access to self-serve learning, especially to resources tailored to their role, workflows, business needs, or changing operations.

This caused friction with time-to-value realization, adoption, retention, and maturation.

This was especially challenging for individual or team users with low-touch customer success engagement, who made up a large portion of Slack’s customer base.

The Problem

“It’s difficult to find the right developer or admin for the job - certification would help us weed out who’s a right fit for the job.” 

Umur Tuncer, McKinsey 

“It’s often hard in IT to know what HR should be doing or how we can get them to start using Slack. What are their pain points? What apps can I recommend? Because Slack is positioning itself as a collaboration hub, we need to know how to actually make it a hub.”

Evn Tomeny, iRobot

The Process

  • Project Lifecycle

    I applied a backwards design approach and worked through the phases of ADDIE. With constant evaluation and iteration, I built a course design workflow that doubled our development speed.

  • SME Engagement

    I developed a SME enablement workflow to speed up and streamline stakeholder management, further securing our team as a trusted partner and scaling or ability to quickly develop new learning assets.

  • GTM Partnership

    I aligned with CS, Sales, and Marketing to partner on GTM efforts to ensure cohesive, engaging, and productive customer experiences, including digital campaigns, webinars, and live events.

Challenges

Slack is constantly growing and updating its suite of solutions.
As Slack is constantly changing, I implemented design standards and change management strategies to maintain the catalog of learning content. This included setting guidelines and best practices around low and high fidelity visuals, templatizing design workflows, and localization, and serving as a team liaison for GTM panels with early insight to product and marketing roadmaps.


To drive the credibility of certifications, we upheld rigorous legal defensibility and industry standards.
We put systems and roles in place to adhere to standards and best practices establishing certification validity, reliability, fairness, and security. A large part of this process is executing and documenting thorough curriculum and exam blueprints, SME review, and usability testing. To ensure these were successfully implemented, I managed project charters, timelines, milestones, stakeholder management, and evaluations, and regularly shared my learnings to onboard additional teammates to scale the operations of the program.

Users want a safe space to learn and practice Slack.
As Slack sandboxes aren’t available, users can’t test features and functions without feeling risk. To enable hands-on learning, I led the design of product simulations with built-in guidance and activities to scaffold skills building.

(Tools: Articulate Storyline, Figma, & Illustrator.)

Example storyboard

Example simulation experience

Engaging, productive learning

All courses are embedded with:

  • Storytelling elements to reinforce value, relevance, and retention. This includes short examples to entire journeys of real and fictitious case studies.

  • Multiple opportunities to immediately practice via simulation exercises, scenario-based activities, and assessments.

Learning paths for every need

Slack Certified’s learning portfolio is tailored to different levels of expertise, roles, and Slack functions.

Certifications:

  • For advanced users who require in-depth expertise

  • Validates learner as a competitive expert

Badge courses:

  • For end users who want to improve a specific Slack skill

  • Empowers learners to champion Slack to others

Gamified, social experiences


Slack Certified credentials are powered by Accredible.

Credential earners can easily showcase their achievements via social media (i.e. LinkedIn) and proudly showcase Slack skills.

The Solution

Increased Promotion

The Slack Certified Directory proudly spotlights +7,500 professionals from across the globe and different industries. It hosts a community of experts and serves as a one-stop shop for scoping qualified talent.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

On top of monitoring engagement trends, we continually collected and responded to learner feedback using embedded surveys and scales, and invited champion customers for qualitative interviews.

With our dedication to positive learner experiences, Slack Certified maintained +80% CSAT and +40 NPS scores at minimum across all certifications and badge courses.

Wider Reach

After being acquired by Salesforce, we extended Slack education into their education platform, Trailhead.

With this merge, we tapped into Salesforce's engaged pool of learners, and expanded our reach by the hundreds of thousands. Slack certifications and badges have since reached +900,000 completions.

Results