Slack customers vary widely by size, industry, location, and role. I was tasked with meeting the unique needs of key customer segments with relevant, digestible, and productive learning experiences. This included supporting the launch of Slack Certified, a portfolio of in-depth certifications, bite-sized badge courses, live training, and hands-on learning.
Role-based certifications
Skills badges
Videos and simulations
Overview
The Challenge
Before joining Slack, customers had little access to self-serve learning outside the Slack Help Center and Blog, especially tailored to their role, workflows, or business needs. This presented challenges with time-to-value realization, adoption, and maturation.
The Outcome
For Slack Admins and Developers who wish to validate and showcase their expertise, we built comprehensive certification prep courses curated with essential domain knowledge and practical scenario activities.
For beginner end users who quickly want to skill up on a feature or best practice, we built a running catalog of bite-sized badge courses, empowering customers to mix and match their own learning journeys.
This portfolio was branded as Slack Certified, and is now a child of Salesforce’s Trailhead training and certification ecosystem.
The Approach
To kickstart the launch of Slack Certified, I prioritized key user personas and developed scalable learning modules catered to beginner Slack end users, Admins, and Developers.
To ensure customer value, I partnered closely with Customer Success and Product Marketing to develop informed learner personas and mapped learning goals and objectives to essential knowledge and behaviors that nurture adoption and usage. I also worked closely with our GTM partners to identify pivotal entry points for education along the customer journey.
My Role
Process
01
I partnered with Sales and Corporate Marketing on go-to-market and localization efforts to ensure aligned, engaging, and cohesive customer experiences.
02
I partnered with Product Marketing and Customer Success to leverage learner personas and applied a backwards design approach to identify key learning objectives that fill key knowledge gaps.
03
As Slack sandboxes weren’t available to customers, users felt they didn’t have a safe place to test features and functions. To enable hands-on learning, I led the design of product simulations with built-in guidance and activities to scaffold skills building.
04
As Slack is constantly evolving and expanding its suite of solutions, I implemented design standards and change management strategies to maintain content inventory. This included setting guidelines and best practices around low and high fidelity visuals, design templates, and localization best practices, and serving as a team liaison for GTM panels with early insight to release roadmaps.
05
We put systems and processes in place to uphold certification validity, reliability, fairness, and security. This included performing detailed job-task analyses, applying psychometrics best practices, organizing reference documentation, complying to security and process standards, building organized curriculum and exam blueprints, holding qualified SME review cycles, and performing usability testing phases.
For Slack Admins and Developers who wish to validate and showcase their expertise, we built comprehensive certification prep courses curated with essential domain knowledge and practical scenario activities.
For beginner end users who quickly want to skill up on a feature or best practice, we built a running catalog of bite-sized badge courses, empowering customers to mix and match their own learning journeys.
01.
Slack Certified’s learning portfolio is tailored to different levels of expertise, roles, and Slack functions.
Certifications:
Badge courses:
02.
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.
03.
On top of monitoring engagement trends, we continually collected and responded to learner feedback using embedded surveys, 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.
04.
The Slack Certified Directory proudly spotlighted +7,500 professionals from across the globe and different industries. It hosted a community of experts and served as a one-stop shop for scoping qualified talent.
05.
After being acquired by Salesforce, we extended Slack education into their education ecosystem, 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.
