 Hello, everyone. I'm Carmen Dicuto, the Senior and Product Growth Marketing Manager at Amplitude. And I'm really excited to be with y'all today, discuss a topic that I am passionate about, how product adoption is a learning experience and what we can learn as PLG practitioners from the learning design field. Before I dig into why I am so passionate about this topic, though, I do want to give it an overview of what we will cover today, plus a little housekeeping. I'm going to set the stage for today's discussion by digging into the framework challenge. I'm sure most of us has faced as we have taken on newer roles like growth. I'll then transition into why learning design is a great fit for product-led growth user design and introduce the behavioral engineering model, walk you through how to do a BM analysis, and then end our time together by sharing resources. While there is not a Q&A scheduled at the end of this session, I will do my best to answer any questions in the chat. So please feel free to ask away there during this session. All right, let's dig in and start on why I'm passionate about this topic and why I'm even qualified to be speaking on this topic. There are a few things that you should know about me and why, again, I feel particularly qualified. And then first and foremost, I have spent nearly six years in the latest and greatest emerging go-to-market roles as startups. So from enablement to product marketing to growth marketing, and more than once, these roles were brand new to me and brand new to the organization that I was a part of. And so as someone who loves order and process and having proven frameworks, I spent a lot of my time in the early days of these roles trying to learn and find frameworks that existed that I could adopt as my own and the roles that I was fulfilling. And oftentimes I couldn't find what I needed either because it was potentially behind a paywall or it didn't exist yet. And so I often find myself kind of making up my own, which can be a little time intensive, especially since it's not proven yet. You don't have a lot of guidelines. You kind of have to figure out a lot of things as you go. And as somebody who has a degree in sustainable development, and I try to be as strategic as possible with my time, oftentimes I found that making these frameworks and the time that went into them wasn't necessarily a sustainable practice for me. And so I really reached the point and the challenge that I was facing that I'm sure at times many of you face as practice trainers and emerging roles is that we were expected to have a really fast impact and so much so that we can often overwork ourselves trying to deliver on outcomes that are expected of us or that we promised. And if we're having to find frameworks or build frameworks at the same time, we end up working a lot harder than we do end up working smarter. And so even though this is a very cliche saying, I do think over the last couple of years if we've learned anything and the way our professional and personal lives have merged and the way we manage our time is that we really do need to be working smarter and not harder. And one way to do this is really to not try to start with scratch with new frameworks or processes but rather in some form or the other recognize that all of the frameworks we need already exist. I actually had a colleague say this to me at one point and it was this major light bulb moment for me. You know, some of the frameworks that already exist have actually been built for the very specific problem that we're trying to solve for and will be a great fit. But others may exist to actually solve a different problem but they could actually overlap with the problem we're trying to solve for and work just as well for us. We just need to find the right one. Now, again, if you can't find an existing one for your specific needs, you can begin to look at other disciplines to see what frameworks you may be able to borrow or adopt. And we can start by asking questions like what disciplines share similar objectives to ours. And you can ask this question of yourself or you can do what I did and talk to someone well respected within your field. For me, that was John Cutler, a colleague of mine who's also a well-known thought leader in project management and product development. He helped point out to me something that was so glaringly obvious from my past work as an enablement manager that I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it on my own. Cutler pointed me towards learning design. As an owner of the full customer lifecycle who has a lot of happy emphasis on activation, adoption and monetization, it was this major light bulb moment of of course this can work for me because when I think about the journey our users take and the things they need to learn and do in order to reach their aha moment and develop a sustainable habit with the products that I work with, I realized that learning design is actually a gold mine. So why is learning design a gold mine? Why is this something that we should be looking at as PLG product practitioners? Well, in case it's not as obvious to you as it is to me with my background in training and enablement, I want to quickly break down the why behind this and why there's so much alignment between product led user adoption and learning and design. In product led user design, we are thinking and designing for our end user and we're really trying to deliver values to them before we capture value in return. And we do this by creating experiences that are gonna motivate them and help them change their existing behaviors in order to drive adoption of our products and services. In learning design, you're more or less doing the exact same thing. As a learning design practitioner, we're thinking about ways they can deliver value for their end users, who are your learners and motivate them to change their habits and behaviors to adopt the new learning. So in this context, we have this common objective and the simple fact that users are learners of our products and learning design has frameworks available that are gonna save us a lot of time and money if we adopt them to figure out how we can view our users journey as a learner journey because adoption is truly learning. Now, this can be true, especially if you have a high tech or very technical product. So for those of you in B2B SaaS in particular, this may very well resonate with you. So now that I've outlined why, what the framework challenge we face is and why learning design is a great area for us to look at as product practitioners for designing for our end users, I actually wanna dig into one area in particular and that is the behavior engineering model. Now, the first iteration of formal introduction of the behavior engineering model, which I also call BEM was founded by Thomas Gilbert in 1978. Gilbert is known as the grandfather of human performance technology and the work he created was really the foundation for the learning design industry as we know it today. And he focused on six areas in particular that can create behavior gaps for learners and in our language for users. And of the six, there's two in particular that often get a lot of time and attention, as a learning design practitioner, oftentimes you get very focused on the knowledge and skills aspect and what you have to teach somebody around knowledge and skills in order to make them successful. But while there is no record of this statistic, there is this well-known, highly held belief that knowledge and skills only make up about 15 to maybe 20% of behavioral change while environmental factors can make up for more than or can make up to 85%. So for learning design, this meant that creating educational content with the sole goal of dissensing knowledge is insufficient. The entire experience of a learner must be taken into consideration as is with the users of our products. Now, as I mentioned, Gilbert builds the foundation, the foundational framework of behavior engineering model or BEM and there have been many iterations and improvements made since then. And there are definitely multiple options out there that you guys can all go look at and I'll share a couple additional resources at the end here, but there's one in particular that really stood out to me that I thought could be applicable for everybody who's working within users. And this book is written by Julie Dirksen and the book is called Design for How People Learn. In particular, I love how she positions the aspects of behavioral change as potential gaps and the questions she poses to uncover these gaps can be easily modified to better understand our end users. So let's go over those behavioral gaps. Again, she took the six that were made by Gilbert and modified them for today's age. So in her mind, the six behavioral gaps are knowledge, skills, motivation, habits, environment and communication. So let's start with the first modified behavioral gap and uncover the questions that we can ask around each of these gaps. So knowledge is the first one and you can think of the questions very simply as what do your users need to know to use your product and when do they need to know it and what format does it need to be delivered in? These are important foundational questions to answer, especially if your product is more technical or there's great variance in your user base. For example, with an analytics tool like the one Amplitude provides, there are knowledge requirements in order to set up amplitude correctly so that other users then can run accurate queries. If data is not properly instrumented, queries will not provide accurate results and important product decisions could be made with bad data or the wrong data and with low confidence. When we design our onboarding and overall end user experience, we have to think about who will be implementing our product, how they'll be implementing it and what do they need to do in order to do so correctly. Without this level of thought, you may find you have a lot of new users who never even complete the activation process of your product. The second is around skills. One way to think of skills as knowledge and action. What knowledge must your users put into practice in order to have the skill set to use your product correctly? And are those skills required similar to other tools or products they've used before or are there things unique to your product that they were going to need to practice potentially multiple times in order to be proficient? These questions as well as questions around knowledge can play a big role in how you design onboarding for new users as I previously mentioned. You know, you can think of things like, do you now send a new user to a demo environment first so they can begin to practice the skills that are needed in order to gain a deeper understanding of how to best utilize your product before they implement and adopt it themselves? Or can you provide quick end product tutorials to give people a deeper understanding of what is expected of them? The right way to ensure your end users have the skills they need will depend largely on who your users are and what your product is. Now again, it's important to remember that we put a lot of emphasis on knowledge and skills, but they may only affect up to 20% of the behavioral change required for true product adoption. As product practitioners focused on the end user, we then really need to dig into the next four to make sure we're addressing 100% of the behavioral gaps that hinder or promote it. So the third is gonna be around motivation. So motivation can vary greatly across your segment of users, which often means it overlooks because it seems so much harder to control for. However, you need to identify areas of resistance and get a sense of the user's attitude and get a sense of your user's attitude as a learner. While the first user product may be very motivated to adopt your product and very excited, the next user may be far more reluctant to do so, even if they're working for the same organization and on the same team. It wasn't perhaps that next user's decision to adopt the tool, but perhaps now it's a requirement for them to do so. As a result, their motivation level can be significantly lower. So much so that the only motivation they feel about adopting your product is now it's an actual job requirement and it can have negative impacts on their role if they don't. And when you add in other considerations like varying skill sets and the different roles somebody may play within their organization, the why behind adoption can vary just as much as their motivation. Companies that are attentive to the different motivational factors of their end users find creative solutions to drive adoption. Gamification has become a particularly popular tool to drive both knowledge and skill building, but also overcome the motivational gaps that may hinder somebody from actually getting on board with you. The fourth thing is about habits. One of the biggest blockers to learning something new is to unlearn what you already know. In every training or change management projects I have led, I have learned that if this gap is not addressed, it will sink the entire learning opportunity. In addition to identifying what they need to unlearn, you also need to identify what new habits they need to develop to truly adopt your product. For example, prior to creating amplitude analytics account, many product managers haven't had a dedicated product analytics tool and have been heavily reliant on their data teams to answer their product questions. But now with the self-service product analytics with amplitude, there are two components who want to take into consideration about our end user. One, they are unlearning their reliance upon the data team and two, they are learning how to use this self-service tool to answer our own product questions. We need to create an end user experience that doesn't just make it easy for them to run their own queries, but also that they must feel as confident that they can answer the question themselves as they were on the reliance upon the data team. The fifth gap is environmental. This category in particular can seem incredibly broad and intentionally is so because there's so many environmental factors at play that it can affect your learners across products, market segments and industries. The easiest way to think about this is what is needed to support success and what could be blocking success. This can look like materials, resources, technology or incentives depending on your users. For example, my primary product led focus has been on amplitude's analytic product. We have wide adoption of our tool across segments and industries, which means that with each customer needs to achieve, success can vary greatly. And at the most simplistic level, one team may have all the technical resources they need to drive successful adoption of amplitude while another team does not. We have to think about how to make both of these teams successful by building better in-product guides, guiding them to invite an engineer or another technical team member, providing easy to find documentation and behavior-based in-product notifications. We can think about the environment as everything's surrounding their product use and designed for a 360 degree experience. The last behavioral gap is communication. For some, this may seem like a stretch when applied to uncovering behavioral gaps for their end-user, but if your product is very technical or B2B sass, this is a gap that can be easily overlooked or one you can place entirely on your marketing or your CS teams. However, your end-users need to understand what the goals for using your product are. I was recently part of a discussion with our sales leaders around adopting a new tool for PQLs. As a growth leader, I can easily see the value and the why behind this new tool, but our sales leaders weren't as convinced about why the product helped them achieve their goals. The demos showed them the basics, but not why the tool was a better fit for meeting their needs than what they currently have. Now, as a growth leader, I could still just choose to move forward with a decision like this and buy this new tool, but until it's become clearly communicated what the goals of the new tool are, I will never see strong adoption. And I think a mistake that is commonly made by those designing new products and experiences is that they put the onus on the internal buyer of the new tool and your own CS team to help continuously communicate why the new tool has been purchased and how it's going to reach your goals. But if we really want to be disruptive designers, we should be understanding how we communicate and use your goals within the product itself. So now that we have an understanding of the behavioral gaps and the associated questions that you can use to dig into each of these, let's talk about an actual BEM analysis. We want to again begin by evaluating the user journey as a learner journey. We do this by first starting with a behavioral analysis, utilizing quantitative data. For some, this may be harder to come by depending on the available resources and tools you have, but ideally you will have a product analytics tool like amplitude that supports behavioral analysis. You'll want to understand who your customers are, what actions they're taking and what product journeys lead to retention and monetization and which ones don't. A good behavioral analysis doesn't just focus on what your users are doing, but also provides context behind why they're doing it. Once you have that foundation, then you can begin by doing more of the qualitative analysis. Even if you have great behavioral data that shows the why behind in user actions, there's also more context that can be uncovered. Customer interviews are ideal because you can dig into areas that can be hard to measure like motivation or other environmental elements. Some of these can also be uncovered in customer surveys or reviews or in community forums, whether it's one hosted by your own company or it's an outside community group. And the next area I dig into after completing and exhausting the options from the previous two is recorded customer interactions. I review customer support logs including calls, emails and support tickets. You can also uncover a great deal in sales calls as well, particularly if you're also paying careful attention to your competitors. Once you've evaluated the learner journey and gathered all the information you need, it's time to begin identifying the gaps in each of the behavioral gap categories. Once they're identified, you can begin designing and testing those designs against these gaps. How and what you design will be completely different for each product and user base. And so every solution is going to be unique. Every way you layer these different pieces and actions together is going to be unique for you. But regardless of what you're designing and testing, there are tools out there like amplitudes, experimentation and personalization tools that can help you deliver and iterate these designs so you can confidently close the learning gaps for your end users. Now, kind of wrapping everything up, I thank you so much for your time. If the concept of learning design frameworks as a way to drive user adoption has inspired you, here are some resources that I think are a great starting point. Again, I highly recommend Julie Dirksen's book as I have shared with you here today. But there are two additional resources you can dig into depending on your capacity and your interest. Agile performance improvements by Bob Winter was another one recommended to me by my colleague, John Cutler. There was more technical and dense read than Dirkens. And I apologize, I said two additional resources. I forgot I took one of them off of this slide here. These two books are your main and primary starting point and I highly recommend starting with these. Now I'm also available to you as a resource feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. You can send me a LinkedIn message if you have questions or you can send me an email as well. I love engaging with people and I would love to share my passion for using learning design frameworks to support product and user design. Thank you so much for your time.