Customer Training Engineers

Who we are

Customer Training Engineers (CTE), within Customer Engineering (CE), will be responsible for defining, creating, delivering, and subsequently overseeing through continuous iteration the way we train, onboard, and enable our customers to help them achieve long term success with Sourcegraph.

This team will train our CEs on how to deliver customers with consistent, relevant, and timely training and enablement materials, in addition to hosting webinars and training sessions themselves.

Finally, this team will establish how we onboard new CEs and continuously train and enable our existing team in an ongoing manner.

Team Composition

To establish a scalable, successful training team and program for our customers and our CE team there’s a combination of strategic and tactical activities that are necessary. The initial team will lay the foundation for long term success by combining experience and perspective directly building, implementing, and delivering a training curriculum for developers with in-depth knowledge of Sourcegraph and our customers as a subject matter expert. No single person possesses all of these critical attributes, and success is deeply dependent on inputs from the broader CE organization. Rather than straining our team with competing priorities, limited resources, and missing inputs, the most ideal structure will have a few individuals fully focused on building this program with complementary skill sets: subject matter expertise and technical training philosophies.

As this team / initiative takes off, there are some parallel efforts or low hanging fruit that may be achievable in the near term as a milestone 0. Some potential initial activities include: formation of customer education / customer experience guild; team / program charter definition; collating collateral across the company (from CE, Sales, Marketing, Product) whose intended audience is our developer users; stakeholder interviews to collect needs; reviving ongoing customer webinars.

The CTE team will publish a roadmap and have OKRs for transparent reporting out.

Year 1 Vision & Milestones

The roadmap will include a combination of both near-term and long-term activities required to establish a successful, scalable Training program in support of our CEs and our customers.

Some probable or potential milestones include: trial enablement program, new customer onboarding, ongoing enablement (self-service and synchronous), established mechanism for feedback / results, metrics definition and subsequent measurement & reporting system, new CE onboarding, ongoing CE enablement. Each milestone will have a single DRI (directly responsible individual) associated with it and that DRI is the overall owner and accountable party for decisions and delivery on that milestone.

Longer Term Vision (1+ year out)

While year 1 is focused on establishing our external-facing Customer Training program, and building out internal training and enablement for the CE team, year 2 and beyond will focus on scale and self-service capabilities. A desired future state is one where our customers are able to self-service the majority of their needs without a dedicated, named Customer Engineer assigned to them.

Success measurements for the Customer Training team long-term will orient around combining training related metrics with customer health data for direct analysis and correlation between how training activities subsequently impact certain behaviors, such as specific usage patterns, higher adoption, overall NPS, and ultimately customer retention.

An important aspect of the longer term vision of the Customer Training team will be an established customer-facing training team that may be utilized to do paid training engagements.

Team Culture & Norms

• Team Norms (WIP)
• How we work in support of customers (WIP)
• How we work with other teams (WIP)

Internal Team Resources

• New CTE Onboarding (WIP)
• Career Development (WIP)