Product Knowledge Training: How to Support Your Team Through Product Changes
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Product knowledge training fails when it can't keep up with product changes.
Teams know how to build a training program, but they struggle to keep it relevant.
Imagine this familiar scenario. A customer success manager is in a support call. The customer asks a question about a new feature they saw announced on the company's LinkedIn. The only problem? The CSM hasn't received training on the new feature.
That's the gap. The knowledge exists, the team just hasn't been trained on it yet. The gap only closes once they understand it well enough to explain it on a call.
How to build product knowledge training
I've seen a lot of "how-tos" for building product knowledge training that are really just instructions for using an LMS. Those aren't the same thing.
If you want training that genuinely supports your employees, there are five steps you need to follow. And yes, they include whether or not you need an LMS.
Step 1: Define your audience
Who is the audience? Customer success managers? Sales development reps? Technical support?
The first step in product knowledge training is identifying your audience, so you can tailor the learning design to their needs.
SDRs are constantly pitching your product. They need to be able to respond to objections in discovery calls with the latest information. CSMs, on the other hand, need to keep customers satisfied. That means showing them how to get more value out of their investment.
Technical support spends their days troubleshooting. They need to know what changed, and more importantly why, so they can quickly diagnose problems and resolve customer concerns.
CSMs, SDRs, and technical support need different product training because the outcomes you're driving are, yes, different. That's why I suggest defining your audience using this template:
This product training is for [audience] who [product knowledge gap]. After completing the training, [audience] should be able to [observable action] so that [business outcome].
This is essentially conducting a needs assessment, if you use an instructional framework like ADDIE.
Here’s an example I’ll work with for the remaining steps:
This product training is for CSMs who need to understand the newest AI feature. After completing the training, CSMs should be able to answer customer questions about the feature accurately, reducing the number of questions escalated to support.
Step 2: Scope your training
Now that we have our audience, the purpose of the training, and how we'll measure success (tied to customer support escalations), we can scope the training. Think through the following:
- How urgent is this training?
Do they need it ASAP or is there more time to develop? - How complex is this topic?
Could it be delivered as a quick message or a one-pager, or does it need more discussion, like a Q&A? - What do you know about your audience?
Are they in one location or distributed globally? Do they work in one language or many different languages?
Use the answers to this question to scope what you design. If something is incredibly urgent, scope the training to be designed in the most efficient way possible, while still taking into consideration the complexity of the topic and the realities of your audience.
In this case, let's say your CSMs are distributed across ten countries, and partner with customers in more than a dozen languages. The newest AI feature is straightforward: it's just replacing a previous feature, and the rollout isn't happening overnight, so there's time to build something more thorough rather than rushing out a quick fix.
Given this information, you might opt to design a simple course you can ship simultaneously to CSMs in every language they need.
Step 3: Design your training
Once you've determined the scope, you're ready to design your training.
If your team's capacity is limited, you might be considering outsourcing product knowledge training. I recommend against it. Product knowledge training is constantly evolving, and a vendor adds a layer of complexity every time something changes.
Of course, you may not be able to build the training in-house. In that case, make sure you either have the original training files and the tools in-house to edit them, or build revisions into the original scope of work with your vendor (know this will be costly).
If you're building the training in-house and need guidance, I walk through how to build training programs that stick.
Step 4: Deliver the training
When the training is ready, you can decide how to deliver it. If the training is in-person or a virtual session, you already have your answer.
If, however, you've created an asset that can be delivered asynchronously, then you can decide where to publish it. Your decision is tied to two things: your measurement needs (essentially, if you need to capture learner data), and your tech stack.
Here are a few examples of how those needs play out across delivery methods.
*If you have xAPI capabilities and a Learning Record Store, you can collect learner data on any of these delivery methods (although the Slack message would require some additional engineering).
Step 5: Maintain the training
All product knowledge training should be connected to a single source of truth, usually a living product knowledge base maintained by the product team. Training should link to the source, or reference it directly, to maintain clear version control.
Assign a specific person to own updates for each training. If you have AI tools, build an agent or workflow that notifies that person the moment there's a new product release, roadmap update, or policy change. It can scan release notes or changelogs to flag which training content is affected, or draft a first-pass update for review.
Notifications shouldn't only flow one direction. The CSM in our opening scene caught a gap before anyone in training did.
Measuring product knowledge training
In normal circumstances, as in, when a training doesn't change every few weeks or quarter, measuring training is hard. For product knowledge it can feel nearly impossible.
Let's say you maintain a product feature eLearning course. Your product team is shipping updates monthly, which means your course is changing monthly. Best case scenario, you have two to three weeks of learner data to evaluate the training against. But that is just snapshot data.
You also need to get impact data the business cares about, like whether the number of questions escalated to support is down.
Depending on how quickly your product team moves (I'm looking at you product-led growth teams), this cycle can be unsustainable.
While you can likely use what I call good enough measurement methods for trainings like onboarding or brand knowledge, you may need to focus on alternative evaluation mechanisms for the fast-paced revisions.
This could be holistic assessments, like how long it took your team to update trainings after detecting issues, analyzed on a quarterly basis, or even lightweight downstream signals, like having an LLM scan a support channel for key terms associated with edits.
Ultimately, your measurement will depend on the analytics your tech stack captures, the capacity of your team, and your ability to access business metrics.
If you're interested in learning how Synthesia's built-in analytics help teams evaluate their product knowledge training, schedule some time.
Amy Vidor, PhD, is the Learning and Development Evangelist at Synthesia, where she researches learning trends and helps organizations apply AI at scale. With 15 years of experience, she has advised companies, governments, and universities on skills.
Frequently asked questions
What are the types of product knowledge?
Product knowledge can be broken down into four categories: core knowledge (what a product does and how it's sold), competitive knowledge (how it compares to alternatives), industry knowledge (broader trends and regulations), and brand knowledge (a company's mission, values, and policies).
How do you keep product knowledge training current without re-recording?
Product knowledge training videos can be updated without re-recording using text-based editing tools, swappable on-screen graphics, or AI video platforms.
If you need to make small changes to the text, captions, or add/change visual overlays, you can easily make those edits. If, however, you want to change the footage or add new, narrated content, you would need an AI platform.
How do you deliver product training to a distributed or multilingual team?
The biggest challenge with delivering product knowledge training to a distributed or multilingual team is latency: the longer the gap between when training reaches one team or one language and another, the bigger the risk to how well that team can support customers.
To reduce that latency, focus on two things: delivery method and format. Asynchronous delivery lets every team access training on their own schedule. Formats like AI video, which supports localization, let that same training reach every language at once.
Do you need an LMS for product knowledge training?
No, you don't need an LMS to deliver product knowledge training, but many teams use one to track completion and progress data.
You can deliver training in person, over a webconferencing tool, as eLearning via xAPI, or as simply as an MP4. If you go the xAPI route, you'll still need a Learning Record Store to parse the data it sends.
