Problem

A customer education team at a B2B SaaS tech org (called MAD) has been receiving requests from customers to “certify” their employees in MAD product skills. As the project manager for the pilot, and eventual credentialing program manager, I conducted an analysis of the demand, comparative market research, crafted a framework based on consultation with product owners, and ultimately ran a pilot in an Accredible sandbox environment.

Solution

The solution is a learning program called MAD Credentials consisting of a credentialing framework paired with a platform, that validates MAD product skills and visually documents them. I led the team through project planning, vendor procurement, a successful pilot, and eventual program adoption. The program I created consists of digital credentials for course completions, product skills, and roles.

Program Management

My responsibility was to execute the pilot and deliver my recommendations to the organization. As project manager I created all of the foundation governance documents, frameworks, and marketing communications. I coordinated across the marketing department, IT, contracts, and legal, as well as with each product team to understand how credentials could serve their audiences.

I created a project plan, RACI, a shared Microsoft Teams space, and facilitated weekly stand-ups for my team of 4 instructional designers, a learning technology consultant, and talent development partner. We used an agile approach, breaking the work up into small sprints with story cards on a Jira KanBan board. The broad phases of the project included a pilot kickoff, framework definition, vendor selection, and pilot sandbox test.

The biggest constraint was a limited budget, which we solved for by screening vendors based on who had free trials. A risk was conflicting requests from business partners, which informed the design of a flexible yet consistent framework offering sets of credentials that represent different achievements.

Evaluation

The pilot evaluation consisted of a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. I conducted interviews with 57 business partners, and also spoke to creative services, procurement, corporate IT, recruiting, talent development, and legal. Their feedback fed into the framework presented here. Accredible dashboards provided data analytics and insights into pilot usage, share rates, and usage. I administered a UX survey for pilot participants which revealed confidence moving forward with a credentialing platform as opposed to badging functionality in our current LMS.

These credentials are a part of new product positioning and GTM strategy for indirect partner channels as we go live in 2024. During this project, I also wrote a TD at Work guide for ATD entitled “Build a High-Value Credentialing Program,” which they will sell in their association store.