I recently earned the Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner certificate from IBM SkillsBuild.

It got me thinking: What if the tools and mindset product teams use could shift how we build enablement, customer education, or internal learning programs? Turns out they really can. Let me share what I found plus some examples from my practice that might help you get unstuck.

1. Hills: Start with what really matters

Design thinking teaches us to begin with “Hills” — outcome statements that describe what customers or learners should be able to do. Not just what features exist. For example, instead of teaching every feature in a new release, ask: Can a new user set up their account and send first invite without asking for help? Teams using IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking claim 2 times faster to market when they use outcome-oriented framing. 

2. Sponsor Users: Feedback early, not too late

One of the most powerful pieces I picked up is the idea of working with real users early: reps, customers, partners. You test education or enablement drafts before rolling them out wide. That way you catch confusing bits, tone mismatches, or missing content early. Over 90% of companies now have an enablement program. One of the biggest struggles those programs report is making sure content meets field needs. 

3. Playbacks: Across teams, ahead of time

Playbacks are little check-ins during the build process. Not just “hey we finished training, here it is.” More like “step by step, here’s what works, here’s what we heard from users, here’s what we adjusted.” That way your training doesn’t launch two weeks behind the feature or, worse, misses the mark. Buyers are doing tons of their own research. One stat says only 17% of buyer time is interacting with vendors, the rest is self-driven research. That means education around your product needs to show up before your sales team gets too deep into conversations with prospects or your success teams discuss renewals.

4. Keep content fresh with loops, not annual refreshes

So many programs get built, launched, then forgotten. Every product update, every change in user feedback, every bug should trigger a check: does my educational content need a tweak? Do reps need updated guidance? I observed this in a project: when we shifted from waiting 12 months to refresh content to doing small reviews every quarter, adoption improved, confusion dropped, and support tickets around the topic dropped.

5. Why education + enablement need product proximity

Here’s something most people don’t think about explicitly: when enablement or education sits far from product, you lose speed. You lose alignment. Features ship, but training lags. Customer support scrambles. Messaging gets inconsistent. Using design thinking tightens that gap. You get feedback from users that influence product direction. You build snippets or help content as features are being made. You reduce friction.

If you are building learning programs, enablement flows, or customer education, I’d encourage you to try one of these today. Pick a Hill. Find a Sponsor User. Do a mini playback. See what shifts.

Sources:

• https://www.ibm.com/training/enterprise-design-thinking

• https://1up.ai/blog/sales-enablement-statistics/