How do you design, develop, and deliver effective product training? Effective product training is more important than ever in government, business‐to‐consumer, and business‐to‐business environments.

Many technical professionals are asked during their career to train others on what they know. The request to train others is a compliment—people in your organization value product expertise and believe that those who best know a product are also those who can best train others.

There is a significant divide between knowing and doing. As you will learn in this book, the objective of product training is not knowledge transfer but rather proficiency development, as measured by the student’s ability to do. Especially for adult learners, the goal is to enable the student to be comfortable using the product and confident specifying the product for others in their organization or for their customers.

So how do you design, develop, and deliver effective product training? This question is relevant to a range of professionals. You may be a field product expert being asked to train customers for the first time. You may be an individual in a call center asked to provide one‐to‐one or one‐to‐many on‐demand product training through webinars. You may be responsible for corporate training and development organization—“training” is in your job title—and you are searching for more effective strategies to create training that results in improved measurable business outcomes. You may be a business leader focused on helping your customer—the technical product specifier—who is thirsty for product knowledge.

My job is a combination of all of the aforementioned roles, and my success directly depends on my organization’s ability to develop and deliver effective product training. I lead the sales engineering organization for a multibillion dollar global leader in infrastructure solutions for communications networks with individuals in over 30 countries worldwide.

I have had the privilege to work with Dan Bixby and directly benefit from Dan’s passion for product training excellence. Dan has developed a remarkable approach to developing product training and technical experts’ skills to deliver product training. I have seen Dan’s methodology work firsthand across cultures, languages, and geographies with my global sales engineering team.

You can benefit from the same methodology and principles detailed in this book. As you read this book, you will be surprised by many “ah‐hah” moments where striking foundational ideas are conveyed. These insightful gems are critical in taking your product training effectiveness to new heights. A few examples you will encounter in this book are:

• The true objective of product training (product knowledge is important but is not the goal)
• Recognizing the difference between product training and product certification
• The journey to unconscious competence and how product experts should train audiences at different levels of expertise
• It’s never just product training—always keep the business objectives in mind
• The 4 × 8 proficiency design model—content is important but must be developed last

Additionally, management professionals will benefit from “Executive Summaries” that recapitulate the learning objectives for book sections and highlight how you as a leader can support the individuals in your organization to learn and apply the methodology in this book.

As you, or those in your organization, put the principles in this book into practice, your ability to design, develop, and deliver effective product training will grow by leaps and bounds. Your customers will be confident about choosing and using your products, and you as a technical professional will now have skills, methodology, and appreciation to deliver effective product training…. You may even pick up Dan Bixby’s passion for training excellence in the process.