Digibee iPaaS: Continuing Education for Users

In this episode of “Integration. Redesigned.,” our host, Digibee’s Chief Marketing Officer Cait Porte, sits down with Digibee’s Head of Education & AI Fabricio Inocencio, to discuss the exciting world of continuing education for Digibee – including Digibee’s own learning Academy. Fabricio shares his passion for delivering useful content and a friendly learning experience for users, primarily focused on enabling developers first and foremost. His job consists of evaluating how to deliver useful content for our customers, how to deliver a conducive user-friendly experience, and how to grow our adoption and community.

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Full transcript

CAIT PORTE:

Hello and welcome to Integration. Redesigned. I’m your host, Cait Porte. And in this episode, I’m joined by Fabricio, the Head of Education here at Digibee.

Welcome, Fabricio.

FABRICIO INOCENCIO:

Thank you, Cait. Thank you for having me here.

CAIT PORTE:

I’m very excited for this topic today. So what does it mean to be head of education? What does that translate to for you?

FABRICIO INOCENCIO:

I can divide my work in three buckets. The first one is how can we deliver useful content for our users in using the platform? So everything related to development content, courses, tutorials, and everything related to that. A second one, is related to learning experience. How can we deliver useful, friendly user experience and mostly a learning experience that can make their job in learning easier. The third one is more related to user adoption. How can we grow our community to attract more users and foster the engagement in order to use the resources that we are providing to them?

CAIT PORTE:

I think it’s really important when we think about the specific type of people that we’re targeting with the platform, which are developers, how are we servicing them? Right? And so when we speak to education, it’s so important that people understand not only the work that they’re doing, but the tools that are being used. So when you think about, we brought you on board to help with redesigning the educational experience for Digibee. How did you do that? Right. How did you think about redefining and redesigning the educational experience for Digibee?

FABRICIO INOCENCIO:

Perfect. Interesting question, Cait. And we start with the beginning that it’s a different user. So if we see educational resources in general, we used to put education as an end. People study to get a certification and then do something else with that. Actually, we want to help our users to use the platform, not necessarily to get a certification. So in this case, education is more like a mean rather than an end.

And there are some implications that we need to take into consideration. For example, we don’t want to measure how much time they spend in the platform, actually in the platform, I mean the learning platform. Actually, we want them to use the Digibee platform. And the learning platform is just a resource for them to help to not be stuck or to get evolved their skills using in the platform. So we thinking about some strategies that we are using.

We are using the approach more “just in time” rather than “just in case.” For example, we do not provide a lot of content for them for just in case they can use. Actually this should be more just in time. And we need to take into consideration concepts like cognitive load, limited attention, and things that we want to put in place to provide a better learning experience for them.

CAIT PORTE:

When we were catching up earlier, you mentioned that platform selection was very much dictated by our user base and you referenced those things just before. Thinking about the difference between a student teacher type of engagement versus self paced learning for developers and people learning the platform. So that the end result, as you were saying, wasn’t just a certificate, but it was more “I want to use this platform over and over and how do I find the information when I need” it versus all at once for this certification.

How have you measured the impact of the success that we’ve seen from the platform? Because it feels like the change has been successful. But how are you going to look at the success in terms of metrics?

FABRICIO INOCENCIO:

Oh, perfect. And it’s interesting because in the context that you brought related to how the users they learn, we need to take into consideration that we may have users that are using the platform in a linear way, learning things from scratch and in a nonlinear way that they can use the platform whatever they need. So we needed to think our metrics in a way that we could measure how the learning platform had been useful for them, considering those multiple approaches.

So one first metric that we put in place is of course the new users, how many new users we are bringing to the platform, giving our client space. And this help us to understand how we are creating the awareness and attractiveness of the platform for them. And once they are there, we measure their user stickiness, right? So we compare daily active users with monthly active users because we understand that if they are going frequently accessing the platform, probably we are helping them in the daily basis. So it’s more lifelong learning approach, it’s an ongoing basis approach. It’s not a thing that start and there’s an end, it’s a process. So we need to provide resources that can help them in a journey, not something that’s going to have an end.

And finally, and this is the most challenging, is how can we measure the learning effectiveness? And it’s not necessarily by grading, right? It’s not necessarily to see that grades. And we came up with how could the learning be useful? If the learning is useful for them, they are using the platform by their own. So we measure pipeline, how they are using and creating integration pipelines in the platform by their own, not with any help. So this is what we call the self sufficiency metric for how they are totally autonomous in using the platform. And we measure and you understand the co hosts that are using the platform and how they are progressing in deploying new pipelines without any help.

CAIT PORTE:

I think for those listening, thinking about implementing an education platform, overall it’s helpful not to just look at “hey, how many people use the platform and how many people have taken courses or completed activities or searched for content?” But in are you seeing an improvement in the amount that someone is using your product or service as a result of having better education and better tooling to support the users? So, I love that. That’s an area that we’re focused on.

When we’re thinking about licensing software based on Digibee’s experience and your past experience, what’s the biggest impact of having an educational experience like ours when you’re licensing software?

FABRICIO INOCENCIO:

Perfect. I think that every product team aims to foster adoption, right, the product adoption and in our case, software. And by not knowing how to use the software, it’s a great friction for that adoption. Right. And there’s different learning curves that users can overcome this learning curve in order to start to grow in their skills in using any software platform or product or mainly digital product. So in this sense, we can think that a product team, if they have offering a software that it’s easy to use and is not complex, it’s very simple to use, maybe an onboarding program can be enough to help these users to overcome this learning curve so they are able to explore all functionalities of that software.

But in our case, despite we are a low code platform and it’s a platform that is easy to use, there’s a lot of capabilities, there’s a lot of complexities that can be solved by using the platform. So, the learning resources are really important to help the users to go through this learning curve as soon as they can in order to use all the capabilities that the software can offer.

CAIT PORTE:

Very well said. What are some of your favorite educational experiences? I know mine, we were talking about this, but I teach part time myself, so I’m familiar with a number of platforms but we talked about a bunch. What are some of your favorite ones?

FABRICIO INOCENCIO:

In this case, because we are focused on delivering a self-paced platform, I really like the platforms that can add a lot of technology features for interactivity and a way to try to replicate at most they could the relationship that students may have with an instructor.

So in this case, we get inspired by some ad tech platforms in the educational industry, for example, Pluralsight and Code Academy, that they focus more on tech as a general and also DataCamp and Dataquest that focus more on data science teaching. And they are really interesting platforms, providing those features related to interactivity, live, self grading or feedback that can provide this self paced rhythm for the student but also trailhead from Salesforce. That interesting way to organize the content with some gamification features that we are getting inspired as well. So I think that those are five interesting examples that I can mention.

CAIT PORTE:

They’re so good and we would be remiss not to mention stuff like Salesforce and I think platforms like Google for Google Analytics and other training that they have. I mean, there’s a wealth of knowledge out there and packaging it up between those platforms has been inspiring to watch.

Fabricio, thank you so much for joining me today. We very much value having education at the forefront of what we do here at Digibee.

It has been a pleasure and I am sure we will have you back for more as we start working on more education that we share. That’s it for this episode of Integration. Redesigned. See you next time.