Scott Rutherford

Welcome to the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development Podcast. I’m Scott Rutherford.

This podcast series highlights the expertise of L&D leaders, all focused on driving performance through learning.

This episode is the third and final part of my conversation with L&D leader and learning experience specialist Tom Decker, exploring his experience in the development and launch of a learning ecosystem within a Fortune 500 company serving a staff of 18-thousand people.

In part one, we focused on strategy: defining the objective, building the business case, and creating internal support.

In part two, we looked at the build: the learner experience, the project team, modular design, integrations, and the technical choices that determine how flexible the ecosystem can be.

If you’ve missed either of those two pieces, you can find them as previous episodes wherever you’re listening to this podcast, or you can find the episode pages, with transcripts and links to additional resources, at axiomlearningsolutions.com/podcast.

In this third part, the LXP conversation turns to launch and adoption: How do you keep leaders and stakeholders engaged? How do you manage expectations across decentralized teams? How do you help learners adopt the platform? And how do you design an experience that feels intuitive and easy to use for learners?

We also close with a broader discussion about the future of learning technology, including why Tom sees value in stronger partnerships between L&D and engineering teams, and why the future may require more build-and-buy thinking.

With that, here’s part three of my conversation with Tom Decker.

Tom Decker

We had worked really hard to think of ourselves as one unit. So I think beyond what we had built, we were spending more time together as learning leaders. And we knew that this whole one company concept was important to us and being decentralized. And I had been talking about this for a lot of years with folks in the learning spaces.

The pros and cons of being centralized versus decentralized. And so if we're decentralized, what's great is we get to actually do the right work for our business units. We understand our learners better.

We have dedicated resources and budgets to support those learners in a way that we wouldn't if we were centralized.

What do we lose? Well, we lose consistency amongst us. We were all doing something a little bit different over the years. We had been talking a lot about the ways in which we could take some of those disadvantages and make them less or turn them into advantages somehow, some way.

So we had a really, really strong community that was built on collaborating with one another.

So it was a little easier. We had a lot of tenure in the space, so there's not a lot of turnover in some of those leadership roles. We built relationships and strong partnerships that made it easier to help everyone understand that this is for the betterment of our company.

Now the product that we had delivered gave everybody their own space still. So I mentioned it was architected a lot like YouTube where you have a homepage and that page is personalized for you as the consumer of the content. And then all the authors have their own channels. Well, this was no different. And so all of these business units and business areas, their learning teams had their own channel that they could control.

Now that was difficult because that's one extra click into that space. And so I think a lot of these learning teams want to invest and be engaged in their learners experience as much as possible.

So trying to help create a space on the homepage where they still had the ability to influence the content that their learners are seeing was critical. And we did that. So we gave all of the channel owners the ability to actually promote specific content to the homepage. And if your learners subscribe to your page or your channel, they'll see that content on the homepage. They don't have to leave the homepage. And getting people to understand the value in not actually leaving the homepage, because I think naturally the learning teams are saying, oh, I want all my learners in my channel, I want them all on my channel.

Well, not necessarily, that may not be the most valuable place for them.

So you got to think of your learners as individuals that require personalization and that might not always be the stuff that you're force feeding them. So there's a lot of those conversations, a lot of collaboration around that. And we were kind of figuring all of that out on our own. I didn't have all the answers. I knew what I wanted to build. And to be quite honest with you, if there's content vendors or products out there like YouTube that do this, they must know something. The people that built that product must know something that maybe we don't. And so the blueprints are out there and I believed in that and I knew what that was achieving. And so it's just a matter of collaborating closely together to help us all unify on those core principles, which is bringing a personalized experience that both you as the learning professionals can influence, but ultimately give your learners control. Give them back some power. We spent a lot of time controlling everything that the learner sees. Empower your learners. Now, that was a shift for us too. And so we spent a lot of time just kind of hashing out those conversations. I listened a lot.

All of those learning leaders became business owners, and me as a product owner, I was here to serve them. And so I was very strategic about what I heard from them and what I built to support them. I compromised a lot and tried to put everyone in a position where they were getting some of the things that they want, but we were maintaining the integrity of the product that we had built.

Scott Rutherford

One thing that you're talking about is I think building a product to be for ease of use of the user is important.

Some years ago, I was involved in a web portal project and I had a conversation with my technical lead at the time, and I said, don't invent something new.

Think about. You mentioned YouTube. I used Apple, I used iTunes, I think, as an example at the time.

Folks know how to use that user interface. Folks know what it's going to do and how it's going to respond to them. So use that as a foundation to build yours, because you lessen the hurdle you're expecting everyone to clear rather than, you might be able to build something that's really, really unique and fun and unlike anything anyone's ever seen before. But if you do that, you're increasing the friction and also increasing the amount of documentation you have to create.

Tom Decker

It's almost as if you were in on some of my team meetings. My mantra, and my team have heard this so many times from me, is that we're not building something that is new and unique. We are building something that's expected.

So this product will behave the way people expect it to behave. The idea is that the learning curve is down low or nonexistent, because when they come in here, they go, oh, this is just like, I know exactly what this is doing because I've experienced it here, here, here and here. We would spend time in Amazon, in some of the social media sites, in YouTube, and we would look at, oh, here's something that we want to do. How does Amazon do this? How does YouTube do this?

Because all of these products already have developed the expectation in our consumer. And so that's all we had to do is just meet their expectations.

Scott Rutherford

Yeah. And frankly, they often. If you look at Amazon as a great example, they also have compared to my user base at the time about 15 billion times more clicks to build their experience from.

Why wouldn't I at least directionally leverage their learning to my advantage?

Tom Decker

Right.

And leveraging applications like that too helped us sell business owners on ideas for new features, new functionality. I used to hear all the time, there's too much content in this LXP. And I'd ask them back, is there too much content in Amazon?

No, I'm able to find it just fine.

So the argument that there's too much content in there is not the argument. The argument may be that I can't get to it as fast as I want to, which is why we created a search bar and also we created filters. And then the argument would also be, there's too many filters.

Go into Amazon and search for a chair and see how many filters pop up on the left side. Is that a problem for you? No. You go down to the exact filter components that you want, select what you want, and boom, there you go.

You've got your choices.

Scott Rutherford

Right?

Tom Decker

Filters, curation of content.

Scott Rutherford

All factor in there, right?

Tom Decker

Exactly. And we had filters for all the skills. We had a tagging system, so skill tags, role tags, business group tags, and the type and the duration and proficiency level. So you had filter options for everything. You can narrow down your results in a way that was clean and easy and also expected.

Scott Rutherford

So I want to, before we wrap up, just get your sense of where you think the ideal learning ecosystem is moving. If you were to look out. So we're recording this as we approach the middle of 2026.

So let's look at 2030, which is far enough out that it's a little bit immaterial.

What do you hope happens in the world? Is there another sea change coming or is it iterative or what do you think it's going to look like?

Tom Decker

So I'm gonna give you two answers. One is, what do I think is gonna happen? What do I want? What do I hope will happen? Because I think they're two different things right now.

And this is my opinion. And I think a lot of our listeners have a lot of different experience too that might feel differently. But the consulting firms and the software solutions control our market. They control our business. They control what we choose to offer for our employees.

More so than, I think, our L&D teams, our internal L&D teams. Now, that was my experience.

And so I've heard a little bit about.

A lot of the software solutions are kind of moving more towards these suites again. We saw this years ago, over a decade, 15 years ago maybe more, the suite of tools, and then they kind of broke apart and became disparate, and everybody's offering these niche little products and services and technologies, and that's where we are today with multiple disparate technologies.

I've heard from some industry experts too that they think they're moving towards these suites. And you've got a lot of these larger organizations like Workday and like Degreed and they're all kind of buying each other up and buying different components.

Scott Rutherford

Exactly right. I think we're in a moment for a variety of reasons, that we had a propagation of vendors that have come into the market in the past five years, and now they're starting to acquire each other. And so that consolidation and lumping together is absolutely happening. I see that too.

Tom Decker

Yeah. And I imagine a lot of that is just kind of very strategic in the market. And a lot of that is probably because we want those features and functionalities to incorporate within our product and services. Now I've seen some of these software companies buy these products and not offer them or make them cost you more money to be able to add that on.

And so that presents a unique problem for the businesses when you're kind of stuck in that contract with some of those bigger software companies.

But I think the suite of tools is kind of where it's going.

Where I hope it would go is that we as HR professionals would figure out a way to start bringing more engineering mindsets into our organizations to start building.

I've talked to people before and I've said, they've come to me with a problem. They said, hey, this is my technology problem. And I would test this theory out, like, why don't you just hire a couple engineers?

Oh, I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't sell that to my executive leadership team, my senior leadership team, that I need engineers in an HR space.

So it was always just kind of like this very initial reaction, like, oh, no, I can't do that.

And so I think there's a challenge out there with how we as HR professionals, L&D professionals, partner more with engineering professionals to build the right solutions that we need.

And this can kind of bring up the whole build versus buy debate too. And my thought is always build and buy. That was what I would hope we would get to is some sort of build and buy solution.

I do think that the consulting firms and the software solution companies control too much and have too much influence over us. And so I think suite of tools is probably what we will see within the next four or five years and not as much of what I had done which is building the modern tech stack internally and connecting it to all of the different products.

Scott Rutherford

Right. And what you're describing almost implies, and I don't want to say this could happen, but it's an interesting flip on the build versus buy to say potentially that if the better mousetrap is built by an internal team, would it not be a revenue stream for a company to say well, we're going to license out what we built and let other people take it? Correct?

Tom Decker

And I think I heard that a lot from a lot of external partners and colleagues and people in the business say the same thing. Can you license that out?

And so some businesses may be more keen to that, some not.

Maybe some of the more risk averse might be like no, we're just going to stick to what we do.

Scott Rutherford

Yeah. And there's of course a competitive pressure that would discourage that sort of thing too.

Tom Decker

Absolutely.

Ultimately there may be somebody out there that can figure that out and then offer that up. But I think ultimately too, what's then the difference between if you did that, if you license it out, how different is that than any other SaaS solution, any other software solution? Because you built it for yourself and you're going to offer that to somebody else who is different.

So you're then just giving them.

Scott Rutherford

You're creating a new problem.

Tom Decker

Exactly. Or the same problem that all these other software LMSs and LXPs offer up.

So I think there are some thoughts on what that could look like in the future.

Maybe there's a birth of consulting firms that offer up some sort of mix in between.

Scott Rutherford

Well, we'll see where that goes. Hopefully maybe you and I will chat again about this at a future conference or a phone call. But absolutely. It's a fascinating and continually evolving area of practice. So it's going to keep us all very busy for an indeterminate amount of time.

Tom Decker

It will. It absolutely will. Yes.

Scott Rutherford

All right, Tom. Pleasure talking to you, as always.

Tom Decker

Likewise.

Scott Rutherford

Once again, my thanks to Tom Decker for being a part of this series of episodes.

In these past three episodes, we explored the scoping, building, and launching of a learning experience platform. And along the way, we explored how building a learning ecosystem is more than a technology or tech-stack question, it’s a business initiative, a data initiative, and can be a significant change management effort.

But the outcome can be worth the effort: through the intentional connection of learning resources and learner experiences with business goals and performance data, we become better positioned to support the organization, and strengthen our ability for showing results.

Thanks for listening.

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