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Feb 20, 2026 - Ryan D Frame
Instructional Designers can not only be helpful to a startup but could be the key to their success.
I attended a tech mixer the other day and had some fantastic conversations. The event was geared a little more towards startups. Since most of my experience has been with enterprise clients, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what value I could bring to these organizations, and I had two big takeaways. The first is that startups seem to underestimate the importance of change management, and the second is that startups are always looking for hyper-specific skills and backgrounds.
My response to both is, hire an instructional designer!
There is a common theme I have seen among startup founders regarding change management: the sentiment seems to be that training is a ‘nice-to-have,’ an ‘add-on,’ not a requirement. For some, that may be true; however, most of the founders I met were working on B2B products with expectations of targeting enterprise customers.
In 15+ years of working with enterprise-level clients, I can tell you one thing for certain: no enterprise organization is deploying a new product, tool, or process within its operating environment without a comprehensive change management plan. Yes, they regularly purchase tools, products, and services without training and documentation. But they are creating the change management plan internally. It’s part of their deployment processes. They are doing needs assessments and creating documentation or training as needed to deploy those tools. That may just consist of the person who led the technology selection process meeting with the affected teams and giving a quick rundown of how to use the tool. It may be some quick documentation or a video. It may be a full training course on integrating the tool into every aspect of their work. Whatever it happens to be, there will be some form of change management plan developed by the enterprise client for your product.
As a founder or product owner, do you really want that messaging to be outside of your control?
The first impact of change to consider is that it is an additional expense that the client organization is factoring into your solution. If you have training and a change management plan ready to go, that is a huge selling point and an advantage over many competitors. It adds significant value to your product. Not only is that an additional overhead expense they will not have to take on with your solution, but it also means they can implement it more quickly and gain even greater value from the time savings.
The second impact of change management is messaging. You may sell a leader or an executive on your idea and secure an initial contract, but the employees who will actually use your tool will make or break your long-term success. The training and documentation you provide may be the only avenues of communication you have with those employees about your product. Do you really want that messaging to be outside of your control? Worst-case scenario: the person putting together the deployment messaging or training was overruled in the selection process and actively sabotages the messaging within the organization to ‘prove’ they were right and that the contract should have gone to your competitor. That may sound alarmist, but I have personally seen this happen on more than one occasion. Best-case scenario: someone who barely knows your product or service is trying to teach others how to use it. Either way, the end user won't have the best first impression.
What are your thoughts on change management? Have you ever seen a tool or product deployed without a plan for integrating it into existing workflows? How did it go?
My second takeaway from my conversations about startups is the need for hyper-specific skills and staffing.
In retail and food service, during busy periods, they commonly have a floater. This is someone who can fill nearly any role in the organization. They help clear service bottlenecks, cover callouts, and generally jump in wherever needed to keep things running smoothly.
Startups regularly need specialists; most of the time, these needs are temporary. There are bottlenecks as they seek out the specialists, and they spend more on short-term contracts than they would if they had a highly skilled floater. An instructional designer can be your floater; your right-hand person. When you need a hyper-specific skillset to keep things moving, they can be that person. A jack of all trades and a master of learning, instructional designers have spent the majority of their careers jumping into new tools, processes, rules, and regulations, quickly learning them thoroughly enough to accurately convey that information to others.
Instructional designers are a full media team by themselves. They can build interactive training simulators that are perfect mockups for prototyping. They write training materials that can also serve as advertising. UI/UX designer? Instructional designers have a deeper understanding of user experience design than anyone else. They are looking at usability from a process perspective, at how the tool fits within the operations as a whole, and most importantly, they understand how a user will use the tool regardless of how you want them to use it.
If you need a specialist, ask your instructional designer. If they can’t do it, they’ll learn how to over the weekend. I’ve seen instructional designers come from a wide range of backgrounds: programmers, project managers, designers, communicators, and media professionals. The one thing they all have in common is that they were the ones to jump in to learn new things when needed, to take on responsibilities outside of their specialty just because they wanted to learn more and broaden their skill set. They kept doing that until they became the jack-of-all-trades, that is, an instructional designer. You don’t need 5 part-time or temporary specialists. You need 1 instructional designer who can fill the gaps.
Dec 11, 2026 - Ryan D Frame
Building Responsible AI & Equitable Communities
I had a great evening at the "Building Responsible AI & Equitable Communities" networking event last night. I had been hesitant to attend these types of events before, but the discussions were genuinely captivating. I'm fortunate to be in Northern Virginia, where there are numerous similar networking events. I'm looking forward to attending more!
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