Driving Product Adoption and User Autonomy: Insights from Airtable’s Kevin Dunn

There’s no such thing as a truly self-adopting product. Even the most intuitive SaaS needs continuous learning, community and contextual guidance to turn an “aha moment” into lasting adoption.

In the competitive SaaS world, a great product alone isn’t always enough to guarantee long-term adoption and customer success. “There’s probably no such thing as a product that can be used without at least some level of education,” as one expert put it during a recent webinar. This reality is why companies like Airtable – despite its reputation as an intuitive, product-led platform – invest heavily in customer education, community, and in-app learning programs. In our Unlocking Success interview series, we spoke with Kevin Dunn, Director of Digital Customer Experience at Airtable, to explore how his team drives product adoption, continuous learning, and user autonomy among Airtable’s customers. Kevin’s role spans three key pillars: Airtable Academy (self-paced on-demand courses and certifications), Airtable Community (forums, user groups, events, and an MVP champions program), and AI Initiatives (hands-on programs like an AI bootcamp to build advanced skills). Drawing from his years of experience scaling customer education at HubSpot and now Airtable, Kevin shared actionable insights on nurturing users beyond onboarding, leveraging community feedback, and proving the business impact of these efforts.

Heads of Customer Success and Product will find these thematic reflections especially valuable – whether you’re looking to improve feature adoption, implement “everboarding” (continuous onboarding) strategies, or empower your users to become self-sufficient. Each section below highlights a key takeaway from our conversation with Kevin, supported by quotes from the interview and relevant context. (P.S. – If you missed the live webinar, don’t worry. We’ve included recommended video clip timestamps after each section so you can catch Kevin’s insights firsthand and even repurpose them as bite-sized learnings on LinkedIn.)

The Myth of the “Self-Adopting” Product

Product-led growth is often associated with products that are so intuitive they “sell themselves.” In fact, Airtable’s growth strategy is heavily product-led, and the product is designed to be easy to start using. Yet Kevin was quick to dispel the notion that any product can be entirely self-adopting – especially at scale. Airtable’s user base ranges from individual users to large enterprises, and the needs at those extremes differ greatly. “On the other side of the spectrum of our customer base, Airtable also supports a significant number of Fortune 500 companies running their most critical workflows on Airtable,” Kevin notes. “When the stakes are a little higher for really complex, cross-functional use… you don’t want to leave them to their own devices of self-guided navigation of a tool. I find that’s oftentimes where programs like ours – digital scale programs, customer education, community – fit in to help those types of customers.” In other words, even the best-designed product benefits from guided enablement, especially for power users with complex use cases.

Kevin pointed out that Airtable is meant to be extremely accessible – it’s a low-code/no-code platform, enhanced with AI to help new users get up and running fast. Features like Airtable Omni (an AI-driven “co-pilot” that can build entire base schemas from a simple prompt) can generate a huge “aha moment” for new users by removing technical barriers. “Yes, there’s very much a product-led growth motion at Airtable – it’s meant to be intuitive, to drop you into an easily navigable space and help you reach those first few steps of activation, shortening the time to the ‘aha’ moment,” Kevin says. “Especially when you start to tap into AI building you the prototype… It absolutely is true [that Airtable is intuitive].” But that initial success doesn’t mean customers will automatically discover every use case or feature on their own going forward. That’s where Kevin’s team steps in – to catch users after the first spike of interest and guide them toward deeper, sustained usage (more on that later).

In short, no SaaS product is 100% self-adopting. Product-led does not mean “education-lite.” Airtable recognizes that proactive customer education and community engagement are essential companions to an intuitive product, ensuring that users not only sign up, but keep discovering value over the long term.

“Even with a product-led growth model, we don't leave enterprise users to fend for themselves – education and community fill that gap.”

Aligning Product and Customer Success on Education Programs

One common challenge in SaaS companies is getting buy-in for customer education programs (like academies, training content, etc.) – especially if the product team believes the product should be simple enough not to require extra training. Kevin acknowledged this initial tension, noting that at many organizations “product says, ‘Well, we don’t really need an academy, our UX is really cool, why bother creating training programs?’”. At Airtable, Kevin wouldn’t characterize it as friction so much as an active conversation early on. The key was achieving stakeholder alignment on where an academy or self-serve learning content fits in a product-led growth model.

His answer to skeptics on the product team is straightforward: a customer academy actually enhances product-led growth by increasing customer proficiency and bandwidth. Kevin explains that if Airtable did not offer robust education resources, the burden would fall entirely on customers (or Customer Success managers) to train every new user. “I think the absence of that [academy] would put the burden on our customers to deliver that as they’re trying to get their growing teams and end users up to speed,” he says. “We want our customers focused on the bespoke enablement and training of the apps they’ve configured and customized. And so, hey, we’ll take the heavy lift – the 101, the foundationals, building your first automation in Airtable… Yes, it’s intuitive, but [Academy is] there so our customers don’t have to do any training for their end users.” In other words, Airtable’s Academy covers the basics and fundamentals of using the platform, so that customer teams can focus on higher-value, context-specific coaching (like how to implement their particular workflow in Airtable).

By framing the academy as a way to remove workload from customers and internal teams, Kevin gained support for these programs. It’s not about implying the product is hard to use, but rather about accelerating time-to-value and freeing up customers to concentrate on advanced use cases. Many Heads of Product can appreciate this argument: a well-executed education program can drive adoption and reduce support load. Indeed, Kevin found that once everyone agreed on the goals and content scope of Airtable Academy (e.g. offering “baseline foundational 101” courses for new users), the product and CS teams could collaborate productively on improving the user experience together instead of debating its necessity.

“For those who say ‘our product is so intuitive, we don’t need an Academy’ – here’s how Airtable’s Academy actually relieves customers of the training burden.”

Designing a Continuous Learning Journey (“Everboarding”)

It’s tempting to think of user education as something that happens only in the early onboarding phase. Kevin Dunn suggests flipping that mindset to “everboarding” – the idea that onboarding never truly ends. Users will continually need to learn new features, new best practices, and new ways to succeed as your product and their own use cases evolve. “Yeah, I think ‘everboarding’ could be synonymous with just saying, hey, the learning journey doesn’t end,” Kevin says, borrowing the term from a past guest. “Okay, you may be officially onboarded – maybe you’ve been with us 90 days – but that shouldn’t mean that opportunities for learning, or providing resources to users, ever go away. We should continue to enable and empower them and keep them on pace with where the product is going, [where] the market is going…”. In Airtable’s case, new capabilities (like AI features) are constantly being added, and customers’ ambitions grow over time – so there must always be learning opportunities beyond the initial setup period.

To support this, Kevin’s team mapped out the full customer journey and ensured there are programs or resources at each stage. Yes, there is an onboarding flow for brand-new users, but they recognized that a long-time Airtable user might show up at a later stage (for example, joining a company that already uses Airtable, or encountering a new advanced feature). “We don’t want to say it’s linear – you could drop in anywhere,” Kevin notes. The content and community offerings are designed such that whether you’re just beginning or already proficient and looking to level up, you can find something that adds value. This approach requires diverse modalities of learning. “Everybody prefers to learn differently – whether that be modality or format,” says Kevin. Some users may love self-paced video courses (the Academy), while others prefer live interaction. Airtable addresses this by offering a mix of formats: on-demand courses, live webinars and streams, in-person user groups, hands-on workshops, office hour-style Q&As, and more. For instance, their “Set the Table” monthly webinar serves as an open office hours for beginners to ask questions live, while the AI Incubator is a structured four-week cohort program for experienced builders to tackle advanced projects in a communal setting.

Crucially, Kevin’s team continues to develop advanced learning content as well, so the Academy isn’t just full of beginner tutorials. They’re adding courses on topics like choosing the right use case for AI, how to run an AI pilot, advanced automation techniques, and so on. This ensures that even veteran users who want to deepen their skills can find structured learning without having to only rely on community help. By “mixing up formats” and offering content for all skill levels, Airtable keeps the education journey going indefinitely.

For SaaS leaders, this concept of everboarding is key: don’t stop engaging users with educational touchpoints just because they passed an arbitrary 90-day mark or completed basic training. Continual learning leads to continual value realization. And as we’ll see, it also correlates with positive business outcomes like higher retention.

“Onboarding never really ends – it’s everboarding. Tthe learning journey shouldn’t stop at 90 days”

Community-Powered Adoption and Feedback Loops

Beyond formal training courses, peer communities play an integral role in Airtable’s customer success strategy. The Airtable Community (forums, user groups, and champion programs) isn’t just a feel-good initiative – it’s a practical extension of the education ecosystem that enables scale and relevance. “Whereas the Academy focuses on the baseline and foundational stuff… we’re never going to be able to create bespoke education for every single industry, every single functional use case,” Kevin acknowledges. “Airtable is a LEGO set, and there’s an infinite amount of ways in which you can use it and build apps. We leverage our community to apply some of that vertical or functional lens. …That’s where you can hear and see what others are doing in a similar space as you.” In other words, community forums and events allow users to learn niche or advanced applications of the product from their peers – things that Airtable’s own team may never have time to document in official curriculum. For example, a product manager at a SaaS company can find in the community how other product managers build roadmapping systems in Airtable, or a marketing ops specialist can discover templates shared by others in marketing. This peer-to-peer knowledge exchange drives adoption by inspiring users with new ideas and helping them solve problems in their specific context.

Community engagement isn’t only about user-to-user help; it also closes the feedback loop with Airtable’s product development. Kevin’s team actively funnels community feedback and feature requests to the product organization in a structured way. “Yes, we use our community to be the vehicle for product feedback and feature requests,” he says. In fact, they “drink their own champagne” by using Airtable forms and bases to collect ideas from the community and integrate them with the product roadmap. “We intake that via a form on Airtable Community – any user can submit their idea or request. Because it’s coming into our Airtable base, and our product team also has their roadmap and development workflows on Airtable, it automatically tags, categorizes, and routes it to the exact right place on our product roadmap, attaches it to the right feature… pings the right product owners,” Kevin explains. They even leverage AI to help triage and categorize this feedback. The result is a highly efficient loop: “We’ve really shortened that gap between community feedback… and getting it exactly where our product team needs to see it,” Kevin notes. Just as importantly, his team communicates back to the community about what becomes of their suggestions (for example, letting users know when they’ve influenced the roadmap or when a requested feature is released), which closes the circle and encourages further engagement.

For Heads of Product, this kind of community-driven feedback mechanism is gold. It provides qualitative insight and validation from your most engaged users at scale. And for Heads of Customer Success, empowering a community means users help each other succeed (reducing support burden) and feel more invested in the product. Airtable’s approach highlights how a well-run community can both scale customer enablement and serve as an engine for continuous product improvement.

Your product is like a LEGO set with infinite ways to build. Hear how Airtable’s community helps customers discover new use cases and share best practices.”

From Aha to Habit: Sustaining Engagement After the Big Moment

One of the pivotal junctures in a customer’s journey is the first major success or “aha moment” with the product – for example, when a user builds their first app or automation that makes them think “Wow, this is a game-changer!” Airtable’s new AI features can accelerate that moment (imagine telling an AI assistant to create a project tracker, and within minutes you have a fully related base structure – mind blown). However, Kevin cautions that after the spike of excitement, usage can dip if not nurtured: “As you can imagine, we see an immediate spike when something like that [aha moment] happens, and we don’t want it to immediately spike back down. Yes, hit that spike, and then we’re hyper-focused on maintaining that durability of usage,” he says. In other words, the goal is to turn a one-time success into a sustained habit.

How does Airtable attempt to prevent the post-onboarding drop-off? Kevin’s team closely monitors these inflection points and follows up with contextually relevant nudges and resources. It starts with data: they identify who the user is and what exactly they accomplished (the use case that led to the spike). Then, they look across their “pool of programs and resources” to find the best next touch for that user. “It’s about having really informed, contextual follow-ups, pointing them to resources,” Kevin explains. For example, if the user just built an event management base, the team might: invite them to a related user group for event planners, send a link to a “builder spotlight” case study of someone who did something similar, recommend an upcoming workshop in their city, or suggest they join the next cohort of the AI Incubator to advance their skills. The idea is to always have “another step” ready for the user – something new to discover or a community to connect with – so that the initial momentum doesn’t fade.

Notably, this isn’t achieved by simply gating features or trickling out functionality (Kevin says it’s “not necessarily product gating” that keeps users hooked). Instead, it’s about intelligent timing and targeting of customer success outreach. Airtable essentially practices a form of just-in-time enablement: delivering the right resource at the right time based on user behavior. This strategy helps extend usage beyond the honeymoon phase and drives deeper adoption of the product’s breadth. For SaaS teams, it underscores the importance of instrumentation and proactive engagement. Detect those key moments (a completed onboarding, a new feature tried, a milestone achieved) and have a play ready – whether it’s an automated in-app message guiding them further, a human CSM reaching out with advice, or an invitation to a community forum or advanced training. Sustained adoption is built on a series of “Aha!” moments, not just one.

“When users hit that ‘aha’ moment, usage spikes – but how do you keep it from dropping off?”

Embracing AI: Lowering Barriers but Elevating Human Guidance

Given Airtable’s incorporation of AI and Kevin’s focus on AI programs, we asked how artificial intelligence is changing the game in product adoption and customer success. On one hand, AI features within the product (like the aforementioned AI assistant that builds bases, or automatically generates interface elements) dramatically lower the barrier to entry for complex use cases. “AI has done a tremendous job at removing the barrier to entry for a complex or sophisticated product usage,” Kevin says. “I don’t have to be a coder; I don’t have to string together a humongous branched automation flow… I don’t have to write the perfect prompt with all the inputs – AI can do all of that for us.” In short, AI is making it easier for a novice user to accomplish what previously only a highly technical user could. This is a boon for product-led growth, as it can drive wider and faster adoption.

However, Kevin is quick to point out that AI doesn’t replace the need for customer enablement – in fact, it shifts the focus of enablement. “We have found that when our account teams, customer success managers, account executives, [or] Academy resources get to work with customers on AI use case identification, AI problem-hunting skills, understanding field agent capabilities, how to string together an AI pilot… that is where the human touch is needed. That isn’t where AI will replace [us],” Kevin explains. In other words, AI can handle the heavy lifting of building things, but customers often still need guidance on what to build, when to use AI, and how to strategically leverage it. Airtable’s educational programs now emphasize AI fluency – teaching users what AI can do at scale, how to integrate AI into their workflows, and how to be “AI-native” thinkers in their domain. The customer success team’s role evolves to make users champions of AI-powered workflows, rather than just product experts.

Kevin also addressed a common misconception: many teams think of AI in very limited terms (e.g., “we’ll just add a chat assistant and that’s our AI strategy”). In reality, the opportunity is much bigger. “Folks are too limited in how they think about the opportunity with AI… It’s not just about a singular input/output exchange,” he says. Instead of just automating one response or one task, AI can be used to analyze and act on large-scale data and processes – from summarizing thousands of support calls to localizing an entire marketing campaign’s assets automatically. The takeaway for product and CS leaders is to think expansively: how can AI remove friction for users at scale, and how can your team then empower users to capitalize on that? Airtable’s approach has been to weave AI into both the product (for ease of use) and the customer education (for skills development), which together drive faster adoption and more autonomy for users. After all, as Kevin echoes, “AI is not replacing us – but the people who can effectively use AI will [outperform].”

Measuring Impact: Proving that Education Drives Success

How do you convince executives that all these customer education and community programs are worth the investment? By measuring what matters. Kevin Dunn shared how Airtable tracks both leading and lagging indicators to demonstrate the impact of their Digital CX initiatives. On the leading indicator side, his team looks at program-specific metrics that show engagement and optimization within each initiative. For example, for Airtable Academy they monitor course enrollments, completion rates, the percentage of customer accounts that have at least one certified user, and CSAT (satisfaction) for the training content. For the AI Incubator program, they track number of applications, participants, project “capstones” delivered, graduates, and CSAT. These stats are reviewed monthly and rolled up quarterly to spot trends and improve the programs.

More compelling to the C-suite, though, are the lagging indicators tied to business outcomes. Kevin’s team performs extensive cohort analyses to compare customers who engage with their programs vs. those who don’t. “We’ll take a list of customers who have engaged with Academy, attended a community event, [or] have an Airtable MVP in their workspace… then look at product adoption, AI adoption, retention, compared to accounts that don’t have that,” he explains. “Are we seeing an uplift correlated to engagement versus those that don’t? That’s the type of analysis and reporting we’ve bubbled up to leadership and executives – those are the headlines of our QBRs and memos.” In other words, they quantify the impact of engagement on key outcomes like feature adoption rates, Net Revenue Retention (NRR), and expansion (upsell) rates. And the news is good: “There’s a quantifiable correlation when customers learn with the Academy, learn with community, or enter one of our programs,” Kevin reports. “There is an uplift in adoption across their team, the depth of AI adoption of the user, and ultimately, positive renewal outcomes.” In plain terms, customers who take advantage of Airtable’s educational resources use the product more and are more likely to renew and grow. This kind of data turns customer success from a cost center into a growth driver in the eyes of leadership.

Kevin mentioned they are even starting to zoom in further – for instance, measuring the impact of a single event on short-term product usage. For a monthly beginner webinar, they analyze product usage in the 7 and 28 days before vs. after the event for attendees, to see if there’s an uptick. Early signs show these micro-level impacts as well. By continually refining these metrics, Kevin’s team can pinpoint which programs move the needle the most and iterate accordingly.

For SaaS leaders, the lesson here is to instrument your customer education and community efforts just as rigorously as your product analytics. Define the leading indicators (engagement in your programs) and tie them to lagging indicators (retention, expansion, reduced support tickets, etc.). If you can show that an educated customer base correlates with higher usage and loyalty – which, intuitively, many of us believe – then you can justify further investment in those initiatives. In Airtable’s case, the data has validated their strategy and even unearthed how specific features (like AI usage) correlate with training. As Kevin joked, if the data had shown the inverse (i.e., educated users performed worse), “we’d be having a whole different conversation” – but luckily it’s the exact opposite!

Iterate and Adapt: Learning from Failure

Towards the end of our chat, we asked Kevin to share a professional “fail” he experienced and what he learned from it. His story, ironically, was about an early customer education content experiment at HubSpot that didn’t go as planned – but the pivot from that failure taught him a valuable lesson about meeting your audience where they are. Kevin recounted how he once tried to launch a live, hour-long Facebook Live “talk show” series featuring interviews with successful partners. The idea was to have a real-time, interactive broadcast (much like a webinar) with agency CEOs sharing tips, hoping to engage other partner companies. The problem? “For an audience of executives… they don’t have an hour. It’s impossible to lock in an hour across global time zones,” Kevin discovered. The live format wasn’t convenient for the target audience, and few would tune in live to ask questions. In short, “that was a fail… Loved the experiment, loved the pitch, but this ain’t it,” Kevin admits with a laugh.

Importantly, Kevin’s team didn’t abandon the core idea – they adapted it. “We didn’t wash it away… we asked, what were the learnings, and how do we move forward?” They realized the content was valuable; it was the format that needed change. So they relaunched the series as a 30-minute podcast, optimized for on-demand audio (no need to fly people into a studio or get everyone on a live call). They recorded interviews remotely, focused on audio quality, and published on a consistent weekly/bi-weekly schedule. The result: “As soon as we made that pivot and stuck to a reliable schedule, the engagement skyrocketed. It fit the bill exactly,” Kevin says. What was once a flop turned into a hit simply by delivering it in the format the audience preferred. “It was a failure, but you have to learn and turn the ship around,” he reflects.

For any customer success or product leader, this anecdote is a reminder that experimentation is necessary – and so is the willingness to iterate when something isn’t working. Whether it’s a training program, a community event, or a user communication strategy, not every initiative will land perfectly on the first try. The key is to gather feedback, identify the mismatch, and adjust the approach rather than scrapping the goal entirely. By staying agile and customer-focused (in Kevin’s case, recognizing busy executives would rather listen on their own time than join a live video), you can transform a good idea with bad execution into a great success. And as the SaaS landscape evolves – with new technologies, changing customer preferences, and ever-higher expectations – this agile, learning-oriented mindset will serve you well in continually unlocking customer success.

Conclusion

Kevin Dunn’s insights underscore a fundamental theme: customer success is a continuous, proactive journey. From Airtable’s example, we see that driving product adoption and user autonomy requires investment in education (Academy), facilitation of peer learning (Community), smart use of technology (AI) to reduce friction, and thoughtful human touchpoints to guide and inspire users. For SaaS leaders, the blueprint is clear – treat onboarding as an ongoing process, empower your users with knowledge at every turn, and back it up with metrics to prove the value. The payoff is more engaged customers who fully realize the potential of your product, leading to higher retention and growth.

At MeltingSpot, we resonate strongly with these principles. Our mission is to help SaaS companies build vibrant user communities and deliver impactful learning experiences that drive product adoption and customer success. The strategies Kevin discussed – from everboarding to community feedback loops – are exactly the kind of approaches that modern Customer Success and Product teams can implement (and platforms like ours seek to enable). We hope Kevin’s experience inspires you to evaluate your own customer enablement journey. Are there gaps in your users’ learning path? Do your customers have ways to connect and learn from each other? By answering these questions and taking action, you can unlock success for both your users and your business.