The learning and training world is changing faster than ever. Artificial intelligence, shifting workforce expectations, and new tools are transforming how organizations design and deliver learning. Amid all that change, one thing remains clear: we need to stay human-centered, and we need to keep talking.
That’s the idea behind The LX Ops Show, a new podcast from Jackrabbit Learning Experience, hosted by Jason Gorman.
This isn’t just a podcast. It’s an open conversation about how learning actually gets made: how design, technology, and operations intersect to shape meaningful learning experiences.
Why We’re Launching This
As Jason puts it, “We don’t have all the answers- and that’s exactly why we need to talk to other people.”
In their work at Jackrabbit LX, Jason and James spend every day helping organizations solve complex learning challenges, and seeing the same patterns emerge again and again: messy handoffs, unclear roles, workflows that don’t flow, tech that doesn’t quite deliver.
Now, as AI reshapes the landscape, those challenges are accelerating.
“If you’re doing things right, AI will get you to a good place faster,” Jason says. “If you’re not, it’ll get you to a bad place faster.”
The LX Ops Show is about exploring how teams can adapt, how we can evolve processes, tools, and ways of working to meet the moment.
What We’ll Talk About
Each episode will feature:
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- Conversations with learning leaders and practitioners across corporate L&D, higher ed, and nonprofits – exploring what’s changing and how they’re adapting.
- Candid exchanges between Jason and James, sharing insights from their work, their network, and the fascinating things people tell them off-mic.
The goal is to connect the dots across disciplines.
As James says, “We want to break down the silos- corporate, higher ed, nonprofit- because everyone is facing the same big questions about learning and work.”
The Big Idea: Learning Experience Operations (LX Ops)
‘LX Ops’- short for Learning Experience Operations– is about more than project management. It’s a recognition that operations and design are merging.
Traditional roles like LX designer, technologist, or project manager are evolving fast. Currently teams are pressed by their leaders to design smarter systems, make better use of AI tools, and validate that what they’re building aligns with learning objectives – sometimes without sending things back up the chain.
As James puts it, “You’re not just moving widgets anymore- you’re connecting the dots.
The people who understand both how learning should work and how it gets built will define the next era of the field.
What’s Next
Episode 0 sets the stage. Upcoming episodes will bring in guests from across industries to unpack real challenges, share experiments, and explore where learning is heading next.
The show is in beta – we’ll evolve the format as we go, based on your feedback.
🎧 Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
💬 Email us at podcast@jackrabbitlx.com
🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn to join the conversation.
The LX Ops Show is about staying curious, learning out loud, and shaping what comes next, together.
Interested in leveraging AI to transform your customer education?
Jackrabbit LX offers expert guidance and proven frameworks to help learning teams adopt AI effectively, accelerate content creation, and scale impact with confidence. Schedule a free 1-1 with Jason Gorman to help you uncover the kinks in your operations and build your learning operations bullet-proof.
Podcast Transcript – The LX Ops Show (Jason Gorman & James Altman)
Jason Gorman (00:00) Hey, I am Jason Gorman. Welcome to the LX Ops Show.
James Altman (00:04) Hi everybody, I’
m James Altman Jason Gorman (00:07) So let’s take a second to talk about why this show exists. Are we calling it a show? not a podcast?
James Altman (00:12) We’re putting on a show.
Jason Gorman (00:14) the reason that I question whether it’s a show is this podcast is really about us talking to other people in the learning and training industries. Because right now, we are at this incredible inflection point of massive industry-wide transformation, really driven by AI. shifting expectations in the workforce, just more need for training and learning in general, but at the same time, because of all those things perhaps, more of a need for like real human centered thinking and systems and ways of working. ⁓
James Altman (00:52) Yeah, right. I see. So show. Well, it’s a little bit better than the investigative journalistic research project, right? Yeah, the learning experience operations, journalistic investigative research project show. Yeah. Right.
Jason Gorman (01:00) which it is not. Yes. Yes, so that is not the name of the show or podcast. So really this show is really about… talking to lots of people because we, you and I together, we run a company called Jackrabbit Learning Experience and we are constantly now in this, we’re in this place where we understand that we need to be evolving what we’re doing all the time. We don’t have all the answers. We need to be talking to lots of other people and one day we said to each other, hey if we’re going be doing that anyway Why not make those conversations available to lots of people? Because this needs to be a big ongoing conversation.
James Altman (01:49) Yeah, we know everyone’s trying to do it already. When we already talk to these people that we’re already talking to to try to figure out what they’re doing in the new world with the new tools that are changing before you can really understand them, they’re trying to do the same thing. So let’s formalize it and maybe help people and maybe build a community around this as well.
Jason Gorman (02:11) Right, absolutely. Because what we’ve seen over the course of our work together and in our work at Jackrabbit is that there are lots of common repeated pain points that organizations, that are building training or learning have. handoffs between subject matter expert and learning experience designer or workflows for content development or inefficiencies because of unclear roles and responsibilities or technology that doesn’t really do what it said it was going to do or what you really need it to do or lack of integration between what you’re doing and what the business wants you to be doing. And we have seen these things over and over again. You and I both have a couple decades each in this work and we’ve seen these things a lot. We’ve spent a lot of time helping our clients work through these kinds of problems and of course we’ve worked through these kinds of problems ourselves. However, things are changing now. ⁓ So fast.
And I think our thesis is that AI James Altman (03:15) so fast.
Jason Gorman (03:22) is going to accelerate things. Obviously everybody knows that. if you’re not doing something right. I think it’s going to get you to a bad spot faster. If you are doing things right, you really understand your processes, your ways of working, everybody’s roles, et cetera. You’re going to get to a good place faster. That’s kind of the fundamental idea.
James Altman (03:42) yeah. mean, you know, haven’t, I haven’t done this, but we, think we’ve read stories and not, not that, not that all these horror stories are, are true necessarily, but you know, when they talk about hallucinations or whatever, even just a simple recipe, it doesn’t take much for you. If you don’t know that you shouldn’t put a half a cup of baking soda in your cake, like it, it might ask for that depending on what you’re talking about and how you’re doing it. and Then when you say, you sure I shouldn’t? no, I’m so sorry about that. So that’s fine if you know, but if you made a horrible cake, that’s not that big a risk. But if that cake is a learning program that you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars out to put out to millions of learners, then you don’t want to make those assumptions. yes, you need to know the basics of what you’re doing in order to know that what you’re getting is good. And useful and you know, we don’t we we’ve talked about this a lot but and I don’t want it because I don’t want this to seem too much like we’re always just talking about the prompt and the things you get back from the LLM that you’re using or the generative AI tool that you’re using You know the tools that are around them now we know are either Wrappers on LLMs and or people are using those to code other tools fast as well And those tools are changing faster than ever as well. I know people know that in our industry, but I think it’s extremely complicating factor is we’re not doing monthly or quarterly releases. The smallest dev team is doing 10 day, seven day releases. Now on any given small product, it’s a lot to keep up with.
Jason Gorman (05:23) Yeah. Well, those are really good points and I think we should, let’s circle back to why we’re calling this the LX Ops Show or Learning Experience Operations. So LX Ops Learning Experience Operations. ⁓ We talked about this, we talked about the name. We both, I think, agree that the job of the people who do design learning stuff is changing. And so, You made the point that operations is in some ways merging with design. There’s kind of a design aspect to operations. You want to talk about that a little bit?
James Altman (06:07) Well, yeah, I mean, they’re kind of being asked to do that as maybe it’s a catch all because things are changing so much. So, you know, we have what might be traditional roles here that are evolving as well. Learning experience, technologist, learning experience, designer, project manager. And the project manager kind of traditionally has done a lot of operational things in terms of making sure that things are getting done, making sure that Kanban cards are moving or the the project plan is being completed from an operational perspective. But then you’re right as roles you’re saying, actually that LX technologist who might be an e-learning developer in another firm or a course builder in another firm. Well, you know what, could you just make sure that like as you’re building that graphic, go back to the learning objectives and we might’ve asked that before, but there’s probably a slightly higher level of expectation around. Well, you have some tools at the ready that you could verify things because you do know enough. You’ve worked with your LX designer a lot. So could you just validate that the stuff that you’re building goes against the learning objectives? Not back to the LXD for a review. So now that LX technologist is wearing a new hat, and if you’re big enough and you have a lot of those teams, you’re gonna probably be thinking, the person that’s saying that, is actually the operations person, right? So now this operations person, and that’s not exactly a, let’s call it first degree design decision, it’s definitely a second degree. They’re asking someone else to do design because they know they can in those tools. And then that, I think that there’s some kind of hierarchy there, right? In the operations as a central role, they’re saying, yeah, yeah, like, I know like two years ago, you used to not really do this, but could you do it? with the use of some of those generative AI tools, maybe some at some firms that they’ve customized for that purpose. That’s totally different, totally different perspective. And I think the people that they’d want in that role, the people that we want in that role would understand that and would be connecting the dots, not just moving widgets forward. They’d be thinking about why this matters, who should be doing it, and how that person could do it. You know, you hear a lot about the term like the cyborg, cyborgification, right? Like I have my bots around that I rely on for the things that I do and so will all of these roles and if the ops person understands that then they’re connecting a lot more than they used to than just simple operations. So don’t think the term connotes the right thing. It doesn’t make you think, ⁓ I’m an operations person, but actually what you’
re being asked to do is Jason Gorman (08:32) Mm-hmm.
James Altman (08:57) do a lot more design, I think. I’m not gonna take too much credit for this idea. I got it from someone who was kind of giving a little talk about it, and maybe I’ll give her credit later more publicly by getting her to come on this podcast later.
Jason Gorman (08:59) Ha ha. Fair enough. All right, 100 % we should have them on the show. let’s talk about the format of this thing. So there are gonna be really two formats. One is I will be interviewing people, have different guests on. We’re gonna talk about, we’re gonna do a deep dive really on what they have been doing, a challenge that they’ve had recently. It could be something that’s very narrow and specific. It could be something that’s more broad. we’re going to talk about what they did to address that. And then what we’re going to do is extrapolate beyond whatever it is that they do to other kinds of jobs in this space. So for instance, if this person is a director in an L and D organization within corporate education, we want to make sure that whatever we talk about is relevant to an instructional designer in a university, right? Building courses with faculty. Because we really feel like This can be a very insular… field that we’re in and we can get really hyper focused on the specific organization that we’re working for. But the reality is what we’ve seen in our work is that something that applies in a place like higher ed often does really apply elsewhere, right? With minor changes. So we really just want to have a diversity of conversations to really bring a lot of different ideas in, different approaches, different tools, et cetera. So we can just get a lot of great ideas out onto the table.
James Altman (10:41) Yeah, yeah, when you say insular, the other thing I think of is when we’re at learning conferences and people are like, oh, are you in corporate L and D? And you say, like we say, well, kind of, right? Cause we can say kind of to almost everything as a boutique firm that helps so many different industries and so many different types of organizations. But generally people are like, oh, well, if you’re in higher ed as a learning designer, I’m not sure can learn from you. I’m going to go find the L and D person that speaks my language. And we, we’re, want to break. that down. We want to make sure that actually those, are really good lessons and they’re happening all over. And the other thing I’d say is the other reason we want to, the one of the reasons we want to break it down is not, not just our selfish kind of that we think and believe that that’s valuable, but I can’t imagine that people aren’t just going to have to wear more hats and do more things. Right. So even, even in higher ed, if you’re in the conversation right now,
Jason Gorman (11:35) Yeah.
James Altman (11:40) The conversation on higher ed is lifelong learning and workforce and K to gray type stuff. And that’s less higher ed than it’s ever been in a lot of ways. So your job is changing there. Why the heck wouldn’t you want to learn what’s been happening in corporate America where some really amazing learning design stuff has happened or in nonprofits as well. So definitely.
Jason Gorman (11:44) Yeah. Absolutely. So we’re going to do that. We’re going have those interviews. We may do some other things because we should just say, this is kind of a beta. Like we are just going to get stuff out there and we will evolve the format as we get feedback and as we get more comfortable with what we’re doing. ⁓ but the other thing that we know we’re going to do from the start is you and I have all of these, these conversations every week with, with friends and new colleagues and new people that we’re meeting and people say interesting things to us all the time that we will get on the phone or you know get into a meet and say man you’re never gonna believe what this person said it’s so smart and we are exchanging these things between each other but we feel like those those ideas even when people are off mic we want to get those ideas out into the world too so the second format will be you and I in conversations like this sharing things that we have heard learned read whatever with each other to kind of put it into the conversation so it’s second type of format we’
re gonna have James Altman (13:00) Absolutely. The value that those people have provided over the years is so big and we capture it, we get to use it, and so should other people as well.
Jason Gorman (13:11) Absolutely. So last thing to say here is that we do have, even though, you know, we’re kind of straddling the line here. I think that it would be hard for us to do the work that we do without being able to call ourselves experts and feel like experts. But I think the point of this podcast is that the spotlight isn’t on us. And not only is it not on us, we feel like Our expertise is in a moment where it has to evolve. Like we feel like if we stay where we are, if we stay static, we’re going to degrade quickly in terms of our expertise. And so the point of these conversations is to, is for us to stay current. We should say even that, even still, we come in with a really, really strong opinion about how this work should happen. Right? So on the one hand, we’re staying open on the other hand, And we have these really highly articulated processes and systems and ways of thinking and mindsets and tools that we always use for every kind of client that we have, whether it’s like a huge medical company or it’s a higher ed organization or it’s a nonprofit organization. We’ve worked out a system that allows us to move through a project to create a learning program that works across all of these different areas. ⁓ So just to say that we have that opinion too.
James Altman (14:38) Yeah, absolutely. No, we’re going to come to the cut. We want as it’s a kind of a there’s an opportunity to kind of come in with a perspective, but we’re driving to find perspective in changing world as well. Right. When you when we’re at one, we want to bring in people that are going to say, well, I think based on my experience. but also some feelings that the future is going to look like X, Y, or Z. And we don’t know those, so we want to gather them, but definitely we’re going to come at it from a perspective. I don’t know, just in a really kind of quick way to talk about it. And we talked about this exact thing internally, and I was writing about it recently, posting about it, is the learner persona probably should evolve. There’s ways to do stuff. And you have talked about this idea that we might be able to get. massive amounts of learner-perspectives from the internet, from forums, things like even subreddits, and put that through a model to build something maybe broader, more like a learner narrative. we’ve been exploring that. So will it change? Yeah. Do we forget? Do we stop trying to understand the learner? Never. Understanding the learner is a thing that we are going to do. And we’re going to be, we’re the principal. We’re going to beat the drum of that.
Jason Gorman (15:56) that principle.
James Altman (16:00) regardless of the tools and the outputs going forward. Even if we get the most amazing person on that has a totally crazy idea of how to do that, we’re still gonna say, right, but the goal of this that we’re talking about is to understand the learner, right? So, yeah, definitely.
Jason Gorman (16:15) Yeah. Perfect, perfect, perfect. So we are going to have a guest soon to be named. We will start releasing episodes soon. in the meantime, if you wanna get ahold of us, you can ping us on LinkedIn. We’re easy to find there. Please, you can also email us at letstalk@jackrabbitlx.com.
James Altman (16:24) Talk to All one word.
Jason Gorman (16:38) You can also, if you want to be our first subscriber, wherever you’re finding this, please subscribe. Even like it, if you like it. If you don’t like it, don’t do anything. We’d love to hear from you. Again, it’s all about conversations ⁓ and we are really looking forward to what…
James Altman (16:54) What if for the first subscriber we thank them? Yeah. We will thank you. How will we know? I don’t know. You’re going to have to tell us if you’re the first one. Email us at letstalk@jackrabbitlx.com.
Jason Gorman (16:59) I like it. Yes, we will thank the first subscriber. How will we know? How will we know? Okay, please, please reach out. Tell us that you are the first subscriber. We will give you a very hearty shout out. Anyway, so until our next conversation.
Jason Gorman (17:22) thank you. See you next time. Bye.