The Hidden Power of Existing Content: Use Content Discovery Sprints to Fuel Customer Education Initiatives
“Have you checked the junk drawer?”
We all have one - that perpetually overstuffed drawer in your kitchen or living room - the one that’s always half-jammed, full of life’s little odds and ends. The tangle of orphaned-electronics cables, lockless old keys, batteries of dubious power, and the takeout menu from that spot lost to the pandemic. It’s chaotic. It’s unhinged (and includes a hinge). It’s…an adventure!
An adventure that can pay off! When I dig into my own junk drawer, I nearly always come out with something incredibly useful amongst those little odds and ends - sometimes I come across exactly what I’ve needed (hello, tiny hex wrench from my last Ikea build).
An organization’s content can work the same way. You can find a wealth of untapped material shared across the content that is produced by your teams. You’ve just got to be willing to pry open the junk drawer, roll up your sleeves, and dig in.
Digging In - With a Purpose
It’s easy to assume you need to start from scratch when launching or expanding customer education programs. But in our experience, a vast majority of organizations can have up to 60 - 70% of the foundational content they need to start building or optimizing a customer ed strategy. Unfortunately, sometimes that content is siloed within teams or systems.
Where Content Hides
Internal wiki or knowledge base articles
Customer-facing decks
Sales and enablement resources
Product walkthrough videos or screenshots
Internal and external call recordings
Social/Slack messages
All of this content can be useful to customer ed teams, but on first pass it can feel overwhelming, unstructured, outdated, or difficult to approach. One word: valid. Every junk drawer is different.
Having an action plan as you get started can help you focus on what you need and enable others to collaborate to fill that need. A quick way to put a plan into motion - while tapping into the knowledge your teams already have - is to run a Content Discovery Sprint.
What Is a Content Discovery Sprint?
A Content Discovery Sprint is a short, time-boxed project designed to identify and evaluate existing content to be reused or adapted for customer education. This isn’t your average content audit - it’s a collaborative, cross-functional discovery process.
Content Discovery Sprints can help:
Save time and resources
Identify and align on high-value, existing content
Create shared baselines before building new content
In a content discovery sprint, the focus is on quickly gathering materials that explain the key concepts, tasks, or workflows relevant to your users. You’re not looking for polished, finished assets. You’re looking for assets that provide starting points. So, how is a Content Discovery Sprint different from a content audit? Think of it as action over analysis. Here’s a quick breakdown to show how they compare.
While a full content audit takes a broad, analytical look across your library, a discovery sprint narrows the focus: it’s about uncovering what’s needed, and available, now. The two approaches can complement each other - audits help optimize for the long term, while discovery sprints deliver quick wins you can build on immediately.
Content discovery sprints can empower teams to quickly uncover, curate, and create customer education content by tapping into existing resources and cross-functional knowledge - making the process faster, more collaborative, and immediately impactful.
How to Run a Content Discovery Sprint
Running a content discovery sprints is meant to help you move quickly from planning to action. Instead of starting from scratch, you tap into the real-world resources your teams already create and use - building new customer education content with authoritative and vetted information. Instead of rolling solo, you work collaboratively with cross-functional team members to curate from each siloed resource pool.
Here’s how to run a focused, collaborative Content Discovery Sprint in just a week or two (you got this!):
1. Define your focus
Start by narrowing the scope of the sprint to a specific customer education need. A defined focus keeps discovery relevant and prevents the sprint from becoming too scattered.
For example, you might need:
Content to support onboarding or change management
Resources for feature adoption campaigns
Guidance materials for customer implementation or professional services teams
FAQs or best practices libraries for support portals
2. Recruit your team
Ask 4–6 team members from departments like Product, Support, Customer Success, and Enablement to participate. Ensure they know they don’t need to write anything - just submit content/resources/references they already use with customers.
Invite contributors who work closest to your customers - they often have content gems hidden in their daily workflows:
Product: Feature release notes, internal training decks
Support: Troubleshooting guides, templated customer responses
Customer Success: Playbooks, best practice sheets, customer call recordings
Enablement: Internal workshops, role-specific training slides
3. Assign roles
Once your sprint team is organized and moving, it helps to define a few simple roles. These roles ensure that content is submitted, organized, reviewed, and prioritized efficiently - without putting too much burden on any one person.
Every team differs in size and make-up, so here are the core roles we recommend:
A Discovery Lead to own each sprint: They kick it off, share instructions, manage the submission process, organize content, and lead the debrief.
Contributors participate in the kick-off and debrief, submit existing resources, references, or materials based on the sprint focus, and recommend or recruit other team members to participate in future sprints.
Reviewers evaluate collected content for relevance, usefulness, and potential. This could mean tagging, grouping, and lightly categorizing submissions for review. Reviewers are well-positioned to help identify and prioritize content for next steps.
4. Create a Drop Zone
Keep your sprint moving quickly by making it ridiculously easy for contributors to share what they have. The smoother you make the submission process, the easier it is to participate - and the more hidden gems you may uncover.
When teammates don’t have to think about how to contribute, they are able to put their energy and focus on what to contribute.
Here are a few simple options you can use to keep the process easy and accessible:
A lightweight spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Airtable) with columns that track the Title, Source, Type, and Notes etc. of each submission.
Enables direct contributions and is easy to filter or sort during the curation phase
A shared online form (Airtable/Google Forms) that automatically feeds into a spreadsheet
Lets teammates copy over notes, paste links, or upload files, while you automatically collect and organize submissions in one place for easy review.
A shared folder (Google Drive, Dropbox) with clearly labeled subfolders by resource or media type (e.g., “Decks,” “Emails,” “FAQs”).
Ideal for bulk uploads, larger files, or when people already have organized content collections to share
5. Set a timeline
Content discovery sprints are meant to be quick, focused, and low-lift for team members involved, so setting clear start and end dates is crucial to each sprint’s success. One to two weeks is ideal.
Check this example of what a 2-week content discovery sprint might look like:
6. Wrap up & prioritize
Hold a 30 - 45 minute session with contributors and stakeholders to share what was uncovered. Start by showcasing a few standout submissions - real examples help everyone see the value of the resources discovered in the sprint.
Then, work together to:
Identify which materials are ready to use or lightly edit
Spot patterns or gaps in content themes
Align on - and assign - next steps: What to build, adapt, or write from scratch
Use the debrief to build a shortlist of your newly discovered content gems (aka those high-potential assets you can quickly shape into new educational materials).
Don’t Start From Scratch - Just Open the Drawer!
Building impactful customer education doesn’t require you start with a blank slate. Content discovery sprints can help you unlock the potential of the behind-the-scenes resources already working across your organization.
By the end of your sprint, you’ll know what’s usable, what needs updating, and where the real gaps are.
With this clarity, you can move faster: mapping content to learning objectives, filling only the real gaps, and building stronger, consistent, and scalable education initiatives.
It’s a lot like sorting through a junk drawer. At first, it can be overwhelming - but with a little focus, you can find exactly what you need: like an oft-overlooked product shortcut or a key technical specification missing from a product education walkthrough.
Trust me - just like digging into the junk drawer, you’ll know it when you find it!
Not sure where to start? At Echtus, we specialize in helping organizations surface, evaluate, and repurpose existing content into impactful learning programs. Get Expert Help
