What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of The Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot, the only move that matters is your next one. For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com.com.com.com.
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Hello friends coming at you today with another solo episode. I think you're gonna have a lot of fun with this one because it came about in a really organic way. I'm gonna teach you how to rapidly prototype a course so that you don't design behind the scenes and make something impactful and expensive that people don't actually use, need, want, or find helpful or that we get out of date very quickly. Now, so much of what I do in my business honors agile software development principles.
I grew up in Silicon Valley. I've always loved tech tools, systems, and automation. And particularly starting at Google in 2006 on the AdWords product training team, I started learning a lot about not only adult learning theory, training, and development, but also how to create and launch global courses in a company that really valued the mantra at launch and iterate and be scrappy. So things are of course, different at Google right now.
At that time, there were 6000 employees. Now Google is much more mature as a company. It's 20 years old. They have over 100,000 employees and they have many more systems and procedures and even branding teams and marketing teams to help make things look beautiful.
But what I loved about those early days of being scrappy was that Google in particular did not prize working diligently behind the scenes and only releasing things when they were perfect. They didn't do this in their core products, even Gmail. If any of you remember the earliest days of Gmail, you had to get an invitation and it had all kinds of bugs in it, but they like releasing things to the public, getting feedback, and then iterating from there. Even internally, Google would release products that were not nearly done and say, we like to eat our own dog food.
That meant if we're cooking it, if we're making these products, we need to try them and use them internally. So very early on, Google internally switched to docs and sheets. These weren't even called docs and sheets at that time. That's really a public facing name.
They had these fun internal project names that of course I won't say here because I don't know if they're public. But it was this goal of we got to use our own stuff and then see how it's going. One of my mentors, mentors, you just recently heard him back on the podcast, John Jance. He says, be a product of your own product.
The same can be said for courses and development. You're going to see a range of stuff online as courses go global. We have major universities releasing courses where they is mostly video of professors who are lecturing at the physical location of that university. We see tons of online courses and online course marketplaces.
There's even the Uber Fancy High End Masterclass talk about branding and getting a list of celebrities so that you are learning from the best of the best. You're learning acting from Steve Martin. You're learning cooking techniques from Thomas Keller, leadership and creativity from Anna Winthur, the art of storytelling from Neil Gaiman. These are the high, high end of courses.
Now, I run into a lot of people as I do coaching with solopreneurs and eat it today in my business. I work with very large companies to this day. I run the gamut. There's courses I produce like Heart of Podcasting, Heart of Publishing.
Both of those are five day courses that ran live at one point and I developed in a very agile manner. And then I'll work on certain pivot programs that are being rolled out in large scale in global companies where I do need to keep refining and raising the quality in the brand over time. So where should you fall? Now, I'll tell you why this lesson actually came up, which is in its own meta agile sort of way.
But first, what does it mean to be agile? So I want to read you from the manifesto for agile software development. And I'm going to put links to all of this in the show notes. So you can just head over to pivot method dot com slash rapid if you want to get the full show notes from this podcast.
And then the full notes for rapid prototyping a course are at pivot method dot com slash rapid prototype. Now, let's get into the manifesto for agile software development. For what I can tell my copyright, they posted this in 2001, but these principles have been around for a long time, probably much earlier, even than that. They say, we are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work, we have come to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration, over contract negotiation, responding to change, over following a plan. That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. This is at agilemanifesto.org. If you've read pivot, you know that I live my life and run my business by one of the agile development sayings, which is each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it.
You can't imagine this is one of the biggest tools for systems thinking. And it has shaped me and how I run my business and how I think about my life and just we're operating with ease and joy. That one sentence has been one that I live by, not the only one that I live by. I also live by let it be easy, let it be fun.
There are two totally different things, but it has helped me so much. So I'm a big fan. Agile is in my heart. I just buy into it so much, and that's why working at Google was so interesting and such a fit because it fits how I like to work.
I'm a starter. I'm an initiator. I like the ideas less than the long-term toil and branding and sort of perfectionism. And if you've read pivot, you can also understand why I love the agilemanifesto because it's all about being adaptable to change and being very flexible.
So it's a way of doing business and developing courses and developing products that is so much more in the moment and flexible because as I say in my bio, if change is the only constant, we've got to get better at it. So how do we do that in terms of our work as well? Now there are also 12 principles behind the agile manifesto and I'll read you a few of them. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Listen to that early and continuous delivery. We're going to come back to that when we get into a rapid course prototyping. We welcome changing requirements evenly in development. Can you imagine how many people would be developing software and be like angry that the client wants changes later on?
Well, as they write, agile processes, harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. So good. Harness change for competitive advantage. Oh, I just love that and welcoming change rather than resisting it.
I'm just going to go ahead and read you all 12 because these are so good. Deliver working software frequently from a couple of weeks to a couple of months with a preference to the shorter time scale. You'll know from pivot, I don't even recommend trying to set goals farther than one year out. If you have them, that's great.
I'm not going to stop anybody from doing that. We're, you know, maybe in the year 2020, you want to look at what do you want to be doing a decade from now? But humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. And I have to say in my own life and business, my actual life has so far exceeded anything I could have dreamed or imagined 10 years ago that I really more live by surrender.
Honestly, just surrender, serendipity and surprise. Those are three of my values and my principles over specific goals that aing metrics targets, even smart goals. Look at the word goal just doesn't really resonate with me anymore. Their next principal business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals, give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Now, if you've heard some of my previous pivot podcasts, you'll know that I like talking on the phone instead of a video or even in person just because I like roaming around pacing and I'm more introverted. So like, I don't prefer always to be face-to-face.
I love my own time and sort of burrowing away my office. Working software is a primary measure of progress. Let's expand that. So of course, not most of you listening aren't software developers.
Working software is a primary measure of progress. Does the thing you're building work? Is it functional? So don't measure your progress necessarily on how it looks or even future sales.
Measure it on this. Does it work? Does your product or your course even get results for people? We're almost to the end.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. Yes. Oh my goodness. Read.
It doesn't have to be crazy at work. Those guys talk about building a calm company. So here, agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
I love this. Now, of course, authors like Tony Schwartz, the powerful engagement, that was a game changing book for me early on. He'll talk about sprints and recovery. He says we're not machines.
We cannot maintain a constant pace indefinitely. But if you're working in a calm way with ease and joy, then if you can at least aim for sustainable development, there will always be more to do. So if you're going to be stressed and overwhelmed and tired and burned out, it's not good for anybody. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
So look, they're not ignoring excellence or good design, but they're not saying impeccable, perfect design. Let me say that. Last three, simplicity. The art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.
Let me read that again. Simplicity. The art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential. Less is more.
What can you drop? Of course, what can you delegate? What can you automate? But more so, what can you drop that nobody needs to do?
What are the crucial features of your course or product? And what can you save for the next time or let go that actually your students or your participants aren't going to need? The best architectures, requirements and designs are from self-organizing teams. We can talk about that on another show.
Self-organizing teams is a very fascinating concept. It's much more about everybody's internal motivation than any top-down leadership. And the last one at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective. Then tunes and adjusts as behavior accordingly.
So think about AI, self-learning machines that they learn by their mistakes or they get smarter and better and faster over time. You can learn how to learn. It's a meta skill that Tim Barris talks about a lot. So part of agile development and anything that you do is also about constantly learning and we're going to talk about built-in learning techniques.
How can you be constantly listening and learning from your audience, your students, and the people that you're serving? Now, let's get into how to rapidly prototype. Of course, the funny story that I mentioned earlier about how this came up, Marisol was helping me do this next, a 30-day systems quick start for new momentum members. It was part of this most recent launch.
It's one of my favorite new things that we created for Momentum. So one of the lessons in do this next was on rapid prototyping. Of course, one of almost 40 lessons, even though it's 30 days. And Marisol is also helping with a course at NYU on Brand Strategy.
Shout out to Adam Sholinti, who's the professor. And I will be guest lecturing at NYU on a class on pivot. So the students were talking about creating a course and Marisol remembered we had this lesson in do this next, which by the way, I developed in an agile manner. So you'll hear more about that.
But she asked me, hey, can we share this one lesson with students? I asked her to throw it into a Google doc. Let's just give it a once over because I develop it very quickly. Let's give it a once over, make any tweaks, and we'll share that Google Doc with students.
So she and I got on the phone. We were talking about other things, but we also saved 15 minutes at the end, where we were both in the Google Doc just live editing and grabbing links and resources at the same time. Within 15 minutes, we had this Google Doc just about ready to go. And it has the pivot logo at the top and just the attribution, my name, the website.
And then I realized, wait, why are we going to share the Google Doc with them? Let's just throw this up on a webpage at pivotmethit.com. And then not only can the students benefit, but anyone else who lands, I have a whole section on pivot of examples of pivot in the classroom, pivotmethit.com slash classroom. So I thought, here's an example of being able to create assets in your business or even if you have a side hustle or any project, even if this is an internal situation, you work within a larger company, how can you take a private request and email or reply and then just go ahead and make it public.
There's nothing super secretive about this material and then throw up a link. And that way, yes, you're still answering the question, but you've also now simultaneously created an asset that more people can access. So instead of showing that Google Doc with the students, we created a page at pivotmethit.com slash rapid prototype. And you know, I'll put it in the show notes.
So that's a fun story of how this page came to be. And then in through sort of thinking, well, what can we even do more with this? Because I do think this is really good material. And it is unique, not just to me.
There are many people online who talk about rapid prototyping, even if they don't use this exact language. Jeff Walker has some material on this in terms of launches. If I figured it would be helpful to also do a podcast on this. And I think it can benefit so much of what you're doing.
It doesn't matter. You don't have to be a solopreneur, a side hustler, any creative project, any project you're working on. If you work within a larger company, I think these principles can really go a long way. So let's get into it.
Let's talk about how to rapidly prototype a course without investing a huge amounts of time or money. Because we certainly see platforms like MasterClass, where they can cause tens of thousands of dollars to produce with professional video editing and branding, but they don't have to. And you know, that's held me back in the past thinking, even the idea that I need to set up a video shoot and do hair and makeup and have the lighting just so that causes paralysis for me. It's not in my zone of genius.
It's not something I necessarily enjoy. And I've had courses where I spent a lot of effort on the videos, only to have them become out of date. Or it's out of date just because I grow. I'm older.
My hair looks different. I look different. My thinking is different. So it's a lot of work to go back and maintain courses that have that much production in them upfront, unless you're super careful about making them evergreen or timeless.
We're going to talk about four sections. And some of what I say might you might have to tweak a little bit to fit your exact situation. Maybe you're launching something internally. You're not launching to the public, but you'll get the idea.
So stage one we'll talk about is pre-course, initial design and vision. Then we'll talk about before enrollment during the course, post course, and a few final thoughts. Of course, you can access all of this at pivot method dot com slash rapid prototype. And again, the show notes with even the agile business or sorry, the agile manifesto, there's a whole different school of thought around agile business, specifically, you can get those show notes at pivot method dot com slash rapid.
All right. So let's dive in pre-course initial design and vision. Again, this is how I've done hard of podcasting, hard of publishing, and the pivot to profit course that's in momentum. So even though that last one's not public, I'm following the exact same principles on purpose.
Even though it was part of a big launch, I didn't want to have the whole course pre-created and ready and you're going to hear why. So pre-course, survey your audience to find out what their biggest challenges and goals are. You might want to update the survey settings to send each participant a copy of their responses. That way they can benchmark and even celebrate progress when they take the post course survey.
I use type form. I love it. And it's just really beautiful user friendly. You can create even a type form bot.
You can see an example of the type form bot at pivot method dot com slash survey. That one you won't get a copy of your responses, but whenever I'm doing a course, I do make sure because the survey is also a learning tool. It can create initial sparks for what each participant of what their biggest challenges are and what support for them would be most helpful. Maybe they haven't thought about those specific questions in the way you've posed them.
So the pre-survey itself can create learning. Now, of course, you're going to come to this thing that you want to teach with your own expertise and philosophy and your thought leadership about how to create the transformation that you want to create in your students. So none of this takes away from the fact that you are going to match the learning and listening that you're doing with your unique thought leadership and recommendation and framework. So otherwise, why would you be teaching the course if you don't actually have value to add, then you're more of a facilitator.
You're not necessarily the one who has an actual philosophy, a perspective that you want to teach with the help of the survey. Now, I also recommend, of course, in companies, there's often an annual employee feedback survey. But if you run your own business, why not do an annual survey saying what's the biggest challenge? Well, how can I be most helpful in your head?
If you go to pimpantmethod.com slash survey, you're going to see that that's what I ask and it just lives on my website so that I can always be listening. A B L always be listening. And I don't push it. I don't talk about that survey all the time, but it's there if you stumble upon it or you hear this episode and you want to help me out to help you out, then tell me your thoughts.
Surveys can go beyond demographics like age and location and can also cover psychographics. So psychographics are around, how does this group fake? What values are important to them? What are their biggest challenges?
Where else do they hang out online? Think about the company Apple. The psychographic of an Apple user is kind of a technique. They're the creatives, they live on the edges.
There's like the weird factor. You of course, there's an iconic Apple commercial. And I'm forgetting exactly how it starts. I know there are people who have it memorized down to the last word, but that's a psychographic.
Even within generations, there could be a psychographic of millennials or a psychographic among certain types of millennials or gen ziers. Then after you have your survey, and by the way, this is really beneficial for writing a book as well. You want to identify the no field, do and resources to create your outline. So what do you want participants to know upon completing your course?
How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? And what resources do you want them to check out? Shout out to Alexander Franzen, who's one of my favorite writers and thinkers.
She's the one that first told me about the No Field Do framework back in 2013. And it fits with a lot of adult learning principles too. But you got to think about where you try to take people. So I added resources to the end because I can't help myself.
I always love throwing in links, resources, books, podcasts, templates. So whenever I'm going to do a course or a book for the entire course or the entire book, I write down. I actually take a pen and paper. I do this analog.
Although we are going to give you a digital template in a Google sheet if you want to do it that way. What do you want people to know? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do?
And what are the core resources that you would recommend? Then your course will likely have three or four major sections that help you get to that point. So for example, in the podcasting course, what I want them to know, well, the landscape, the technical elements of getting started, interviewing best practices and powerful presence, and then systems. How should you prepare?
How do you actually stay sane while adding a podcast to your workflow? And then day five was a Q&A. So then within each of those five five sections, I'm going to do No Field Do. So within technical elements of podcasting, what I want them to know?
Okay, the basics. How to get started? What equipment do you need? What software?
How do I want them to feel less overwhelmed? Less like it's a black box. Feel empowered. Feel excited.
Feel ready to try and eager to learn. What do I want them to do? Get their first mic if they don't already have one fancy mic quote quote. And they can even do something like choose their intro out.
Pro music resource would be some links to Amazon products and then doesn't have to be on Amazon, of course. And also like Pond5. That's where I got my intro and outro music for pivot. And then within each of those major sections of the course, each lesson you can do No Field Do and Resources.
So I give you an example of a very short course five days, hard of podcasting. But if you're doing a book that has four chapters within each of the major parts like pivot, you're going to want to do No Field Do for that specific chapter so that you deliver the information in the most helpful way at every single point along the process. Next step, create a content delivery schedule for your course. So hard of podcasting, I mentioned it's a five day.
It was live at the first time you ran it. Now you're buying the bundle for days of content, one day of Q&A and a ton of tools and templates. Last in this section, you'll identify course delivery software or program and complimentary applications. So it just depends.
Are you delivering this in person? Is this going to be online? Are you going to use Zoom? So they're going to be on video.
Are these going to be prerecorded calls? There are so many ways you could do this. I have two courses on LinkedIn Learning, one called figuring out your next move. And the next is called Holding One on One Conversations with your team.
That one's for managers. And it's brand new in case anybody want to check it out. But LinkedIn Learning does actual fancy video shoot with green screen and fancy post processing and then it's hosted on LinkedIn Learning's platform. So that's very different than Toshu Silver, another author and teacher that I know who records, uh, records, audios.
She really records calls. Maybe she has an eight week course. It's eight audio calls and some Q&A's and that actually became her latest book. She did a course called It's Not Your Money and it became her newest book.
It's Not Your Money, which is a great read. I also loved her first book, Outrageous Openness of Viral Sensation. But Toshu is a great example of there are no bells and whistles. There are not even visuals.
There's not even handouts. I mean, I think maybe later they added handouts and of course, the book has a lot of reflection questions, but she just gets to the heart of it and gets to the meat of the course itself. And I really resonate with that. I'm not someone I don't really need a course to look good.
I just need it to be extremely helpful, practical, useful, and ideally give me new moments. I always, if I'm going to pay for a course, I just make a point to say, all right, great. I'm going to use this material and try and double my earnings or if I read a book, the book is worth it. If I have one takeaway or one a moment, then it is worth the purchase price of that book, which by the way, books are just like books are the best.
You are getting a person's entire career or life, practically summed up for a couple cups of coffee. You know, it's like, as if you get to take that person, that expert out and you can learn so much. I love books. Okay.
That's a tangent, but all this works for book writing too. Let's move on to the next big section before enrollment. Create the course overview page and set the dates of the course will run live. I do recommend a live version to start so you can build a course with direct feedback from your students.
Then you will know exactly how to revise it if you're going to make a fancier version later on. Then this is a key step. Create an onboarding survey that people take upon signing up for the course. Be sure to include some high level questions.
Then one question for each day or module of the course. So ideal outcomes and or biggest sticking points on those specific topics. So for example, and you'll see it in the notes of this rapid prototyping page. Now on the website, I'm actually sharing the onboarding survey that we created for hard of podcasting.
So you can check it out. I created questions that ask about what questions do you have about technical setup? What questions do you have about systems or what challenges do you face when it comes to preparing for your interviews. I asked my students directly.
I had not built the course yet. There was nothing built. I just knew what the framework was. I knew what I wanted to teach and I knew what the no field deal with the ideal outcomes or the transformation in my students would be by the end of the course.
And this is five days. Can you get someone from zero to podcast in five days? I'm very happy to say yes, because I still get feedback to this day where people say, Oh my gosh, it was so helpful. And I've seen two, three, four, five podcast launched in that time.
I'll give shout outs to velocity work with Melissa, talk burnout with Kevin Tracy, who's a momentum is running for local office in her community and started a podcast for her political career. I'm not a campaign. I mean, how cool is that? So, and there's so many more that just aren't even coming to my mind right at the top of my head, but it did work.
And part of the reason that it worked is I didn't create any material until those students enrolled and then they took the survey. So I knew exactly what to teach. So that survey really helps me tailor the discussion, the resources, create new handouts because sometimes you're going to anticipate what questions and challenges people have. But sometimes you won't.
So then that allowed me to finish ideating around, well, what else can I create? What else can I share? What do I need to find? What other experts do I need to pull in so that I give these students who are now here and going to be with me for the next five days, give them exactly what they need.
And as I don't even have to tell you, this creates such a better experience for your learners too, because instead of your learners showing up and you thinking, well, I hope whatever I built six months ago works for them. You're actually delivering to them exactly what they need based on their unique challenges, interests and ideal outcomes from the course. I also like doing this pre survey based on the course outline because it allows you to pre populate the Q and A sections of each module of the course with exactly what people want to know. So they didn't have to resubmit their questions.
I already knew for every Q and A section. I already had five to 10 questions. And then based on everything we covered, they could ask follow ups. The next major section is during the course.
Whoo, the fun part. You are actually delivering this. If it's a live course, you have live students, whether they are on the phone on video on zoom or in person. If you can, I highly recommend recording each day.
And if you can, try to keep your lessons as evergreen as possible. What does that mean? Try not to mention the day month, year, season, or what's in the news on that specific day. Like, Happy Halloween, everyone.
It's, it's October 31st. That's just going to make it a little awkward. If you package the course, the recordings and someone's watching six months later, it's just, it's just unnecessarily awkward. You don't need to say that unless it's relevant to the course and try to keep your stories and examples relevant, even if someone we're watching a year from now, or at least as relevant as possible.
So a mistake that I've made in the past is I'll say, I am two years in to running my own business. Well, what if someone watches a year from now, that's just no longer true. So I switched my language to say, I started running my own business full time in 2011. That's not going to go out of date.
Software screenshots are real tricky. I cannot say I recommend it. I don't know how people do it if they teach things like Facebook marketing or LinkedIn or as soon as that software changes, you have to redo all the video. That just sounds so challenging.
So, but some of you may be doing courses where you do want to show software. Just got to know, make a note to yourself of what you might need to go back in and edit. Establish systems for participant support. How we answer questions and troubleshoot technical difficulties throughout the course.
You might even consider thinking through these questions in advance and creating an FAQ that lives within the course materials. Set up communication systems that will let your participants know where to find course materials, how to participate in the course live, and how they can participate if they're unable to participate live. I guarantee you will get questions whether you're doing this live or over the phone of people saying, well, what if I have to miss even when I do trainings within companies? What if I have to miss the first hour?
Oh, I'm going to have to leave an hour early or if it's an online course. What if I can't make day two? So just think this through in advance. One, can they still participate?
Can they still take the course? For example, when I do pivot train the trainer in companies who want to roll out pivot globally and they want to anoint pivot trainers and experts within their organization, if somebody's going to miss one out of two days, that's just not going to work unless they're not actually going to be a fully ramped up trainer. So if it's someone from HR who might want to shadow, okay, fine, they can come to one of two days, but if they're trying to be a facilitator, you kind of got to be there for both. Otherwise, I would say, why don't you wait till the next round.
So anticipate stuff like that. And I always like to just be over communicative in the beginning. If it's true that they don't, sometimes they'll say, listen, you don't have to make any of this live. They will all be recorded.
And this is key. You can submit questions in advance. Nobody wants to feel like just because they can't be there live. They can't have their specific questions answered.
So even within momentum, we do Q&A calls three times a month. And I'm always saying submit your questions in advance. I'm part of a forum or a community where there's weekly Q&A calls and I have maybe been on live two times in five years. I just simply don't need to be there live.
There's no interactivity if you're on live. There's no difference. And so I don't care. I'm not trying to make it live.
And I really, for the most part, don't care if someone attends even a live course. I'm doing live. It's always nice. It's fine.
I love the energy of people being there live, but it's not required. As soon as recordings are complete for each of your lessons, I definitely recommend sending them in for transcription. You can use a service called Temi TMI that offers automated transcription at 10 cents per minute. That's really good.
And of course, they're not perfect, but they're pretty good. Shout out to Brenna who told me about it or Rev.com offers higher quality transcription for a dollar a minute. There are many other services and I know some people who have found freelancers on Fiverr who will do it for 50 cents a minute, but Rev is very reliable. So I use it.
I love it. And guess what? This is a great asset for you and your students. So post the transcription as soon as they're ready.
I like throwing mine in a Google Doc just so that it's central, agile, changeable, editable, throw it in a Google Doc and then I post that in with the recording in the course. And that transcript is now your future script. If you want to rerecord any of the lessons with slightly higher quality, well, boom. You already have a jumping off point to do that.
Our last big section before we get into final thoughts post course. After your course is finished, send a post survey to help you make adjustments and get an idea of next level content that this group might want from you. I almost want to say here, do not pass go without doing a post course survey. I think if you are not willing to do a post course survey, you are just flying blind.
You have no clue how it went. That is not agile because you are not in that spirit of continuous learning and feedback. You can guess you can feel like it went really well. I felt that way with harder podcasting because I just felt the energy and the feedback every day.
But I didn't know what people took away, what they learned, what they wish was a little different, where even next level, what they want to want to more of. Also, you're kind of taking away a learning opportunity from your students. So if you give a post survey, you allow your participants to also benchmark and celebrate their learning. They can even compare it to their pre survey results and reflect and note their progress as they take the post course survey with harder podcasting.
We actually did kind of really mirror the two. Another thing, if you want to collect testimonials to share publicly, you can add a question for this and just ask for explicit permission to share it. I don't like pulling out what someone thinks is a private survey that there's some feedback and then just boom. All of a sudden, created the testimonial on your website.
I don't work like that. I would have a section that says, are you willing to write a few sentences that I can share on the course overview page as a testimonial? And if they say, yes, have a special fill in box for that. And I like to ask how they prefer to be attributed, either anonymously, first name, only first name, last initial or first and last name.
Some people want to have their first and last name. And even I've in the past asked, and do you want me to link to any website for you? So it could be good social duty for them. Like you get to link to whatever they're up to.
You can also encourage participants to join an ongoing community or a next level of working with you once your course is complete and consider how you'll nurture the relationship with your learners moving forward. So even if there's a next more advanced course that you could create for the next step on their transformation journey. So I did hard of podcasting, but I've learned, I've grown even in the time since I did that course. I still think it's great, but what's next?
What's next level podcasting? You can also package your course recordings as we've talked about and adjust the enrollment page and process to reflect that the course has been prerecorded. So I still have a pre and post survey and hard of podcasting, even though it's not being actively used to shape if someone's taking it right now, you will see the recordings, but I'm also taking that in. And if I create updates to the course, then I would post it in the course materials and everyone would have them.
So it gives me that still that information to keep improving the course over time. You could, as we talked about, you could also consider re-recording the course. Now, one thing that I didn't get into in this lesson because it's on rapid prototyping is measurement. When we're talking in a more official LND or learning and development capacity, a lot of companies will want to know how are you measuring the success of this course or learning engagement.
And this just comes from my days at Google. We often used Kirk Patrick's four levels of evaluation. So we'll throw a link in the show notes, but let me just tell you what they are very briefly in case you are on the hook for reporting back in terms of success metrics on your course. So the four levels of evaluation number one, reactions.
Google used to call this the smile sheet. This is even I leave when I'm doing pivot in companies. I leave five minutes at the end oftentimes to have people pull up a quick survey on their phone. And this is just, did you enjoy this course?
What do you recommend it to a colleague? Do you feel equipped to apply the course material moving forward? What did you, what are three specific takeaways that you learned? And then is there anything you would want to know or do differently or change?
I'm not wearing that perfectly, but you get the gist. And then I always like to have an open response, anything else. So that's reactions, just the smile sheet. And a lot of times, you know, we call it a smile sheet because a lot of times, if you do a good job, people are like, wow, I loved it.
That was a great course. Level two in Kirk Patrick Patrick's levels of training evaluation is learning. So not just did they like your course. Someone could say, I like this podcast.
I really liked it. It was fun to listen to. Learn something if I quizzed you on agile and manifesto principles. If I said, does agile value collaboration or contracts?
You could see if you learned anything. There's a little pop quiz for you. So that's often about retention and knowledge. It's what did you learn?
Can you kind of repeat back? And maybe this is the next day or maybe it's a month after you've taken the class. Level three is behavior change. So behavior, not only did you learn something in your head.
So I could ask you, did you learn how to rapidly prototype a course? And you could say, yes, and you might even pass the test. But if you don't actually practice this, you don't actually change your behavior around how you develop your next course or your next book or your next project at work. Then what if we really did?
Then it's okay. Again, you had fun listening. You did learn something, but if you don't do anything differently, it doesn't matter. No, it's not going to resonate with everybody.
Some people are like, no, I want my course to be perfect and beautiful and branded or my book to be perfect before I release anything at all or this podcast. So it just might not resonate. Maybe behavior is not going to apply to you because you just want to reject the whole thing. But ideally, you do something differently.
This goes back to no field. Ideally, you do something differently the next time you're going to develop something and that number four, the fourth level of evaluation and Kirkpatrick's framework is results. So in a business context, this is, did you improve the effectiveness or the efficiency or the engagement of the organization? Or maybe your course is directly related to revenue for the bottom line?
Did you save the organization money or did you help them earn more money? So if you're developing a sales training, you are going to want to measure level four results. Did this training actually help our salespeople close more business? That would be crucial.
Imagine if people loved the class, they learned a lot and they actually changed their behavior and imagine if sales went down, right? You got to know that. So maybe I'm going to teach you this whole method and I don't know. You try, of course, this way or a book and it just completely flops.
Now there could be many factors, but results is a key part of the equation. So in the context of what we're doing here, I would want to know, did you try this? Did this help save you time, effort, money, energy, stress? That's always what I'm eating for.
So I would want to know not sales results from a rapidly prototyped course, but I would want to know. So let's say you listen to this podcast and before going to talk about results, I'd want to say, did this help you build a course faster? Did it help you launch sooner? Did it help you create more transformation in your students because you were actually asking what they needed before you built the whole thing out?
Did this help you go from zero to one? And as I mentioned with harder podcasting, results is that people created podcasts and launched them. Do you know how happy that makes me just makes you just like, oh, I live for that. I live for knowing that something I did was so helpful that it got you from zero to one on a project, a podcast.
Anything in your life, a creative project, that is the most satisfying, rewarding feeling because of all those podcasts, the host is going to be learning so much. Other people are going to benefit just all the way around. It's so exciting to me. So I always love hearing.
And selfishly, you know, you're more than welcome to let me know what results you get from listening to this episode and trying out this method of rapid prototyping. Final thoughts to bring this episode home, build with the end in mind and do not be afraid to create as you go, remove the desire to be perfect or to get it all right up front. That is almost impossible to do. And instead, consider what content is crucial to create or collect prior to your launch.
What content will be created once the course is live, for example, Q&A calls, transcripts, even follow up worksheets or templates that your students request from you. What can you add over time? What bonuses could you offer to students to make things even easier for them after they take your course or as they're going through the material? And what's next for them upon course completion, both personally and in terms of staying connected to you, future courses and your community.
Lastly, how could you turn this rapidly prototyped course into a book or even a larger piece of what I call public original thinking or intellectual property? So maybe like toach to silver, your course becomes a book that you get so much great feedback and you get so much interest and it starts going viral that you decide, you know what, I really can take another look at all this package it up and create it into something like a book. Or even how you run this course again, what improvements would you make the next time that could build on what you've already done. I hope this was helpful.
I know we covered a lot of ground. Maybe this is one that you'll listen to a second or third time. And of course, let me know what you think. I would really love to hear your feedback.
You can check out show notes at pivot method.com slash rapid. You can even take my survey and do me a solid and let me know at pivot method.com slash survey. And if you want this rapid prototyping overview, that's at pivot method.com slash rapid prototype one word. All right, if you made it to the end to this point, you are as my friend Neil Pesserich says, you are in the end of the podcast club.
Thank you so much for being here and for listening this far. I really appreciate it and happy agile development, everybody. Happy agile course creating. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast.
Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for pivot list. A curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm keeping out on. Sign up at pivot method.com slash pivot list. Get shown us from this episode at pivot method.com slash podcast and connect with me on Twitter at Jenny underscore play.
Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always?