The Making of my first LinkedIn Learning Course (pt 1)

Over the past few weeks, I took my first steps to create a course and become an Instructor on LinkedIn Learning!? I wanted to reflect on the process so far, which has truly helped me build empathy in making products for instructors and for our internal teams who jump through hoops - sometimes flaming hoops - to plan, produce and publish an incredible number of professional courses that help millions of people grow in their careers and lives.?

Note: The video I’m sharing here is a "just for fun", short compilation of? the remote studio filming of my first LinkedIn Learning course - most notably, the setup and breakdown of the physical studio. ?

When I joined the LinkedIn Learning product management team in 2021, I recognized that I didn't have a deep, current understanding of what it's really like to be an Instructor. I felt I would be better equipped to understand the needs of our Instructor partners if I could stand in their shoes - that's partially what drove me to create a course.

The other thing that drives me is sharing my experiences making products as a Product Manager. I often try to help other PMs and engineers in their careers or entrepreneurial journeys, and find myself excited to share stories about products that I've helped create - and I have discovered some patterns in decision making that felt worth sharing in a story-telling lesson format that perhaps could scale better as a course.

So far, I've completed about seven steps to get through the critical “Recording” step, and past the point of no return. This course is happening :)

• Step 1:? Deciding to DO the course!
• Step 2:? Creating a clear learning goal and OUTLINE of the course
• Step 3:? Getting approval from our Learning team that this is a worthwhile course
• Step 4:? Writing the SCRIPTS (and re-writing, and getting help, etc)
• Step 5:? Receiving and setting up the equipment for my temporary Remote Studio
• Step 6:? Recording!
• Step 7:? Breaking down the studio and sending it all back…

This "Remote Live Action" approach to filming a course became a significant part of our production operation due to Covid. The huge studios operated by our LI Learning team (led by @fiona) have been closed for most activities for more than 2 years . While we're hoping to open the Studios back up soon (fingers crossed!!) I didn't want to wait, and I thought the experience of setting up my own temporary studio would also be a great way to understand the work put in by so many of our amazing instructors - and our incredible LinkedIn Learning production teams - over the past two years.

The members of the LinkedIn Learning team that made this all happen are individually highly skilled experts in their respective fields, and as a team, a highly-collaborative, energetic, optimistic family who made me feel good about our journey ahead within minutes of joining our day 1 remote production session. The whole thing, afterall, was done REMOTELY - with them all doing their best to make an effective studio production environment without ever being physically present! I was the only in-studio technician (ha!) who could unbox and set up all the equipment, make all the connections, adjust the lights, camera, tripods, microphones, powder my shiny nose and make wardrobe changes.?

This amazing team teaching me how to do everything include: Becky Davis: Camera, Media and Teleprompter; Jeff Carter: Director; Lauren Habib: Producer; Nathalie Rodriguez: Lighting; Lianna Squillace: Audio; Scott Fegette: Content Strategist who got the whole thing rolling to this point

HUGE Gratitude to this team for all their patience, focus, positivity and help!!

Now I look forward to the next steps in the process - like editing, graphics, audio editing, quality assurance reviews, compression/staging, and of course, publishing the course!

About The Course:

The course is expected to be titled "Making (Brave) Product Decisions" - subtitled: "Killing the Save Button" - where I share stories about making products - mostly at Google from 2005 to 2019 - when I initiated and led the product development of many Google products, such as Sheets, Docs, Slides, Drive, Forms, Classroom, Jamboard and others.

In hindsight, some of the decisions we made in making products, turned out to be very directional - not just for our products but for many web products - and there are some lessons and abstractions in those decisions that perhaps could help others in their decisions Making Products.

A while back I did a presentation called "Killing The Save Button" - recounting stories about product decisions, such as, how and why we removed the SAVE action from Google Sheets (and Docs, etc) and turned it into a SHARE action. That became the foundation of this course,

Up Next…

I’ll try to continue sharing this course creation journey - and find more consistent ways to share my stories and experiences of making products in the hope that others can relate these learnings to their own product management and entrepreneurial journeys!