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Planning Your Course

TL;DR; Don't start by opening PowerPoint. Start by answering four questions: who is this for, what should they be able to do afterwards, what's the shortest path to get them there, and how will you know if it worked. Write the answers down. Then open PowerPoint.

Most bad courses fail at the planning stage, not the production stage. The ideas in the previous chapters — short, specific, respect the learner's time — only pay off if you decide what you're actually making before you start making it.

This page walks through a lightweight planning process. The masterclass has a much more thorough version; this is the 80/20.

Question 1: Who is this for?

Name the specific audience. Not "engineers" or "new hires" — which engineers, at what level, with what existing knowledge?

Write one or two sentences describing the person you're making this for:

"This course is for a new backend engineer on the Payments team who has at least one year of Python experience but has never worked with our internal transaction framework."

This is not a marketing persona. It's a cheat sheet you'll reference every time you make a decision about depth, tone, jargon, and what to cut. When in doubt later, re-read it.

A common mistake: making one course for "everyone." Everyone doesn't exist. A course for everyone is a course optimized for no one. If you have two genuinely different audiences, make two courses.

Question 2: What should the learner be able to do afterwards?

Not "understand" or "be familiar with" — do. Concrete, testable, real-world actions.

Bad:

"Understand how our payment system works."

Better:

"Submit their first payment integration PR without asking anyone for help on the basic wiring."

Notice the difference. The second one is testable: either the PR gets submitted or it doesn't. The first one is vague — every learner would claim they understand it at some level, and you'd have no way to check.

Write down one to three concrete things the learner should be able to do. If you can't name any, you don't have a course yet, you have a topic. Go back until you have a real answer.

Question 3: What's the shortest path to get them there?

Now — and only now — start thinking about content. Given the audience and the desired outcome, what's the minimum you can teach?

Here's the trick: you're not making a reference manual. You're making a training course. The goal is not to cover the topic comprehensively; the goal is to get the learner from where they are to where you need them to be, using as little of their time as possible.

Ask:

  • What does the audience already know? Don't teach them that.
  • What could they easily look up? Don't teach them that — reference it, but don't spend course time on it.
  • What do they need to deeply understand to do the job? This is your content.

The result is usually a surprisingly short list. Good. A short course that covers the essential things is dramatically more useful than a long course that covers everything.

Question 4: How will you know if it worked?

This is the question most course designers skip, and it's the most important one.

Before you build the course, decide how you'll measure whether it's actually helping people. A few options:

  • Direct observation. "After this course rolls out, new hires on the Payments team should be submitting their first PR within two weeks instead of five." If that number doesn't move, the course didn't work.
  • Reduced support load. "The senior engineers should be answering fewer questions about X." If they're answering just as many, the course didn't work.
  • Quick feedback survey. "After watching, can the learner describe the three key concepts in their own words?" Not a perfect measure, but better than nothing.

Don't skip this. If you can't articulate how you'll know the course worked, you're building it for you, not for the learner.

Outline before you produce

Once you've answered the four questions, sketch an outline. A typical Lupo course outline looks like this:

Section 1: Why this matters (1 video, 3 min)
  - The problem we're solving
  - What you'll be able to do by the end

Section 2: The core concepts (3 videos, 5 min each)
  - Concept A
  - Concept B
  - Concept C

Section 3: Applying it (2 videos + 1 exercise, 10 min total)
  - Walk through a real example
  - An exercise they do themselves

Three sections, six activities, about 30 minutes total. That's a small, tight course. Aim for this shape, not for an hour-plus module.

Write the outline in plain text first. Don't touch PowerPoint until the outline feels right. It's way cheaper to throw away an outline than to throw away a deck.

When to build vs. when to skip

Once the outline is drafted, do a sanity check: do you actually need a course here, or is a knowledge base article enough?

Build a course when:

  • The content is structured and has an order.
  • You need to track who completed it.
  • It's aimed at a specific cohort.

Skip the course and build a knowledge base article or short video instead when:

  • The content is reference material people look up on demand.
  • You don't care who reads it.
  • It doesn't have a natural beginning or end.

Most knowledge you want to capture is actually the second kind. Don't make a course out of something that should be a library item.

Where to go next

  • Writing Scripts That Teach — once you have an outline, how do you write narration that actually works?
  • Go Deeper — the full masterclass spends several chapters on course planning, with real examples.