You have all heard me ranting and raving about my three decades of work experience. Yesterday, I posted a picture of a hardware debugging tool from 1995, and in an online conversation, one of the people I spoke with said, “That is as old as I am.”
It goes to show that age is just a state of mind. I am desperately trying to convince my hair of this as it decides to turn gray or fall out completely. This is a battle I will fight until the end.
That being said, those thirty years were… educational. It is not exactly that Rutger Hauer moment where my tears are lost in the rain (IYKYK), but it does have some painful learnings in there that are worth sharing.
And sharing is what I am doing. If you have not yet visited my little video repository, you probably should. The bulk of the content there is free, and there are some paid items sprinkled in because hosting content on the internet is not free.
I want to provide helpful materials to first-time managers. There is a huge challenge there. Most of the people who get promoted into first-time managers from IC engineering roles generally get a sidegrade into that role, and many companies treat this as a net-zero pay change. In some cases, moving from a high-end IC to a manager is actually financially a downgrade in base compensation. Not that anyone gets docked pay for the switch, but there is a pay band disparity.
This complicates the cost of hosting these materials a little. Much like almost everything you want to buy in a mobile game, the price is wrong. I have no problem giving reasonable prices to Directors and Vice Presidents on coaching and mentoring, most of them understand that there is a five or six figure upside to them improving their craft, and a couple bags is a worthwhile self-improvement investment if they don’t have the L&D budget. A couple bags, by the way, means two thousand dollars. If you don’t find that valid, then you are totally chopped. I learned this from my kids.
Back to the conundrum.
How do you price educational content for first-time managers? Just like with routinemath.com, I have picked a horrible Initial Customer Profile, with a bunch of baggage around the numbers. Apparently, the thing I am really good at is making products for people who have no idea how to correctly value things.
Back to the central rant. Pricing content for first-time managers is hard, and I probably have it wrong. I would love to open this conversation up to the wisdom of the crowds. I have about ten to fifteen online videos I am building that were the training materials for every manager I ever promoted from an IC, and eventually moved on to DOE or VP. I am figuring that this stuff is worth somewhere between twenty bucks and one hundred bucks for each video of 20 to 100 minutes. Is that wrong? Is that crazy? Is it cheap? Is it steep?
If you are a first-time manager and you are looking for some assistance, let me know if this is crazy or if it makes sense. If you are not a first-time manager, and you know someone who is, send them this rant and the accompanying materials at Leadership Lighthouse. Eventually, this will be fully populated with lots of good stuff. There will be videos. Books. Possibly some interpretive dance.
The goal is to help people out. My kids would also appreciate it if this were not a negative revenue stream. I have a lot of person-years of college to fund for my kids, and this is why I am asking for some help to figure this out.
I enjoy building stuff, and I enjoy helping people professionally. I make more money doing the former, and that is largely due to demand. I am looking for ideas on how to balance these two activities. Especially since there are very confusing perspectives on value for a first-time manager.
I would love your thoughts, please and thank you. This is a one-year chicken-and-egg experiment, and at the end of it, I do not want the conclusion to be “fuck it, I am going to eat them both.”
Thank you for reading along, and I apologize for the weeklong gap. I was replacing a dying computer, and that impacted my ability to put up some kind of “see you next week” thing. I will have no excuses going forward.
