The strategy & ideation stages of digital product-building are breezy. Thatās where you can let the ideas and planning have free reign. Untethered from reality and unworried about the actual implementation or delivery...
Well, time to spoil the party. In this workspace, weāre going to begin giving our online course, ebook or digital product some real shape. The good news is, by this stage we should already have:
(If not, you can always keep planning those as you consider and get stuck into your digital product outline.)
It may not be enough to go out and build an entire product right away, but itās enough to work with while we sketch out a shape for how we intend to deliver this product.
Outlining an online course or digital product is about understanding:Ā 1) the key content to include; 2)Ā the flow of information delivered; and 3)Ā the mode(s) of delivery you want to adopt.
Let's begin with the meat of your product: content.
If you're building along in the Digital Product Lab, you will by now have already filled out the Best Content List. This is simply a table to help you reflect on the content that's already working for you--and resonating with your audience.
We start with content that we know is performing because this is how we can confidently respond to our audience's needs. If they're telling us they want more SEO backlinking content, then it might not be a bad idea to structure our digital product or online course around backlinking (or at least to include a section on it).
Reflect on your analytics data to find the key topics that are performing well with your audience, then try to shortlist 3-4 topics that could be the main pillars of your online course.
From there, you'll be in a better position to break these 'pillar' topics into smaller lessons and sub-topics.
The next piece is to consider the flow of information. Supposing you have your pillar topics and content ideas, it's also important to consider the order in which you'd like to deliver this to your audience.
As well as 'subjects' or 'lessons', now is a good time to start thinking about other elements of the course you want to introduce. Features like:
If any of these feature ideas are swimming around in your head, then now's a good time to consider the flow of those interventions.
Will you, for example, follow up each lesson with an exercise and a quiz? When would be the best time to run a Q&A--perhaps after a particularly tricky subject, or just regularly, once per week?
You can use the Product Outline gallery to move cards around, experiment with new features introduced in between and simply experiment with different structures for your final course or product.
The final piece for planning out your online course is to consider the mode of delivery.
Will this be a video-intensive course that students can watch along to at their own pace?
Will it be run in cohorts--introducing a real-time element +Ā accountability to the online course experience?
Will you host it on your own website, or share it through a platform like Skillshare or Udemy?
Spending some time with each of these questions, now, will help you structure your course or product in a way that's compatible with future delivery. If you do opt for sharing via Skillshare, for example, then there will be formatting requirements that will either help or hurt the actual structure and flow of your course.
As youāll see in the default Product Outline gallery, there are some placeholder āTopicsā littered with a few other Features from our Features tableāsuch as an Introductory Quiz, an Exercise and a Discussion Prompt.
While youāre building out your Product Outline, donāt forget to leverage aspects of work youāve already done, including:
How do you outline an online course?
While building out your Product Outline, try to avoid Feature creep. There is a space you can use to help manage this, in the āReleasesā section of your Roadmap.
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