How to egghead

egghead content strategy

egghead’s core purpose is to provide professionals practical, focused lessons to increase their knowledge and solve immediate problems.

We want our members to feel confident in their ability to solve problems. We’re trying to build better professionals, not just professionals with more skills.

We are practitioners ourselves.

  • We understand the kinds of problems our members are solving.
  • Our lessons are practical and immediately useful.
  • Learn by watching experts “do”

We break abstract concepts down into reasonably small concrete steps.

  • Presenting lessons as small, concrete steps makes it easier for members to take the time to really understand each facet of a skill before they move onto the next step.
  • Smaller lessons are more likely to be reusable and reapplied to different problems.
  • Quick lessons and courses fit into a regular workday and inside urgent deadlines.

We provide multiple approaches to a single issue.

  • We know that different brains work differently, and looking at the same problem through multiple angles helps everyone learn better.
  • Our content library is strongest when our instructors represent a wide variety of perspectives and experiences.

Our content is current and up-to-date.

  • Members can trust that courses on the site represent skills they’re likely to need in their work.
  • Older lessons are clearly marked so members can always find the latest version. Rather than relying on a single data point (like publish date or version number), real people will do the work of determining when content is no longer current.

Future Pursuits

Learning Paths

There’s a strong desire from existing members to have more formal curriculums to follow. Making decisions is hard, and these learning paths will help members pick up new skills and understanding without requiring them to identify every individual topic they want to learn.

  • Learning paths are a meta-organizer that will allow the creation of comprehensive (or deep-dives) into a topic. Paths will be made up of existing courses and lessons, not all necessarily by the same instructor.
  • Because paths are intended to help people advance without the cognitive burden of making specific decisions, the meta-content around paths – introductory explanations, who will find this curriculum useful, how to choose between paths that seem similar – needs to be clear, strong, and consistent across all paths.

Bridging the Instructor/Member Divide

The process of teaching someone else a skill is one of the best ways to cement knowledge in our minds. We will encourage more members to become instructors, and help people gain confidence and skills through teaching. To that end:

  • The instructor materials will be integrated into the regular egghead experience, with guidelines presented as egghead courses and lessons.
  • We’ll use existing features like Courses and Learning Paths to keep the instructor content lightly segregated from the rest of the lessons.
  • We’ll conduct user research on who the most likely members are to make the leap to instruction, and decide who in particular we want to encourage.
  • We’ll create user journeys and stories that present a clear path towards instructorship and use design and UX to prioritize helping members move forward on that path.
  • We’ll create content that helps members understand the benefits of becoming an instructor.

We want members to feel that becoming an instructor is an achievable goal, and that egghead has the resources to help them reach that goal.

Amplifying Underrepresented Voices

We prioritize the creation and fostering of a diverse community of instructors and members. To further these efforts we will:

  • Bring people from underrepresented groups into our leadership team
  • Not just encourage, but actively recruit, underrepresented people as instructors
  • Focus marketing and sponsorship efforts on underrepresented groups
  • Offer and publicize scholarships for egghead membership
  • As we build out our community, follow progressive stack methodology to move underrepresented voices to the front of the line/waitlist

We want members of underrepresented groups to feel safe and protected in our community, and for all egghead members to benefit from the increased range and experience of diverse instructor voices.

Play to Members’ Inner Lives

Most egghead members are spending their time on the site steeped in fear – fear of irrelevance, of losing touch with the latest developments, of not being clever enough to understand how to solve the problem they’re currently wrestling with. We understand that fear and will prioritize creating a service and community that helps to assuage it.

  • We’ll create guidelines around the kinds of words and messages we want instructors to use and avoid in their lessons and descriptions. The goal of these guidelines isn’t to police instructors’ speech, but rather to educate them and help them be aware of some of the insidious and unhelpful messages many of us have internalized.
  • We’ll examine all our interface labels and marketing text to make sure we’re not inadvertently sending discouraging messages.

We want members to think of us warmly – not just as helpful, but as friendly and encouraging. We want members to succeed, and we want them to know that we believe they can.