Get out of Your Head and Start with Your Users with Janelle Allen

egghead.io developer chats

Teaching provides a learner with more information, but the information isn't the only thing that is required to teach effectively. Doing is almost just as essential as the information itself for the learner to solidify what was taught. Creating an effective learning path is challenging, and we tend to start from what we know and take it from there. Janelle challenges the tendency to start from our knowledge, and instead, we should start from where we want our learners to end up being and work backward from there, this is called Backward Design.

Backward design doesn't just apply to education, it applies directly to software development. As developers, it's essential that we get out of our head and start with the user.

How do you start teaching if you have no one to teach? Janelle says there are three critical components to building your audience, having an email list, providing valuable content, and consistency. If you stay genuine and provide value you'll filter out anyone who doesn't resonate with you and what you offer.

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Transcript

"Get out of Your Head and Start with Your Users - with Janelle Allen" Transcript

Resources

• Badass: Making Users Awesome
• Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

Janelle Allen:

• Twitter

Joel Hooks:

• Twitter
• Website