A course built to get developers to their first deploy
The cloud platform sold to people who already knew what a container was. That audience was small. The bigger one was developers who were afraid of it — so I built the thing that teaches them.
Product owner, answering to the CEO for the business case, the priorities and the launch — not just the design. Three personas, their real fears, and a map of who was already serving them decided what we built.
No video, no lectures. A stepper: 45 minutes of doing, one minute per step, ending with the user's own service live on a public URL. Every step promises a result before it explains a concept.
Users had to register twice — once for the course, once for the cloud. Mapping barriers and a metric per stage made that visible as the biggest drop in the funnel, and it got merged into one.
Two courses in eight months, ten people through the pilot, then no full launch. If I ran it again I'd test willingness to pay before building the second course — the format was right, the sequencing wasn't. I'd still make the original bet: it was the cheapest channel we had into the audience the platform needed.