A Day of Training in NYC
Mar. 25th, 2025 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerNYC Quickie Travelog #4
Midtown Manhattan - Mon, 24 Mar 2025, 5:30pm
Today was a day of training in New York. Seeing as that's the whole point of me traveling across the country and back for a few days I figured I should actually write about it.
"Training day" can conjure notions of information overload or, almost worse, death-by-powerpoint. Maybe even both. I've certainly been subjected to either or both in the past. But this training day was very productive. Part of it was that the trainers were careful not to overwhelm us. And possibly part of is that this training is as much about feedback to the trainers as it is training us.
That gets back to what I noted ahead of this trip: it's training for a tiger team. The company wants us to be the first ramped up on the new product and new approach, and it also wants us to provide feedback to improve the training before it's broadcast to the other 80-90% of the sales team. Thus if the day had been information overload or death by powerpoint, we would have been vocal about that. Instead we got the opportunity to be collaborative about how best to tune the material for wider consumption.
It's interesting to note how this training also is a counterpart to a training day I had 14 months ago. It was about the same product. The company thought it was ready to ramp up sales on it 14 months ago. The result of the training day in Jan 2024 was that we made them aware of the fact the product was Not Ready for Prime Time— an outcome they absolutely were not expecting. Moreover, after they wisely pulled back for a few months to fix things, they later realized they needed to pull back for over a year to get the product truly ready for market. Now we're there. The product's way better. And our goal is to have everyone ramped up on by the end of May.
Midtown Manhattan - Mon, 24 Mar 2025, 5:30pm
Today was a day of training in New York. Seeing as that's the whole point of me traveling across the country and back for a few days I figured I should actually write about it.
"Training day" can conjure notions of information overload or, almost worse, death-by-powerpoint. Maybe even both. I've certainly been subjected to either or both in the past. But this training day was very productive. Part of it was that the trainers were careful not to overwhelm us. And possibly part of is that this training is as much about feedback to the trainers as it is training us.
That gets back to what I noted ahead of this trip: it's training for a tiger team. The company wants us to be the first ramped up on the new product and new approach, and it also wants us to provide feedback to improve the training before it's broadcast to the other 80-90% of the sales team. Thus if the day had been information overload or death by powerpoint, we would have been vocal about that. Instead we got the opportunity to be collaborative about how best to tune the material for wider consumption.
It's interesting to note how this training also is a counterpart to a training day I had 14 months ago. It was about the same product. The company thought it was ready to ramp up sales on it 14 months ago. The result of the training day in Jan 2024 was that we made them aware of the fact the product was Not Ready for Prime Time— an outcome they absolutely were not expecting. Moreover, after they wisely pulled back for a few months to fix things, they later realized they needed to pull back for over a year to get the product truly ready for market. Now we're there. The product's way better. And our goal is to have everyone ramped up on by the end of May.
