In this conversational interview, Christopher Parsons argues that architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms should treat their learning experiences—courses, training modules, and onboarding content—as products. He highlights a common mistake in product development: building ideas without market validation or strategic alignment. To avoid this, Parsons proposes a simple decision‑making framework that scores potential learning offerings on reach, impact, and effort, allowing teams to surface disagreements and make data‑driven choices. He illustrates the approach with a "Healthcare 101" course example, showing how differing perceptions of effort and impact can be reconciled through structured scoring. The discussion also covers the value of maintaining an audit of learning assets using tools like spreadsheets and Miro boards, which helps firms move faster by providing an analytical view of their curriculum. Parsons emphasizes the importance of early demand validation—talking to recent project participants, involving potential instructors, and checking whether the content would truly be useful before investing resources. By front‑loading this systematic planning, firms can prevent wasted effort, align stakeholders, and proceed with confidence, ultimately improving employee engagement and the effectiveness of their learning programs.
Chapters
One of the things I found myself saying over the last 3 to 6 months is I think that AC firms should be treating these learning experiences, these courses, whatever they are, more like products. One of the foundational errors that founders of product companies make, myself included, is building some stuff that you think is a really great idea, but you haven't validated a market for, or is it necessarily strategic? But it sounds fun and it's right there and it's kind of easy and why don't we just do it? And that's fun, but it doesn't get you where you want to go in the long haul. And I think trying to bring some of that framework to thinking like, well, why? Yes, we have this course, like, and maybe it's even helping people think about, do we bring this into the modern era? So we have a recording from 6 years ago of a certain topic. It's maybe a little bit outdated. Maybe we want to modernize it, but do we even need this topic at all is a first question. So a framework like this helps you flesh that out. And if you've got 10 ideas, 15 ideas, 20 ideas as a learning and development team or whatever that committee might be running through this, a tool like this helps you just get some rigor behind how you're making decisions. But what's also interesting too is it surfaces disagreements. Let's just, let's move away from onboarding cuz that one's kind of more universal. But let's say that there's a course on Let's say that your firm has a healthcare practice and you want to create a Healthcare 101. So a new emerging professional joins the company or joins a project team who's never worked on healthcare before. So they don't know the jargon, they don't know the medical equipment, they don't know the building layouts and the typology and the regulation. There's all this stuff to learn around healthcare. So the theory is we should create a, whatever it is, 30-minute, hour-long, 2-hour course to just give them the foundations of working in healthcare projects. And you might score this out and I might score this out. You might say that this is like, your reach score might be very different than mine, or the impact score. I might think this will be transformational and you'll be think like, eh, they have to work on the project to actually learn these things. We can do this, but it's not really gonna move the needle. And I could say like, and it's gonna be super easy for us to do. And you might be like, this sounds like a big lift. We don't have any of this stuff written down. And so by having a framework like this, instead of you and I just debating our kind of internal tacit feelings on whether this is good or not, this gives us a way to kind of say like, wow, Susan, you put effort as a 5 and I put effort as a 2. What information do you have that I don't have? Or what information do I have that you don't have? You know, same thing for impact. Like we have theories of the case and it lets us really get a lot of that invisible thinking out on the table.
Yeah. Do you feel like, uh, this may be a weird question to ask, but do firms need to have some sort of audit to be able to move through this process, an audit of their learning experience. You know, I love a spreadsheet. A lot of our clients love a Miro board, and I'm seeing our clients build out some spreadsheets and Miro boards. Some are doing it more than others.
Yeah.
I feel like the firms that are doing a more thorough list of here's all the stuff we want to get our arms— or here's the stuff that— here's the learning that's happening. Even if they're doing it within a section, you know, maybe they're just doing it for all their Revit learning, but they're taking the time to write down the list. I feel like those firms are moving a little faster.
And the firms that take the time, they slow down to actually build an analytical, like, thought process.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and the question is like, do firms need to? Is there another way?
And I don't know if there's an answer to that, but yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit of go slow to go fast, but not only go fast, but go with confidence. So, you know, I think being very thoughtful and, you know, we think about this from product investments. We think about this where we go to speak and what events we invest in. We think about what topics we're going to cover and try and, you know, talk about from an educational marketing perspective. I think taking that little bit of time upfront to validate. It's good for alignment with the team also, because like, if you've got this kind of suspicion that my Healthcare 101 class is just a big waste of time and you don't ever talk about it and I just go build it and it turns out to be a big waste of time, that wasn't great. If it turns out that I was right and you were wrong, still, that's not great. I don't know. It just feels like there's a, there's an opportunity around, but then I will feel more confident Even if I thought I was right, you said, I don't think it's gonna work. And in the back of my mind, I'm like, what if Susan was right? Maybe, you know what I mean? And then I find I'm halfway through building and I realize, oh my God, she was right. We don't have any of this content. We have to start from scratch. I thought we had this all written down. It turns out we don't. And so it's just, I, I feel like it's worth a little bit of prevention here.
Another thing that I've seen is that by having the analytical plan, when you share it with someone else, you say, okay, I'd like you to record this lesson. I'd like you to record a 3-minute video on this topic. And they can see that it fits into this bigger story.
Correct.
That is well thought through, that will have an impact.
Yeah.
They're much more likely to take the time to do it well, to prioritize it, because it doesn't— they know where it's going to go. They have some confidence that there's a plan.
Yeah. I'm sorry to have put you in the role of skeptic in this hypothetical scenario, but if you don't mind, I'll go one step further. So let's say that we go through the exercise And what we figure out is Susan was right, the effort was 5, but I was right that the impact is also 5. And so the numerator and denominator, it turns out it is going to have a huge impact and we should do it, but it's also going to be hard. That lets you feel like, okay, it's going to be a bit of a lift, but I see why it's worth it, you know? And it also sets my expectations for we should do this, but it's going to take a little bit because we actually have to build this content from scratch. And so it lets us move forward with a much more realistic idea of what we're signing up for. And it also encourages you to have good habits. The demand piece, I think, is let's go check with some people who have recently gone on to healthcare projects and kind of walk them through this and say, and try and validate before we build anything, would this have been useful? You know, or as we start thinking about who's going to teach it, maybe that helps us identify and like kind of bring them in early and be like, do you have the energy for this? Does this sound like something you want to own or Don't try. We'll support you as a learning development team, but like, do you want to drive this thing? So yeah, I find this, I don't know if we've gone on this for this too long, but I think this thing is a lot of where, let's put it this way, all of these things need to be thought through whether you do it upfront in a systematic way or not. And if you don't do it, it's gonna come back to you later. And it's better if it doesn't come back to you after you've already invested 20 hours or 50 hours or 100 hours, or you built something that nobody's using and you don't know why. Unless they've just been forced to do it and then they're like unhappily complying with it. Right.
You know, and your employee engagement score goes down.
