Hey, Megan, let's do a podcast. Great idea. What

should we talk about?

What if we did a quick podcast about the process of doing

the podcast? I love it. That's

super deep and meta, and I would expect nothing less of you.

Thanks. So, okay, the podcast started. Let's start where?

At the beginning. It was not my idea. It was

Dean's idea. Years ago, he said, hey, we ought to do a

podcast. I'm like... Hey, we

ought to do a podcast. I don't have time for that. But then after a

while, you listen to people, and other people kept saying,

hey, you ought to have a podcast. Hey, do you have a podcast? So. So

after a while, you start to listen to all the people who say you ought

to do a thing and do a thing. Yeah. So let's do, like,

lessons learned from season one. What do we wish we could

go back and tell past Meg and past Megan about?

What are we learning so far? Well, I think one thing

that's important is coming up with a theme. We struggled with this

a little bit. We decided to call it Tangents.

Tangents with Torrance Learning. Sometimes it feels a little more

tangential, sometimes a little less. I figure this will probably

evolve over time, and it kind of

matches a little bit. Our logo, we've got this curve logo,

and I imagine that ball moving up

the logo and then shooting off it, in a tangent, off

into space. You provide so much

good, intentional story around what may otherwise be

seen as a cop out to coming up with a theme. Because, hey, we're just

gonna go off on tangents and talk about whatever we want. Yep.

And everyone told us we needed a purpose and stated outcomes

for the podcast. That's probably important. So, you

know, I mean, one of those things is that it's a chance for us to

hang out. Totally is. And all the cool kids have podcasts. Yep.

They're all doing it. We also get to use this as a chance to stay

in touch with our network. I like that a lot.

And it's also a way to kind of document, in an

easy way, some of the stories and concepts that are core to our work so

that we can easily share them with others like our clients or the team

or community at large. So it's been really nice

to say, oh, wait, wait, wait, I have a podcast on that.

Yeah. So it's not really about marketing or sales, is

it? Nope, not at all. I mean, sure, that's nice, but that's not why

we're doing this. Don't tell the marketing team.

So we also found, you know, we got some

advice from and encouragement from our friends who are

already doing podcasting, Betty Dannewitz and Matt Pierce,

here in Michigan, in particular in the learning industry

and settling on a good structure. That's probably

one of the key things as well. It's important to have a

flow, find a groove. And, you know, it

took us a few episodes to get that down. And it's probably still evolving

and will evolve over time because, you know,

we've got a few episodes in there, but I know it can take, you

know, maybe even a hundred episodes to really feel like

you've got a good, solid flow. This one will be fun to come back to

100 episodes from now. Yeah. Can't even

imagine. I think one of our other lessons learned was how

to make time to do it because this is fairly time

consuming in terms of prep and recording, and

that doesn't even count all the editing. So we have

blocked off big chunks of Friday afternoons when things are

otherwise quiet. We're a little bit more relaxed,

sometimes a little punchy, and so far we're batting

like one for two. We booked two sessions and actually

managed to have one out of that. So booking more time than

we think we'll need. Super key

would be like, get yourself a great producer. Dean

is awesome. Dean is awesome. Dean comes by this

professionally and so we get to lean on that

so much. He is a music producer, an engineering, mixing, production

guy. Super sound nerd.

Basically, he does things that sound way cooler than what I do all day.

Yeah. And stole this from other

podcasts, but "ABR" always be recording. Dean is always recording.

And not only that, but because of

his background in music production, he created our

little music diddy. We have a

ditty, but we also have like a super professional setup.

We have professional microphones that I'm afraid to touch. And

like, we're in one room, he's got a whole big soundboard in the other room.

Like this is a professional deal. Yeah. Yeah. And

another key thing that has helped us a lot is that

we set up a shared Google Doc so we

can both be typing in there at the same time, editing notes.

And then it's color coded so I can see when I'm talking. You

can see when you're talking. Makes it super easy. It does.

That eases up the prep a lot. And we have taken

definitely a release to learn and iterate

approach to this. Super agile. We

record a few, release them, get feedback from folks,

we debrief ourselves. So retrospective as we go.

And Dean gives us feedback and that's been really, really

helpful. So if you've given us feedback about the podcast, thank you.

Thank you so much.

And so that's our episode about podcasting.

Now that we're in, this is what, our tenth podcast ever. Our tenth episode.

Tenth episode. We're onto something here. Yep.

Okay, Meg. So how'd you think that one went? I think pretty good.

We had to take several takes at that. Even though you would

think this should be an easy one. We're

talking about the thing that we're doing, and it's not like we have to do

a ton of research, but it's

hard to make sure you're hitting all the points you want to. Not

being overly wordy and have a

good flow. Keeping it tight. But I think it's a great one. To start off

season two, we've got lots of cool stuff coming. We've got agile

ceremonies. We've got learner personas and empathy

maps and learning engineering stuff and overnight thoughts,

which is different than overnight oatmeal. So we have lots of stuff

coming up. Stay tuned. This is Meg Fairchild

and Megan Torrance, and this has been a podcast from

TorranceLearning. Tangents is the official podcast of

TorranceLearning, as though we have an unofficial one.

Tangents is hosted by Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance.

It's produced by Dean Castile and Meg Fairchild,

engineered and edited by Dean Castile, with original

music also by Dean Castile. This episode was

fact checked by Meg Fairchild.