Closing a 9-Figure Budget Deficit: A 3-Year Plan to Add $150M to Annual Revenues


SITUATION

The Training & Certification (T&C) organization faced a daunting challenge: a longstanding 9-figure budget deficit across a 1,950-person department. Leadership tasked the team with closing this gap within 24 months.

Through my research, I uncovered a critical insight: developers and engineers—who made up over 60% of our customers' IT technical staff—were significantly underserved compared to the smaller solutions architect market, which generated far more revenue. This presented a massive opportunity to address unmet customer needs, streamline inefficiencies, and close the budget gap by modernizing our approach to training.


COMPLICATIONS

The path forward was riddled with challenges:

  • Outdated Training Focus: T&C had grown organically around teaching individual AWS services. With AWS offerings expanding from 11 to over 300 in a decade, leadership needed to be convinced that customer needs had shifted toward application-building rather than service-specific training.
  • Post-COVID Market Shift: Demand for traditional classroom training plummeted, while online training surged, creating inefficiencies as separate teams targeted overlapping markets.
  • Limited Customer Feedback: Existing data relied heavily on sales history and post-course surveys, which failed to capture evolving market needs—especially as 70% of developers reported using Generative AI for coding.
  • Incomplete Metrics: The company’s data-driven culture relied on outdated metrics, reinforcing ineffective strategies.
  • Proposal Complexity: I faced the dual challenge of crafting a formal six-page proposal in the company’s highly structured format—something I had never done before—while addressing one of the organization’s most critical problems.

APPROACH

To tackle these challenges, I focused on understanding customer problems, leveraging existing assets, and integrating cross-functional insights:

  1. Customer-Centric Research: Conducted extensive research using internal and external data sources to uncover gaps in customer feedback and identify untapped opportunities in the software developer and DevOps engineer market.
  2. Full Lifecycle Alignment: Collaborated with peer Product Managers from Solutions Architecture and Cloud Operations to align the Developer and DevOps modernization strategy with the preceding and succeeding stages of the cloud application lifecycle. This effort successfully unified the entire development and operations process into a cohesive approach for designing and delivering courseware for solutions builders.
  3. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with AWS teams like Developer Relations and Professional Services to gather additional data and expertise, ensuring a well-rounded perspective. Obtained and referenced the latest user persona definitions which supplanted those used by T&C for the past five years.
  4. Strategic Proposal Development: Formulated and delivered a concise, six-page proposal aligned with company standards, presenting a multi-year strategy to modernize training content, significantly reduce production costs, and increase revenue by up to fourfold. The plan focused on targeting the underserved developer market with the goal of achieving a market penetration rate comparable to that of Solutions Architects.
  5. Alignment Across Teams: Collaborated with peer Technical Product Managers to align courseware across the entire application-building experience—from solutions architects to cloud operations—creating a cohesive and unified learning journey. This marked a significant shift from the previous approach, where curricula targeting each user persona was developed independently without collaboration or alignment on the overarching goals and objectives of cloud builder training.

EXECUTION

I presented my proposal to leadership at multiple levels, refining it based on feedback to ensure alignment and buy-in. My plan emphasized:

  1. Modernizing Content Production: Streamlined processes to reduce costs and improve efficiency, enabling faster delivery of high-quality training materials.
  2. Metrics that Matter: Adding data collection of forward-looking customer needs to supplement historical consumption data to provide a 360 degree view of customer needs, market trends, and opportunities to increase adoption of multiple compatible cloud services, a core function of T&C.
  3. Customer-Driven Training: Integrated customer insights to create application-focused training that aligned with evolving market needs, particularly for developers and DevOps professionals.
  4. Cross-Team Partnerships: Fostered collaboration across teams to deliver a unified learning experience, bridging gaps between solutions architects, developers, and cloud operations.

RESULTS

While mass layoffs, including my own, occurred before the plan could be fully implemented, my work laid a strong foundation for future success:

  1. Strategic Recognition: My proposal received widespread praise for uncovering critical data points previously unknown within T&C and for presenting a forward-thinking, customer-obsesssed strategy aligned with corporate leadership principles. This approach benefited learning domains outside my immediate scope of responsibility but also demonstrated the potential to generate revenues far exceeding my proportion of costs.
  2. Improved Metrics: The metrics and measures I introduced enabled quicker, more accurate tracking of customer engagement, satisfaction, and financial results.
  3. Framework for Growth: Developed a strategic framework that positioned T&C to better support cloud software builders while addressing the budget gap that threatened the organization's sustainability. This approach ensured a stronger foundation for long-term growth and operational stability.

LESSONS and TAKEAWAYS

This experience reinforced several key lessons:

  • Challenge Assumptions: Thorough research and a willingness to question the status quo can uncover hidden opportunities and drive meaningful change.
  • Leverage Collaboration: Partnering across teams unlocks diverse expertise and data, leading to more comprehensive and impactful solutions.
  • Communicate Strategically: Crafting clear, concise proposals that resonate with leadership is critical to driving alignment and action.
  • Exceed Expectations: By going beyond the scope of my role, I delivered a strategic framework that not only addressed immediate challenges but also set the stage for long-term success.