Mark Shklav, the host of think tech Hawaii's law across the sea program. Today, we're going across the sea to Paris, France to talk with Frederick Rupert. Freddie, as he is known to his friends, and he is my dear friend, is a French avocat à la cour. He is also a member of the California State Bar, a dual French US citizen, and an honorary member of the Hawaii State Bar Association's International Law Section. I've asked Freddie to share his unique personal and professional insights into life and current events in France, Europe, and the world. Aloha, Freddie. How are you? Good. Bonjour, Mark. Bonjour. Yes, aloha. Aloha. I want to start off, thank you for being my guest today. It's such a pleasure to see you. And I know you're in Paris right now. And I want to ask you a few questions. First, I want to talk a little bit about your personal and professional background. And I find it interesting, you are both a French avocat and a California attorney, as well as a dual citizen of France and the United States. And we can put up both flags. And my questions are, I mean, how did that happen?  And how do you balance your views of the world with being a dual citizen of France and the United States and a lawyer in both countries? How does that work? Please tell us a little bit about your work. Yeah. Well, I was born and raised in France. And at some point, I moved to the US because I had at the time married the person who became my wife and who was born in San Francisco. So we decided to move to San Francisco because as a lot of originally non-US citizens, the US have always had a special attraction to me, in particular, and to a lot of people, of course. So one of my dreams was going to the US, which I did, thanks to my wife. But I was already a lawyer, not a licensed attorney, but a lawyer at the time. Because in France, you can be a lawyer without being an attorney. And so I moved to the US, and I realized that in the US, you can really practice law only if you're a licensed attorney. So I looked into all that, and I went through the motion. I passed the so-called baby bar in California, and then the big bar. And it became an attorney quite some years ago now. So I was first an attorney in California before becoming a licensed attorney in France. I practiced for many years in San Francisco. And at some point, we decided to move to France. And years after that, because I didn't do it right away, but years after moving back to France, I became a French attorney. So my California license predates my French license by more than 12 years, actually. So I learned how to lawyer, how to practice law in the States. And so that gives a special perspective on how to do things, because the practice of law is very different in the US and in France. And as a matter of fact, when I came to France, I knew that no matter what, I never wanted to do a litigation again.  Well, so I decided not to do that anymore. And on top of that, I was always attracted more to the business side of the law. So anything that touches to or that leans toward finance, corporate, M&A, investment, private equity, financing, that's always been my preferred taste in terms of the law practice. So I mean, obviously, naturally, I was more attracted to the transactional work of the law and then the litigation side of it. So that's how I became a dual attorney, France and the US. But I mean, really originally a US attorney. That's interesting. And so you were attracted to United States, then you were attracted back to France. And going back to my question, and I guess the US citizenship came with being an attorney in the United States, is there a, I mean, do you ever have a conflict with our political or social events? And how do you deal with that? Yeah, absolutely. You know the fact that you live in two different countries of through your life. You live through different countries. It gives you a lot of perspective on two things. It helps you realize that things are not necessarily as bad as they look or as good as they look. And being far away from a place gives you a lot of relativness in terms of how you appreciate things or how you apprehend things, how you look at it, and how you digest the different events and how you spit it out, basically. But it is true that sometimes I feel conflicted because I can see what's wrong in the States. I can see what's wrong in France. People often ask me, because especially when you're in the States, people ask me, I mean, how come you wanted to come to the States?  And when you talk to French people, it's exactly the same question, but the other way, right? It's like, what? You can live in the US? What are you doing in France? And the response is that there's no black and white response. I mean, there's good and bad in both places. And you cannot have a perfect place. I mean, there are some real good things in France, some real bad things in France. It's the same thing with the US. The US is definitely not the best country in the world. There are a lot of things that would need to be rethought and really redesigned. But at the same time, there's some wonderful things in the US that there's no way you can have in France. So actually being able to straddle is a nice way of enjoying both good sides and try to avoid the pitfalls of both sides. So I like that. What you're saying is, going, being in the different countries gives you a perspective that is very good because you can see deeply into both countries, both sides. And it allows you to maybe not be so one-sided in a way. More. It's not only being one-sided, but it's also having open eyes and an open mind how things can be done differently. You don't have to get stuck in your way or you don't have to get stuck in some ways because it's always been done that way. It's actually a narrow-minded way of view or a way of seeing things. And I actually think that is a good thing for your clients because you can see different perspectives and you're able to advise your clients on the good and the bad in both countries. So I can see that and not just one-sided. Yeah, that's really good. I like that. That's true. And well, not only you can do that, but you can also, because you can see through the client's eyes why he reacted a certain way, you can somehow explain why the other side is saying something, why they're thinking a certain way and what you should do of it. Being a cultural interface is more important than being just a legal interface. Yeah, and that gives you the insight into what people are thinking by being a citizen. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. It sounds like a good thing. Now, I wanna move on a little bit.  You're an honorary member of the Hawaii State Bar Association's International Law Section. We have a photo of you in Dubai with the other members of the Hawaii delegation that were there for the Inter-Pacific Bar Association's annual meeting short while ago. You're the only member wearing an aloha shirt and you're wearing an aloha shirt today.  How did, and give me a brief reason. Why are you into aloha shirts? Well, I've always liked Hawaiian anything, you know? I mean, part of the American dream is Hawaii, right? And the Hawaiian, or Hawaii, and the Hawaiian culture has a very special taste in that, because actually it's exotic. It's, well, on top of that, I love the sun, I love the sea, I love the heat. So it's part of that beach, sun, and fun atmosphere, right? So the aloha shirts are a major part of it. So I've always liked aloha shirts for the longest time. I actually have a big collection. I've had to give some away because actually they were too big for me. I kind of like shrunk over the years, right? So I had to give some away, but I still have about 50 to 60 different colors of, you know, and different styles, some for the night, some for the day, clear light, different green, blue, red, whatever you can name it. So I really like the relaxed feel that comes with it. Okay. Yeah, you're a natural member of our Hawaii delegation. I'm very, very proud. Actually being a member of the international section of the Hawaiian bar is one of my proudest moments. But good. Now I want to delve a little into Europe and France, and let's put up a map of France for a minute. And France is right in the middle of Europe and all sorts of things are going on. I want to first ask, you know, President Emmanuel Macron has been the subject of some political unrest in France. He proposed pension reforms and there were thousands of French citizens taking to the streets and protests.  What's that all about? And what's the status of that? I didn't quite understand why there was so much opposition to raising the country's retirement age from 62 to 64. But I mean, I don't have that same perspective as you, right? I'm not a French person, but tell me, what's that about? This is something where my American perspective helps, because actually it is true that with the population aging and aging well, because actually now you can live old and in very good health for a long time. So it's not insane to think that we can work longer in good health. It is true that some people have had hard lives and should not work longer or later in life. But there are some special disposition in the law, in the current law, as well as the new law that provide for that. So when you look at it, the way it was set up, the retirement age used to be older than 60. It was, if I remember correctly, it started at 65. But at the time, the life expectancy was lower. It was late 60s, early 70s. So when you had to work until 65, but you could expect to live until 70, that only left a few years in retirement. Now people my age, for example, the life expectancy right now is well in the 80s and being in good health, I hope I'll go at least until 90. So even if I retire at 65, that still leaves me like 25 years of retirement. And the current retirement age is actually 60. So that give me 30 years of retirement. So this is one thing that led to the reform. The other thing is that when the system was designed and put in place, there were way more active people than retired people than now. Somehow the ratio has changed and there are less active people for retired people than they used to be before. So the financial burden is heavier on the working people because we don't, in France, you have two system of retirement. You have a system which is a reallocation system when the working people pay for the people who are retired, they finance their pension and you have the capitalization system, which is pretty much what it is in the U.S.  So those two system, in France, it's a reallocation system, a repartition. So, of course, it stands, it is down if you have a lot of people working and few people not working. But if the ratio changes and you have less and less people working and more and more people retired, there's not enough of working people pool to finance the pension for the people who are retired. So because of all that, the system had to be reformed. So the people that were objecting were objecting because they would have to pay more over a period of time and couldn't retire and get the benefits of the state. Is that it? Well, the people who are objecting actually, I think they don't necessarily wanna look at the big picture, but what they wanna look at is their vested rights because actually right now they would be able to retire 60 and they don't like the perspective of having to work for more years, which is at an individual level, is understandable. But when you look at the big picture at the society level, somehow we have to take into account that we live longer in better health. And no matter how you look at it, the system had to be reformed because if not, it would not function properly from the financial standpoint. Now the problem that Macro has had, I'm sorry. Is it going to be reformed? I mean, it's going ahead then? Actually, the law was voted by the parliament and the Senate and the decrees are actually being published right now. So the reform is in, it's bound to be to come into law. It's actually into law right now since it's been voted by both chambers, but it is gonna be implemented. It's gonna be the law. Okay. And people are protesting because of what they see as an attack on their vested right to retirement at age 60. I see. And so has this affected Macro's popularity or? Yes, it has, but Macro has tried to, I mean, ever since his first term and into the second term as well, he's tried to reform things which are traditionally very hard to reform. The retirement system being one of them. So the problem is not so much that he's trying to do something, but his style is somehow remote from the way that people feel about him or he's somehow a little too rigid or a little too pulled to really relate to the population. So his problem in terms of the opposition that he encountered with regard to the pension reform is the, it's more the psychology of the message. He didn't, it's more the communication issue that he had to deal with. So it's his style. Exactly, his style really irked a lot of people. And on top of that, because of the political opposition that he's also met, he had to use some special articles or special section of the constitution that made a what's called a blocked vote at the Parliament, meaning that there's no real vote. It's a special, it's a special mechanism that was put in place by De Gaulle back in 58 at the time the constitution was drafted because De Gaulle made it to his taste so that he was able to actually govern France because he knew France is the country of a position anyway. So he gave himself the tools to be able to govern the country. Okay, I wanna move on to another issue that President Macron has been involved in is the Ukraine matter. And are the French citizens supportive of that? I mean, Macron seems to be on the side of Ukraine and against the Russian invasion and is very strong in my impression. And is that the citizen of France? Are they all behind that? And I was also wondering if the history of France in World War II plays a role in this. It just seems possible to me. And I wonder if that comes up in discussions. Well, my feeling is that France is definitely behind Ukraine. Russian is seen as the aggressor and Britain is seen as a big bully anyway. Regardless, I mean, no matter under what angle you look at it, he's the one who started it. He's the one who basically invaded Ukraine, right? It's, there's no other way to look at it. I don't see any other way to look at it. I mean, I know some people are trying to argue against that, but I don't see how it could work. Now, with regard to France and World War II, it probably has some impact, but what's very interesting to look at is the way the countries of the old Eastern bloc, the Eastern bloc reacted.  So, I mean, they're so adamant about fighting Russia and helping Ukraine. I mean, not directly fighting Russia, but definitely helping Ukraine as much as they can because they know what it means. I mean, in terms of relative assistance, the biggest contributor to the Ukraine help is one of the Baltic Republic, one of the tiniest countries. But in percentage of their wealth, they're providing a huge amount. I mean, these people quite suffered under Russia's rule. That's interesting because that kind of goes back to what you were talking about, perspective. They have a different perspective that you also have, but they see it through different eyes of the world and they had personal experience of Russia and the way that things oppress them. Is that, am I hearing that right? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, Poland has provided fighter jets, you know, old MiGs that they had in the inventory, old tanks, whatever they could. So the message that I'm getting from all of our talk is perspective is very important. Getting, you know, where you stand, where you, what you see in your experience in life is important on how you see the world and how you deal with it, you know. Now, I like a lot of things about France. So one thing, the French national motto, and let's put that up on the screen. I'd like you just to tell me what the French national motto is and what it means and how did it come about? Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Thank you, quality fraternity. Yeah, exactly. It's something that actually comes all the way back from the revolution, from the French revolution in 1789. It was not the motto of the republic until 1848, which was the second republic in France, but it's been around since the revolution. The fraternity part doesn't really raise a lot of issues, but there is some discussions about which one of liberty or equality you wanna push because clearly, there's some high antagonists. If you have too much liberty, too much freedom, the equality might be damaged and vice versa. If you try to have everybody equal, the liberty will suffer. So, and it's that's interesting because in this motto, the people leaning right or more for liberty, people leaning left or more for equality. And so it's still a subject of topic and discussion in France, is that correct? The motto itself is accepted as one of the symbols of the republic anyway. Nobody would even think of questioning the motto as it is, right? But you have discussions in terms of when political parties argue or push their laws, push their propositions, you could see which one they try to promote more. And clearly, liberty is on the right, equality is on the left. That's interesting, okay? And they still bring it up in discussions and just switch to which one they press. Now, are there any other words of wisdom, French words, French sayings that you can give us because we're in the world, we're in a tough time. Are there some words of wisdom from France that you could share with us and please translate them? In French, I would not know of any French words like this, but the French people as a society, as a whole, they would like to slow things down, take the time to live, that's important. It's especially when you look at the US, when you somehow you lose track of who you are, what you're here for. You're not just here to make a buck. I mean, if it comes with it, that's fine, but it shouldn't be an end in itself. So that's all the things in life. That's a way to live. And again, it's another perspective, right? That's a French perspective, right? Exactly. And that's what gave Paris the name, the city of light, I think, is just the way that the people lived there. They enjoyed life. Is that, am I hearing that right? Is that what you're saying? Well, yeah, it is true that Paris has been a city of life also because it's the city that had a lot of pleasures, a lot of occasions to enjoy life, whether it's artistic, cultural, but it's always been a happy place. Maybe less nowadays, because actually it doesn't have that much of that anymore. And Paris is like all big cities, all capitals. It's fast, it's sometimes dirty, people are not necessarily nice, but you could experience the same thing in any major, major cities. New York City is also known for this kind of things, even though you could say the same thing about how New York City is a pool of cultural events, artistic events, you could do all kinds of things in New York City. But, and the same could be said of Paris, right? It is still a pretty city, it is still definitely a city anyone should wanna visit because it is gorgeous, but Paris is not France.  Okay, and then, but the general French perspective that you've shared is to slow down a little bit. Yeah, definitely. And go back to nature. Go back to nature. That's probably why I love Hawaii too. Okay, yeah, well, I like that. Okay, so we're gonna close now, I wanna thank you. And I wanna close with the national anthem of France and the flag of France. And tell me, what is the national anthem of France? Please. La marseillaise. La marseillaise. La marseillaise, okay. And we will play this as we go out and I wanna thank you, Freddie, for being my guest today. Aloha, and what do we say in France? You could say, bonne journée, bonne soirée. Depends, to me it's bonne soirée because it's nighttime right now, but to you it'd be good, bonne journée, which have a good day. I have a good day, bonne journée.


Awesome. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's product school talk. I'm Cassandra. This week, we have a very special guest with us. His name is George Perrantados. He's the product manager over at Redfin and he started off at Microsoft. Hi, George. How are you doing today? Doing well. How are you? Great. I'm really happy to have you with us today. Happy to be here. Awesome. Well, I know you have a presentation. So if you want to start screen sharing, I'll let you get started with that. And guys, as most of you know, we'll be taking questions following his presentation. So you can type those into the comment section underneath the video whenever he's done. Looks like we're set to go, so I will let you take it from here. All right. Thank you. And thanks, everyone, for joining me today. I've got a few things I want to talk to you about on one topic, which is how to make hard decisions as a product manager. First, a little bit about myself. I started my career quite a while ago at Microsoft. I've done enterprise software in SharePoint. I've done incubations at Microsoft as well in office labs, entertainment software and gaming and Xbox, built devices at Amazon. And right now I'm a lead product manager at Redfin where I work on the listings team, the listings product. And so just a little bit more about what I do. Redfin is a tech-powered real estate brokerage. We help people buy and sell homes. And I work on the selling part of that. So we help our sellers and our Redfin agents make the experience of selling a home which can be really stressful, really efficient, really easy and amazing. That includes promoting the sellers' home online, giving them some cool technology like 3D walkthroughs so people can see their home without necessarily visiting it and also giving sellers a dashboard where they can watch the whole process and what's going on. But something you all probably don't see and something I'll talk to you about first is some tools we built for real estate agents, customer relationship management tools and other tools to help them be productive as well. That's certainly another part of Redfin. So making hard decisions. There's a lot of them in the world of product management. I'll just touch on a few of them. The first hard decision I want to talk about is taking on incumbents. You may have an idea about a new product, a new company even that you want to start or make and let's say there's a Facebook or an Amazon or an Uber or a company of that size or caliber already in that space doing pretty well and maybe the question you're asking is, should I go for it? Should I build that product? Should I start that company? Well, I didn't build a product or start a company necessarily that was going to take on Facebook but I had this problem recently and this question to answer within Redfin. And it was this product that we called the CMA. It's not a shipping container ship as I show here. It stands for Comparative Market Analysis and what that is is as follows. So let's say you want to sell your home and you talk to a real estate agent and you say agent, how much is my home worth? Well, what that agent does is they look around other homes near yours, see how much they sold for and try to figure that out by analyzing the prices and all the other statistics. So agents who work with sellers do this day in and day out and they put together these reports and they meet with sellers to talk about what their home should be listed at. And what you list your home at is a really important number because if you list way high, nobody comes to check it out and if you underpriced it, people may wonder, is there anything wrong with it? And so from an agent standpoint, what the question we were trying to answer is, can we replace effectively something like Microsoft Word for them? Something that people use almost every day, several times a week. And it's like as core to their work and their business as Word is for a product manager or anybody else that's an information worker. And we thought, yes, and here's why. First we said, those reports, by the way, they look like this. They're really ugly, chock full of numbers but they're really hard to understand. Two, they take a lot of manual work. It's an empty vessel. You have to find all the homes, figure out the right ones and add them. And third, there's no unique content. Everybody has the exact same data. It's just crunching it slightly differently. There's nothing to differentiate this analysis for a Redfin agent versus anybody else. And so we said, we think we can make something different and something better. And we did. Our product was beautiful. It automatically suggested homes for agents to put in and it had data no one else had because we have this big website where we can watch and see what buyers are doing in which houses they seem to be gravitating towards or not. So you may be wondering, well, did we succeed? I will say not right out of the gate. This is our adoption numbers by agents when we launched the feature. We started about 50-50. So we kept talking to agents and listening to feedback and iterating and adding improvements that they told us they really needed. And eventually we got to almost all the agents. And I will say now at this point, this is about a year old. We're pretty much at every agent at Redfin who works with sellers using this product. And this is what I live for. Not the numbers, but the stories. Agents, these are direct quotes. Agents saying, I love this tool. I'm amazed by what you all built. It's very eye appealing. So at the beginning, we didn't know if we were gonna succeed. But we thought we had an edge. So if you're thinking about, gosh, should I take on that incumbent product or company? Figure out, do you have an edge? Is there something really special about you? Can you build something amazing? And that should hopefully lead you to the right answer. All right, question number two or hard decision number two, taking on a new job. So here's my story on that. You saw Microsoft free times earlier in that slide. I was at Microsoft for 12 years. Some of you may be wondering, this is a long time, George. And I will agree that was a long time. Three jobs then, but still a long time. And after 12 years, I said, I wanna try something new. I wanna learn new things. I wanna try building some products in a different place. And I knew some people at this company down the road called Amazon, here in Seattle. And they're working on something, but it was a secret project. They wouldn't tell me. They couldn't tell me. In fact, I would have to sign that I was accepting my offer at Amazon before I found out exactly what the product was, which sounds crazy in hindsight. And it is a little crazy. So of course, my mind was racing. Like what product could this be? Like, is this some random transparent toaster? You know, is it a weird like iPad potty thing? I have young kids at the time. So like, what's, you know, is it that?  By the way, this is not a Photoshop. That is actually Jeff Bezos in a giant mecha robot. I don't know what that is, but that is real. So it's none of those things. So I signed on the dotted line. I joined in my first day. My manager said, we're working on the fire phone. You may be groaning now. Oh my gosh, George, fire phone. Wasn't that a business flop? Like, wasn't that a failure? Well, it was not a business success. But remember what I said? I said I was going somewhere where I wanted to learn and do some different things. And in that frame of mind, I had a successful time at Amazon because I learned a ton. Shipping a phone is extremely hard. There were dozens of teams involved. It's hardware, software and services. It's a massive rally across the company. Ton of exec meetings. Like I'd never shipped a product like that before and worked on a product like that before. And I specifically owned the beta program. And this is probably one of the hardest beta programs I've ever run because it was a secret project. So I couldn't just like toss it out to the world. I had to work with only certain people that were disclosed. Most of them were inside the company and somehow motivate them to give me great feedback. So I got out of what I wanted from this job, regardless of the success or failure of the fire phone. And Amazon did too. Do you know Alexa? Well, the first product that tested Alexa was actually the fire phone before this product ever shipped called the Echo. And if you've heard about Amazon Go, this cashier-less convenience store in Seattle, the people that built the cameras for the fire phone were the same people that built the cameras on the sensors for the Amazon Go store and the same camera that is the Amazon key. So for Amazon, it was a success too. It wasn't a complete failure. There's a lot of technology that came out of the fire phone that Amazon was able to harness. So if you're contemplating a new job or a new role, the questions I would say you need to ask yourself is what will you learn and what will you get out of that experience? And who are you gonna get to work on this product? And finally, what's the worst that could happen? Because a lot of good I think can happen. So ask those questions of yourselves if you're contemplating a new job and hopefully it'll lead you to the right path. Okay, so last question or last hard decision is saying no. Saying no is hard. I mentioned that comparative market analysis tool. So generally Redfin Agents give us a ton of feedback online and in person. And that CMA tool I mentioned that countless amounts of feedback I've come in about that tool. So I just mentioned it was a success, right? Well, there's a ton of feedback on it. Agents want us to make it better. And here's the challenge. The challenge is we could hire an army of engineers to address all the feedback and we still wouldn't be through with addressing all the feedback. Because it's never ending. We could always make it better. And meanwhile, there's other things we can do that are brand new. For example, a year ago, Redfin announced, we're doing a mortgage product and we started helping customers with mortgages and about six months ago we announced, hey, we have this product called Redfin Now or instead of you listing your home with an agent, you could sell it to us directly and avoid all the hassle of cleaning and staging and things like that. So there's this tension. Do I put the blinders on and just focus on my current product and make it great? Or do I ignore customers and focus on new products and ignore my current products? Well, of course it's no extreme. It's somewhere in the middle. And the question is, well, how do you strike the balance? And I really have one answer to that which is customer empathy. At Redfin, we can shadow our agents, we can watch them work, we can do online user testing in-person focus groups with buyers and sellers on our website. And I've found no other way besides watching people work, hearing their concerns, their wishes, their pains to decide where to set the balance. Because only when you see something, you feel it, then you can prioritize whether it's a mild annoyance or a really severe problem to set that balance. So if you want to say no to a customer, first figure out, have you addressed the big pains with your product?  In that last comment, 5% for art, always save a little bit of time to keep a product fresh and address the top pain point, however small that may be.  All right. Those are my three hard decisions. I want to close with one personal story which is a topic or a theme of big opportunities. So you may see my last name. It's a long name. It's Parentados. It's Greek. I was born in Greece. I was born in Athens. And I'm not there. I'm here. And I don't have an accent. You may have noticed. And that's because my parents and my sister and I moved to the States when I was five years old. We followed our uncle who had settled after attending school somewhere in Georgia to this little town in Northwest Georgia named Dalton, Georgia, which is known for carpet, Marla Maples and Deborah Norville and not much else. So you may be wondering why the heck did your parents move from this big metropolitan city, cradle of democracy, et cetera, et cetera to this small town in Northwest Georgia? And the answer was opportunity. It was opportunity for themselves and for their children, myself and my older sister in terms of education and jobs and all the things that led me to where I am today.  I just wanted to leave you with a few tips there, which is make sure you're running to and not from an opportunity. My parents at the time were actually not running away from Greece. Greece economically was great then. It is not so great now. But their friends said, you are crazy to leave Greece when they left in the 80s. But they were running to something. And I recommend anything you do with your product, with your career, run to something. Also, remember it's about the journey, that learning and growing piece for Amazon. I did not regret one minute of my time at Amazon because I was learning and growing every day my time there. And finally, there's no regrets. You can't explore every single possible opportunity out there, but remember, you can always make a change. So don't regret where you are and if you don't like it, you can always make a change. So I always try to bias on making a leap as long as you're heading somewhere you think is gonna be amazing. So that is what I had. This is my contact info. I'd love for you all to reach out. If you have thoughts, if you wanna get in touch. But I think right now, we're gonna do some questions. So I'll hand it off. Awesome, thanks George for a great presentation. And thanks everyone for joining us. Make sure you're typing in your questions there. We'll get to them. Really interesting stories. And I know you mentioned you were at Microsoft for 12 years. Can you talk a little bit more about how you landed your very first role as a product manager there? Yeah, good question. So I went to Georgia Tech. I have a CS degree. And I was trying to decide between product management and engineering. So I did one product management internship and I did one dev internship around my like end of my junior through my senior year. And I didn't have any product experience before. And the way I landed that product internship was I talked to recruiters and I expressed my interest in talking to customers, figuring out what to build, all the characteristics and the skills I think that make a good product manager and they took a bet on me. And if Microsoft would have said no, I would have pursued another company that would have said yes. Awesome, thanks. And let's see, have a couple of questions coming through here. This one came in from Slack. Can you talk more about what skills have helped you be successful as a product manager? Sure, there's a few. One is synthesizing information. As a product manager, you get information from a ton of sources. You get information from customers, from competitors. If you're in a company from executives, figuring out an answer from all those sources of information, being able to distill it down into like here's the three things we need to focus on and then leading your team as a result of that. I think it's really important. The second is really clear communication. That's the next step. You can communicate to an investor or an executive or just your fellow developer about why we're doing what we're doing. I think really having a knack for understanding what customers want is important, not just hearing what they say, but digging in below the surface and understanding why are they doing what they're doing or saying what they're saying. What are they really trying to achieve? They may be proposing a solution when in fact the problem may be something unrelated. And finally, there's many more, but the final one that comes to mind is being scrappy. As a product manager, figuring out how to get things done is really important, not just through others, through developers and designers and others that you work with on a team, but also unblocking yourself.  Do you build something? Do you talk to someone who's an expert? Do you find someone online to just have a coffee with for 15 minutes that knows more about the space than you do? There's a correlation between I think product management and entrepreneurship in that both roles, I think require startup founder or a product manager require a certain level of scrappiness to just keep yourself unblocked and keep moving forward. Right, definitely. It's definitely about continuing. It's being a lifelong learner too, right? Awesome. So our next question is from Igor. What are the biggest challenges you face when you worked for Amazon? Biggest challenges, that's an interesting question. I'll say to the following. Amazon's strength and also weakness is its risk taking. It can turn on a dime, which is impressive given the size of the company and say we are gonna do this or we're not gonna do that. We're gonna change course. The challenging thing for me was when I got really invested in a project that was actually after the fire phone I didn't talk about. I was at Amazon for two years, I worked on the fire phone for a year and I worked on some other stuff that didn't ship for a year. I think Amazon made the right call to change course on the stuff I was working on but I got so invested in what I was working on. It was hard to say, oh, it's been four months, five months, I need to pause on this and work on something else. So it's the, in hindsight, I think it was the right decision, but when you're in it, it's sometimes hard to kind of change course when you're personally invested in the product you're trying to build. You've heard all the customer stories, et cetera. And that's maybe another skill to add to the list, which is you can't get too attached, you have to do what's right for the customer, right for the business. Sometimes if you're too personally invested, you may go too far down a course you shouldn't from a business strategy product perspective. That's a really good point. Here, our next question, we have actually quite a few coming in. So let's see, our next question is from Katie.  And if so, how much do you disclose ahead of time? We also, yes, if you take the word public and assume kind of within the scope of Redfin in my case, I've never posted something outside of the company, mainly from a confidentiality standpoint, it would be a competitive advantage if somebody knew exactly what we were building when. We usually let our PR team handle what we talk about publicly. But in terms of like within the company, yeah, Redfin has two kind of patterns that I find really good. One is we have this annual strategy team process where different people from different disciplines get together and figure out, what are we gonna do for the website or our agents or this particular business problem? And they lay out a roadmap for the year. And then every quarter, teams like mine get together and figure out what are we gonna shoot for next quarter? Like what metrics are we trying to drive and what products do we think we'll build? And both of those are public to the company. Anybody can go read that document or that strategy document or read the quarterly plan and comment on it. We use Google Docs and we do a short kind of exec review for that quarterly thing and a longer one for the yearly thing. So we're from a value standpoint, we're a very kind of transparent company, not just with our customers, but within ourselves. And I think that's good because ideas can come from anywhere and people have different perspectives, especially diverse perspectives. And it's good to make sure it's not just blinders on, let's go. So that's the process we use it for and I found it's pretty good. It's awesome. Our next question, excuse me, it's from David. How do you prioritize your backlog? Yeah, good question. So as I mentioned, we set up a plan for what are we gonna do next quarter? Once we have that plan, we prioritize based on if something has more or less urgency, like an agent is like screaming for this tool or this is like the most important problem to solve or there's another team depending on something we need to ship to unblock them. So we kind of lay out our quarter roughly and then that's what prioritizes essentially the backlog. But that's really a guidepost. That's not a fixed plan. We do, like many companies we have our own kind of modified version of Agile that we use, but we are in principle Agile and that we can change the plan. If something surprises us and sometimes it does, some issue arises in production or some new request comes in that is the more urgent. So we have regular, we have like weekly meetings are pretty short to kind of scrub the backlog and give daily standups to make sure everyone's unblocked. So, but I found personally that having a little bit more than one or two weeks of projection of what the team is gonna do is useful because it helps us roughly understand what we think we're gonna get done. What I found sometimes in Agile and Scrum teams is if you stay too focused on one week or two weeks you miss the kind of the where you're headed or you don't quite know how far down the roadmap you'll get, which in some situations that's fine. In my situation, we do need to have a little bit of predictability for one reason. One reason is we're building tools for agents and agents think of that more as like an enterprise software thing where you can't change the software like every day on them. So it's like word or Slack changing on you every day. Like it can be problematic. And so we need to be a little bit more predictable about when we think we'll ship things. The website feature teams do move more on a, yeah, let's start testing this today. Let's AB test this tomorrow. Okay, awesome, great. Let's see, our next question is from Daryl. What are some pitfalls that a highly effective product manager should avoid at all costs? That's a great question. One pitfall is don't assume you have a rock solid understanding of the customer forever.  You say, I know this customer. That's probably true for three months, six months, a year. But depending on the customer segment, that information will decay. So at some point, if you do no more customer visits, customer research, customer outreach, you will not know the customer. So it's not a one and done. It's a marathon out of sprint on the customer side. That's probably my top one. Let me think if I have another one. I guess the other one is more of a business strategy one which is, and this is hard, which is when you're on a particular course, you're like, this is my strategy. This is my roadmap. This is the product I want to ship, not being open to change. And this echoes earlier with what I mentioned, but this could be more of a business problem too, if there's like a new competitor that arises that maybe is trying to disrupt the entire industry in a way you didn't expect. I think as a product manager from a feature to a product to even a company scale, you always need to be open to change and be objective to what the right decision is at any point in time. So the course you're on now is not set in stone and should never be set in stone. Awesome, really good point. And our next question is from Pranav. If your team has a dependency on another team to build a feature and let's say it's blocking your own team, how do you manage that situation? Yeah, I'll answer that by saying there's probably one more pitfall to avoid, which is not being paranoid enough. I think product managers are naturally both curious and paranoid. I don't know what it is, but I think you need, if you have this dependency, you need to be on top of it as a product manager. You need to create a system, a framework to manage it. And that's not necessarily a meeting every day or an email every hour, but some way to check in on how things are going, keeping things unblocked if they're great, but providing the help that's needed or the decisions that are needed if it's not. So usually the wrong answer is, oh, I'll assume that product will be ready in a month for me to, or that API or whatever, for me to depend on. Great, see you in a month. The other extreme of I'll call you every hour to check is obviously not right either. But the specific framework, I think depends on the company or the organization you're in. In general, what I try to do is rather than worry about the individual, like how often am I gonna check in? It's setting up a framework. Is it a weekly meeting? Is it a Slack channel and a reminder? Is it, you need to figure that out. And I would say that the more paranoid you are or the more mission critical it is, usually the more okay it is to have a more frequent check-in period. But maybe really the ultimate answer is, you need to check in at a good pace so you can respond if there's a problem. You can't, that's been the best, really the best solution I've had to that problem. Awesome, thanks. And say, I have quite a few more questions. Sure. I'm scrolling through here. This one's from Sagar. As a student pivoting from software engineering to product management, what builds credibility for hiring managers? Yeah. Side projects, startup weekends, blog posts, anything that demonstrates you're thinking about what customers want, the look and feel of a product, what's important and what's not. I think builds credibility. An internship, a product internship would as well, but I know not everyone has that and still wants to be in a product role. The other would be, hey, I'm an engineer in my role right now or I have an engineering background, but I'm looking to take product-like work off of other people's plates in my current organization or company. And so it's like, oh, I was the engineer, but I worked on this feature I was really passionate about and I actually wrote this back or I figured out, I used Balsamic and kind of sketched it out. We actually had an example of a developer here at Redfin just last week who did that. And I mean, this person doesn't want to be a product manager. He just stepped up and said, we need to solve this problem and I'll do it. That speaks volumes from a hiring manager perspective. It doesn't have to be a formal role. It can be an informal yet demonstrated. Oh, this person's doing product-like work. And we have time for one more question. This next one is from Hyun. What are some things that you do to continue learning and improving your product skills? Yeah, it's a great question. I've been at it for a while, but lifelong learning is definitely high on my list. I read books and I get book recommendations from people I trust. I have mentors, those people I trust, who are more experienced than I am and I meet regularly. That's some of them are within the company, some of them are not. I do some online reading as well. And then also by having a team, by managing people and by being a mentor to others, it helps me kind of stay plugged in and hear both what people are struggling with or need help with, as well as kind of what's new in the industry to make sure I'm not missing something, not just technically that I need to understand, but also a pattern, be it agile or whatever else. So those are the techniques I follow. Awesome, thank you. Well, we appreciate you again for being here with us today and sharing presentation, taking time to get to all those questions. Yeah, you're welcome. It was fun. Awesome. Well, before we let you go, I'd love for you to share your advice for aspiring product managers out there. Great question. My advice is be scrappy and hustle. Product management is not a very kind of traditional role. There's people from many different backgrounds that do it. If you're passionate about it, keep networking, keep practicing your skills, keep trying to find opportunities to demonstrate those skills, and you're gonna land the position you want in no time. Awesome, thank you again. George, I appreciate you being here and thanks to everyone for joining us today. As you guys know, you can learn more about us at productschool.com and have a great day. Everyone, bye. Bye-bye.


Our next caller is Alexis from New Jersey. Hey, Alexis, how can we help you? Hi, guys. So I've been noticing that whenever I try to do an overhead press, I struggle with that initial lift off, like the front rack position. I was wondering if you guys have any tips for that. Yeah, good question. Super common, by the way, Alexis. That's the hardest part of the lift for most people. So there's nothing weird or wrong with how you're doing it or whatever. Anytime you have a sticking point in a lift, one of the things you could do is literally focus on that part of lift. So with a overhead press with a barbell, one thing you can do is literally take the bar off the rack in the front rack position, press it up, bring it back down, rack it, wait five seconds, then do the same thing.  So what you're doing is you're constantly working on that dead stop position of the press. You have to go lighter when you do this, but if you practice this often, you should get better at that particular part of the lift. What's the most difficult part? I know wrist mobility is a limiting factor to that in the rack position itself. What would you say if you wanted to pinpoint where it's a struggle for you? I would say just mentally connecting to the fact that, okay, I'm getting ready to push this up now. Once the weight is moving up in the air and I'm ready to walk out, that's fine, but just the initial part, connecting to whatever muscles to get the weight up. Okay, I see. Have you ever worked with kettlebells at all? I was just going to go that direction, I'm glad you did. Not too frequently, but I do have some experience with them. Okay, there's a few things. I've gotten the guys into this overhead carries, but also just like in the rack position doing some carries, so you familiarize your body with that position. The load itself, being able to just have control over that and brace and be able to generate force in that position, it's a good way to start really kind of familiarizing your body with that. So the way it's loaded, it's on the backside of your arm, so it's really conducive to pressing and overhead and doing sort of spiral type of presses that will really help to get that rotational support and be able to stabilize the joint and you'll find that you get stronger as a result of just working with a tool like the kettlebells itself.  I actually make it a priority for sure. I forgot the name of it, but when you take a stick or something and you kind of like rotate it around the back of you. Shoulder dislocates. Yes, I do those. Is that the main thing that you do before you prime the shoulders to go in? I kind of also do some like lateral raises with like two and a half pound plates and I also have resistance bands, so I'll use like a light resistance band first and then go heavier and then eventually use a barbell. Do you have access to a strap? I heard you're in a gym right now. Do you have access to a strap like a TRX strap suspension trainers? My gym doesn't have that, no. So you can use your bands, use the really light band and do you know what a W looks like? If you can totally go on YouTube, I think we've done videos on this too and look up suspension trainer W's. You can do that same movement with a really light band. I like doing that before I do any shoulder stuff just because that joint is a floating joint and getting all it primed the entire thing, doing just the shoulder dislocates. Sometimes people just get in the motion of going back and over and they're not really priming the shoulder really well and doing a row to the W really wakes up the entire shoulder and then I would do a movement like Justin said like kettlebell presses with a little bit of weight and resistance and then go into your shoulder press with a barbell and see how you feel after that. Okay, sounds great. I'll definitely try that out. Yeah, Alexis, I'm going to back up what Justin said. I think carrying dumbbells or kettlebells in that bottom rack position and walking is going to probably help you the most. I think holding and staying tense in that position, the key is not to rest the kettlebell or the dumbbell in that bottom position but rather support it and stay tight and then walk for like 30, 40 steps. That tension, that isometric tension is going to build strength in that bottom position. I mean, when he said that light bulb enough, oh yeah, that would make a huge difference. Yeah, and I forgot this one more point. If you're working your way back to the barbell itself just to get a nice tight grip with a fist grip and have some outward tension so you're actually kind of pulling on the bar outwardly, it creates that, the body responds to it that the joint is more stabilized and so you're able to generate a bit more force so just being able to pull out and create tension before you lift, you're going to feel a lot more comfortable pressing it overhead from there. So what I would add to that is making sure that right before you press you think about squeezing your glutes and your abs tight so you have a good solid base. A lot of times people feel loose at the bottom because their core is not tense before they press up and that instability in the core which is your base and foundation of a press like that that's a lot of times the problem.  All right, thank you for calling in Alexis. Thank you guys, I really appreciate it. Yeah, that you know the way the CNS works, you know, because the CNS, right, that's like the the amplifier to the speakers which are muscles, right? It's what turns on the muscles to make them fire and the CNS fires more powerfully when more of it is turned on, less of it's turned on. So in other words if I do, if I want to get my right quadricep to fire as strongly as it can I have to fire the whole body. We actually do this naturally when you're lifting something real heavy or doing something even with one hand that's real stressful you'll naturally tense up your entire body. So, you know, when you're trying to go from a dead stop position you can't go from, it's hard to go from dead stop to all of a sudden turn everything on better to turn everything on then go.  You got to think about that when in terms of if you're not generating enough force, if you're not lighting up enough muscle fibers to contribute to that lift, you know, that could be an issue. Well, I just think when you're talking about the shoulder, like the hips it's a ball and socket joint and so you have all these muscles that are kind of supporting this floating joint and if they're not all woken up and activated and stable you feel unstable at the bottom just like when someone feels really unstable at the bottom of a squat. If you don't do a good job of waking up the hips just like if you don't do a good job of waking up all the muscles around the shoulder you feel really unstable when you go to a press just like when someone does a squat. Yeah, and then of course, if there's a part of a rep of an exercise that you're not comfortable with, literally just training that part makes a huge difference, huge difference. You can literally stop your reps at that part, hold the position then do your left, you could add more weight at that bottom part or make that the determining factor to how much weight you put on the bar. Just train that part I did this with bench press as a kid. I got the bottom part was so hard that what I started doing is I started doing, you know, I would do half reps bottom up just to practice that portion and I got so good that it actually became a stronger part of my lift.


So, I'm going to be talking about the Quantum Open Source Foundation and the goal of this talk is to first walk you through the story behind QSF, how do we get to this point? What is QSF about and what's the future vision in terms of like missions and goals and this talk is also going to be a lot about how you could potentially get involved because none of this could be done entirely by Tomasz and myself when the core team of QSF that I'll show you in a bit. So, throughout this talk I'm going to have this little small request doc which is going to pop up at random places and it's going to like just ask you about certain skill sets or things that you might be interested in and if anyone is interested in helping just drop us a message on the Slack channel which you can join through this link or send us an email. So, first of all what's the story behind the Quantum Open Source Foundation? It basically all started with a small GitHub project that back in the day I was hosting on my own GitHub and by now it's like on the QSF GitHub and it's basically a list of all, well we're trying it to be all but there's always some missing open source quantum projects. So, we broke it down into different categories like full stack libraries, simulators, compilers, this category for quantum fun where we have quantum games and other things and each category is broken down into programming languages. So, the goal is that if someone wants to get into the space and maybe like I don't know start a project on a quantum simulator and they happen to be what they might want to join a project and they're very comfortable in common list. They can go to the category for quantum simulators and then look for a common list subheader and actually find all the projects that are implemented in that particular programming language. Then like Tomasz and myself had several publications, several publications in the quantum computing space and we worked with all of the various hardware players, D-Wave, IBM, Xanadu and Regetti and at some point this journal plus one that is very focused on open access science approached us and asked us to write a review paper on the open source landscape in quantum computing and we were pretty excited about this and we joined forces with Peter and we started working on this project where the goal was to kind of look into all the various repos and also dive into the literature on traditional open source software engineering and figure out okay what are best practices that the community should follow and do most of the projects that are out there actually adhere to these best practices. For me there was one particular learning that I found very surprising. There's a thing called Brooks Law and Brooks Law says that adding human resources to a late software project will make it later and for the people that have worked in software companies that might be able to relate to that and it has to do with this law of diminishing returns where adding more bodies and resources to a project initially increases productivity at some point you will start plateauing and then adding more people you actually decrease productivity because the communication overhead just gets too big. What I found interesting is that if you look into open source projects and that's independent of the work that we did in the quantum computing space out of this other paper they actually found out that adding contributors to open source projects always leads to higher productivity, more commits, more codes and more features. So I think that's a pretty exciting finding that the way to developing software open source actually makes sense. One of the problems though was that we realized that this review paper is going to get outdated quite quickly because we can't really update it. We could update the archive version of it but we can't really update the version that was published in plus one and that's why we started a website and we hosted this evaluation and the results of the evaluation on the website of the Quantum Open Source Foundation. So that was kind of like the first thing that we did as part of QoSF and the response was overwhelming and as part of that we started Foster the Quantum Computing Track in 2019 and since then we've been running various events and growing the idea of the foundation and also adding more things to it and we have quite a big vision I would say for the future but we need help to actually get there. So that's how the QoS team looks like right now. Mikal just recently joined and he's working on a new program that I will be introducing in a bit and we're also working on building out an advisory board. So right now that's Will and Josh and we're looking to add more people in the near future and the goal here is to basically get advice on the various aspects and that like I will be talking about that in just a second but basically to kind of get high level advice and guidance on various topics that QoSF wants to work on. But at that point I would like to point out that without Peter we would not be here today. We would have not had a Quantum Computing Track at Foster in 2019. We would not have not have it this year because he was like one of the main driving forces behind the creation of QoSF but unfortunately he can't be here today because end of last year he embarked on a mountaineering journey in the Himalayas and unfortunately got hit by an other launch and never got back. So I just wanted to have us all appreciate kind of what Peter did for the community and what he did for QoSF and yeah just honor him for that. So what is QoSF actually about? QoSF is about supporting the development and standardization of open tools for quantum computing. So that's pretty generic and wide and we want to keep it that way because we want to be able to kind of adapt as things develop and ultimately it's a community effort between industry and academia and when I say industry I mean the quantum computing industry but also just the traditional software engineering industry. So on our website we have a manifesto and there's like six items that we want to focus on and yesterday when I was looking back at them and I was asking myself okay how many items does foster actually kind of tick off? It ticks off four where we have things like foster collaboration between the hardware and software community incentivize and support the distribution of free and open information regarding advances which is what the goal of today was to kind of like showcase some of the new projects some of the new updates to existing projects and to organize free and open conferences and generally events that kind of increase the audience and the community for quantum computing. On top of that we have that we want to provide financial funding which we have not gotten to yet because we haven't really focused on getting funding for QSF that much and providing a forum where people can exchange ideas and that's the whole point of this slack channel that we're currently like building up and which is supposed to be a point where you can connect with people that are working on these projects that are quantum physicists or people that are excited and interested in like helping out on existing projects. So in terms of the future missions and goals we basically have kind of like defined three pillars that we want to focus on we have a pillar that is about pushing the boundaries spreading the knowledge leveling the playing field and a biannual QSF price and I'll talk a bit more detail about each one of these pillars and what we mean with that. So first of all pushing the boundaries is supposed to bring together the quantum community and advance the solution of outstanding issues and problems. So what I mean by that is to basically have a list of open uncracked problems in the quantum computing software space. The idea is that young researchers can come to this list, get inspired, pick up one of these challenges and work on it and potentially also like get some links and resources linked to that problem that was compiled by other people in the space. So for example like one of the things that there's a shortage of is compilers without me saying that you might not know that and you might find it out by like going to that GitHub list that I mentioned earlier and you will see that there's relatively few projects there but there might be like more hidden uncracked problems that you wouldn't be aware of unless you like spend quite a lot of time kind of diving into the field. So the idea is to kind of like create a quick entry point and that's the first time that this little duck pops up because if you know any challenges, if you have any challenges as part of your project that or that you have encountered as part of your academic career please let us know so we can get started building this list. The third, the second pillar is spreading the knowledge. So this one is very much about outreach and education and the goal here like one of the things that we're doing is hackathons and workshops. So we did a workshop together with CERN that we'll be talking about in a second but the goal is also to kind of widen the community by not just doing hackathons and workshops for PhDs and quantum info but actually for people that are new to the field. So that means hackathons with quantum newbies. I have this particular idea of like doing a workshop with kids because there's like actually some interactive, there's a startup that creates interactive elements for kids that you can kind of like simulate quantum circuits with and also like kind of focus on like the older population and just kind of like spreading that excitement for quantum computing and I personally always find it exciting to see people taking like maybe a day maybe two days for them to actually run a program on an actual QPU and also understanding what that program does. So at this point this always takes quite a lot of money running these events if you know how and where a software foundation like us could get grants or funding from please approach us and let us know especially if you've done it before and this is a particular example like we teamed up with CERN the particle accelerator in Geneva and we ran a Toronto version of their hackathon at the same time. It's called the quantum futures hackathon and we had a lot of cool projects that came out of that including Thomas and Kelly who made the blockade game that we're presenting earlier today. Another thing on the outreach side is like MOOCs or massively open online courses. So Peter is part of the U of T and QoSF like had an EDX course that is still accessible. You can check it out on this EDX link. It's about quantum machine learning. It might be a bit dense for beginners but like once you kind of master the basics of quantum computing that might be a really interesting course to dive in and we have the course material hosted on our GitLab and then I want to point out this paper that is a follow-up paper to the review paper that we wrote and what they are pointing out is that they're saying we observe a lack of educational resources on quantum computing which is something that I would disagree with because I find there is quite a lot of resources and Desiree from Australia she actually has a list on GitHub that lists all the free and open learning resources on quantum computing and we're mirroring and co-hosting that list on the QoSF website. So if you're in need of some learning resources go and check that out there's plenty of material. So I mentioned earlier that like Mikal joined the core team and like one thing that he started is the quantum computing mentorship program. So for people that want to get into the space but they might not feel comfortable or they I don't know feel like they're like too early on that's a great program you can basically join and you can work on a quantum computing related project and you get teamed up with an expert from industry or academia and you're going to work together for three months. So it's mostly going to be you working but you have regular check-ins with the expert you can get feedback they might look into your code and kind of help you implement certain things and the goal of that is to build a community of quantum enthusiasts and also providing a smooth and guided entry to the community because again in that paper they were pointing out they did a survey of the community and said I was very much focused on like people with a PhD in quantum info or computer science and so we would like to kind of break that up a bit and like bring people in from various backgrounds. So if you're interested in that I did not get to push that code and deploy it before this talk but we're going to do it before tomorrow so the deadline opens up tomorrow and goes till February 14th. So if you're interested or if you know of people that might be interested feel free to spread the news. And then we have the idea of a decentralized kind of quantum conference that was something that will brought up the idea that like foster talks are already recorded and put online but the idea would be to like not just ended with foster talks but also have people record talks like that where they're kind of like presenting their projects and like showcasing or demoing it throughout the year and publishing that on YouTube. So if you happen to know how to edit videos properly because I don't and Tomas doesn't either we would love to talk to you and maybe partner up and work on these Qcon videos because I'd like to have them look great. And then lastly the last pillar is leveling the playing field. So what we mean with that is providing an objective reference point to evaluate both quantum hardware and software. So the idea is building compiler and simulator benchmarks. Like this is an example from the classical domain you can see like different C++ compilers ranked against each other. The idea is that there's way too many quantum simulators out there right now. And if you would want to work on a project you would face the decision like okay which of these simulators do I use. And that is a difficult question to answer because it depends on what kind of quantum circuit you're trying to simulate. If it consists only of Clifford gates you might want to use a different simulator that is particularly optimized for that. If you want to paralyze it on a big AWS instance or if you want to run it on GPUs those are all factors that are going to influence which simulator you want to use. And we would ideally like to give you that like opportunity to kind of like look it up and have like some central point where you can see them all ranked against each other in order to make this sort of decision. So ultimately we would love to build what we call a QSF gym where you have certain standardized data sets like those might be like certain types of circuits. And if you build a compiler you can test it on this standardized set of quantum circuits and you can measure the performance against other compilers. So you can think of it as kind of like the standardized data sets that are out there in computer vision or just in traditional machine learning like M list. And then again we would have like some sort of public leaderboard that ranks the various implementations and projects against each other. So again we have that little duck down here. If you fancy helping us develop this reach out to us because like we have limited bandwidth we all have limited bandwidth so like if you want to spend a little bit of spare time helping us with this that would be great. And then lastly in that pillar falls the open source project evaluation that I was touching upon earlier that is currently accessible on the QSF website. And the idea here is to have evaluation results for static analysis things like code coverage of the various projects but also kind of a grading scheme for the documentation. And the idea is to encourage best practices and also help newcomers decide which project should I be spending my time on. You probably don't want to join a project that I don't know takes three months to get back to your pull request or your issues and might also have shitty documentation. So we want to kind of like enable or like help projects to kind of be aware of their shortcomings and then fix them. So again here we need help to automate this. Right now it's very manual and painful and there should be good ways of like scripting this. So if you're interested in helping in that let us know. And then lastly we are like we have this thought and that's a very high level thought we haven't like flashed this out fully yet to like create a bi annual QSF price for the best or well main most well maintained quantum open source project. And we would like to dedicate that to Peter and we ideally want to pull in some partners maybe some journals maybe some companies from the software space and kind of launch this and get this off the ground. And as I said we haven't fully fleshed this out if you have ever done something in this kind of way that like awarding prices for software projects or anything related to that please reach out to us and I don't know share your insights because we haven't done it either. So lastly quick overview of the small requests that we have. Tell us about uncracked challenges and related to quantum software. If you know how to get funding as an NGO especially a software foundation please reach out if you know video editing we'd love to collaborate for the Q con 2020 idea. Tell your friends about the mentorship program or sign up yourself if you're interested. And then we need help developing this QoSF gym for the compiler and simulator benchmarks as well as automating the project evaluation and if you have ever awarded prices for software projects please reach out. So if you want to get involved there's a become a supporter tab on the website. Basically what that means is that you're going to be put on a mailing list where we send out information like foster or like hackathon events or anything related to the quantum open source foundation. Join our Slack channel and this is the end of my talk and like I invite you to check out our GitHub and GitLab profile and follow us on social media. That's it for me. Thank you. It's okay. Thank you. It might be a bit off topic but I'm just wondering if there is such a thing as in 3D there is the Utah teapot and in programming there is the hello world that you write when you are a newcomer to a field. Is there such a thing in quantum computing with like a hello world first step that you could like devise and if not then it would be desirable or bad ID. Just wondering this question for everyone I guess. Yeah, I would probably answer in a way that there is hello world examples but they are very specific to the particular hardware that you're looking at. So like for example, Righetti has their own hello world example. D-Wave has their own hello world example. There's actually a question on the quantum computing stack exchange at some point. Like what's the hello world equivalent for D-Wave and I wrote a big answer to it but like it's really hardware dependent and like even like software dependent depending on which tool or framework you choose. So that's the unfortunate thing. Anybody else? There's one over there. One sort of comment challenge related to the hello world question is there are there are hello world problems in the quantum computing space but then there's sort of nothing after that and then you design your own algorithms so you if you're getting into it you sort of write the hello world. You go like okay I can make a circuit and then step two is all right start designing your own quantum algorithms and quantum machine learning and there's no like all right now that you've written the hello world let's see if we can add two plus two and and sort of build up seals from there and I think that's a stage that might also be missing and might actually be more critical is that you sort of need a a guiding a guiding track rather than just a jump from like I have written this code and it works to I now have to design my own or implement my own quantum algorithms. Okay so if I understood correctly the concern was that there's no good intermediate kind of level materials. There's well then at the beginning and maybe both at the end but not and I guess okay. Any any other questions? I guess we had time for one last question. Okay so let's thank Mark again.


Well, last time, Braynard and Alexandria met September 16th. A combined 93-point score and a Warrior 7-point victory. Since then, Braynard has won five of their last six, the Cardinals, and even three in three. It's playoff weather at Warrior Stadium tonight for the rematch in the Class 5A Section 8 Championship. First half, all visitors. Alex's Cody Faber takes this one in for the score. Cardinals all the momentum into the locker room up 14-nothing. But Braynard showed some life in the fourth. Charlie Garrett takes the pitch for the long run into the end zone. Two-point conversion good. The Warriors are within six. Defense then makes a stop. Next, Braynard drive. Garrett again down the sideline, right past the camera here. Just like that, Warriors take the one-point lead. Late in the fourth, then some more defense. They were stingy all second half. Michael Emthing has all day. What is picked up by Brady Anderson for the Warriors, deep in Cardinals territory. Then Gares puts the game away. They stamp their ticket to state. His third touchdown of the night. 23-14 Warriors, an incredible fourth quarter comeback. Braynard fans, put your party hats on. The Warriors are going to state 23 unanswered points to win by nine. Here's Coach Stolzky on the message at halftime to change the momentum. The game was up to them. I said, you're one of the toughest. One of the, this team is one of the toughest bunch of kids we've ever had here in my tenure, 43 years. And I said, we're behind, but it doesn't mean you're not tough.  And we made them one at a time. I mean, it's all a team effort and we just put it together in the second half and I made it in. It was awesome. It's so great seeing a game like that. As soon as I got it in my hands, I knew we won. It's just a great game. Started a little slow, but came off good in the second half. Good game. It was awesome. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


This is the animation minute Welcome back to an animation minute and as always start with jobs. There are a lot So we got Amazon games. We got Crystal Dynamics. We got mob entertainment the third floor 31st Union unreal staffing the believer company limit break worlds and worlds on told not sure if that's the same thing staffing ninja we have bad robot games here and There's a cloud chamber job posting Creative circle has one and moon active has also a posting and last but not least super seed studios is also looking for people Now for those who are in the game industry who are potentially thinking about forming their own studio here's a good tip here But I would go down there's a better resolution in terms of what to pay attention to not that I want to amplify someone's ridiculous Comments about the layoffs, but the threat that follows is really interesting in terms of what the work that people do in movies and TV shows and Game animation can do in terms of inspiration. I think that heavily outweighs what Matt was posting here So she go with the animation. This is super cool. I'm not the only one to think so This has almost 2 million views. It's really really neat also really cool I love that ending that's on bonkers animation nicely done This is always very satisfying and snappy, but I love that little bluey keychain. Here's a great reel watch your whole thing This is a minute and 22 long worth every second cleaners horse is back as always. They have fantastic renders and really nice squishy animation Here's one and then here's another one make sure to check out the Instagram accounts lots of animation posted there Moving over to some technical mechanical animation I love all the kind of like the moving parts that kind of wiggle around I love all that stuff and as it drills in some of the whole thing here as it settles and drops all that stuff Very satisfying. I love it. Here's another really really great post is by Pierce It's a great animation watch all thing with sound really nice performance another really fun piece That's a nice smears and sound effects as well. Speaking of props. Here's another one Really nice to like it. This is cool. I like this look very cool Here's a 30 second piece but all about walk cycles what to pay attention to go through into the translate posts I can't read this but it's really nice. I love tutorials like that. This is very cool going to 2d animation really nice I like it. Speaking of 2d. That is cool. I'm dynamic. I love it 2d effects Always something that is high on my loving list. These designs are absolutely my gem So cool including that one come on love that then we have seen the release of the vision Pro here is a post about accessories and goodies like that plus the Archive app that is all about Star Trek also some Batman in there But I do have the vision pro and the Star Trek stuff is absolutely bonkers It's really really cool. If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen this is about two minutes long But you can go through and look at models But also go through so many different even like these space nine is on there by different bridges and everything It's so so so cool If you're a Star Trek fan, you got a special and you got the Apple vision pro so cool speaking of mixed reality That is cool. I like that real-time lighting. That's neat. Then there is a new ghostbusters trailer for the sequel to the sequel to the sequel, but it's neat. I like it. We're back in New York. That's cool. Nice cast This is bonkers. Hold on. I'm a massive fan of a little miniature version of these ships This is great, but I'm a big fan of this design forever and this is so cool Here's another tweet by Edward here and he has a book coming out very very soon We have DreamWorks new movie Orion and the Dark that is now on Netflix. It's on my list I'll hopefully watch it this weekend and here are new images for that Christmas. This is by Simon Otto Let's check out the series here. This is the part 3 out of 4. No CGI really just means invisible CGI These are really really informative definitely watch them and what I talked about last week is now out The Kickstarter is running now. She says great. It looks awesome. Speaking of pixels. I love stuff like that Going from 8 by 8. Come on. I don't know pixels will there will never get old for me. I love it. That's cool, too Nice impact. Nice animation Great pixel art animation and last but at least this is cool I like the combination of the three aspect plus 2d flat pixel art. I know this is cool Anyway, I'll leave it at that. That's that animation minute You can tune in every week on Mondays and hopefully I'll see you around my channel


Thanks everyone for joining us and those who are joining us. We have Arjuna with us. She will be talking about outcome-driven teams and this is Priyanka. Thank you for joining us today. All yours, Arjuna. Thank you, Priyanka. And good afternoon, everybody. And today's session, I'll be talking about why Outcome Centre City is important and what is outcome-centric teams and how you can fix start this journey with your team. So before we start, a quick introduction about myself. My name is Arjuna Mali et al. I am an agile coach who works for SIX, which is a global mobility provider in Germany. So right now I'm settled in Munich. I started my career as a software developer long time back in 2006. And right now I am into coaching teams and organizations, almost eight years into it, and I thoroughly enjoy that journey now. The core values which I follow in my personal as well as professional life is I'm a really curious person, love to learn new things, experiment and leave things better than how I find it. So let's start this session with a small reflection from your side about this whole topic. So imagine you are going back to your team tomorrow or Monday and asking these questions. Who is your customer and what customer value did you produce in the last six months? Take a moment to reflect on this, what your teams would be answering. So these were exactly the same questions which I asked my team almost eight months back. And the answers which I got, it really left me speechless or perplexed because for the first question, who is your customer? Most of the teams, they were answering or asking me the questions. So as now who should be considered as our customer? Is it an internal customer or an external customer? So this made me reflect the fact that many times teams does not have a shared understanding about who their customer is. And for the second question, it was even more interesting because teams are answering with, okay, we delivered this feature, we rolled out this project, we built this API. These were the customer values which teams were talking about. So I'm pretty sure maybe many of you can relate to this. So why should you know who your customer is? Of course, you don't know who you are serving for, but most importantly, if you don't know who your customer is, how are you going to solve their problems? How are you going to serve them? An employment engagement survey which happened recently came up with this particular fact that employees who know their customer, who knows their purpose are better engaged in their work compared to the peers. Now I think this is something which we all can relate to. And let me tell you another story about this. So President Mr. John X Kennedy once in 1962, he was visiting NASA and he was doing a tool and he saw this guy standing there in the floor. And he just went near him and asked this question, what's your job? For which he gave an answer, Mr. President, I am helping to put a man on the moon. Now you imagine your organization, your team, know their purpose, know their customers and working in a bi-directional manner to achieve that. That's the dream. Remember, when you take a road map to your team, you're just asking them to build some features and giving them some timeline. However, if you're asking your team to think about outcomes, you're actually giving them autonomy where you're making them responsible and own their deliverables. So now that I spoke about outcome and what is this outcome I'm talking about? So outcome is a change in human behavior that drives business results. So this is a, this is this particular statement is by Joshua Frieden who has wrote this book, Outcomes Over Outputs. If you have not read it, I would highly recommend reading this book. That's the eye opener. In this, if you see, outcomes are measurable. Outcomes are observable because it is linked to humans. And this human could be anybody. It could be your external customer. It could be an internal user, an internal employee. Whom server is in your context? Now the question comes, how can you link your day to day work to these outcomes? So this is a very beautiful drawing done by Jeff Patten, who is the author of User Story Mapping.  The outputs generate outcomes. And the important part here is when used by the customers. So there is a human interaction which is happening and which generates your impact. What is your impact? Your company revenue, increase your user base, extended to some other countries, the business, etc. So you cannot jump directly from output to your impact without this outcome. And whatever output which are not used will not create an impact. Which is why thinking about outcomes and customers are really, really, really important. Now if you're thinking, how can you kickstart this journey? First step is to bring the awareness. So I remember in one of the previous talks in today's conference by Ashish and Sujata who were talking about the OPR. They were stressing the importance of outcomes and bringing the awareness. Exactly the same thing I would like to bring up here. Start with awareness. So in my organization, when we started this, people didn't know what was outcomes and what was impact. Many times, especially when you talk to leaders, they will mistake outcomes for impact. They will talk about product-led deliverables, migrations, etc. So we did workshops about output outcome impact, asking teams who your customer is and what value they are producing. And what we observed was after a few months, people started thinking about outcomes. They know what is outcome. It's not that they can influence it, but they know what is outcome. They can distinguish it. That is the first step to this whole journey. Now, what can you do next? So for this, I would like to give you the story of Shockknot. So Shockknot is an imaginary organization or imaginary company which owns an app which sells clothes online. They have only clothes and they have around 2000 employees. So they launched a new feature called the pre-owned, where customers can actually resell their used clothes, which is good because nowadays clothes are lying in the woodwork so they want to get rid of it. That's a good cause for the community. So see, Mr. Jack, he came up with a very ambitious plan to increase the revenue from the pre-owned feature to 0.5 million. And he communicated it to all his divisions, departments. So what product manager, Stephie, she was thinking, how can I take this impact? So if you see this is a revenue, we lose an impact. How can I take this impact to my team and how can I influence it? So she was interacting with two teams. So let's say one team is marketing team and one team is an app team. What did she do in order for the teams to come up with outcomes to realize this impact? She asked few questions to the team. The question, first question was, what are the customer behaviors that drives business results? So if you see this question, the focus is not on the features, but rather on the customer behavior. And many times you have data to support and come up with answers for this. Many times you might not have data. And asking this question can even make teams to think about, so what is the customer doing now? How is he or she interacting with the application? Is there a different way they can do it? And discussions around this. So this is the first golden question which you can ask your team or even we have asked our team. Now, then Stephie asked this question to the team. She didn't have any data to support. So what she did was she did a hypothesis. So hypothesis is something, a belief that if we do this, this can happen. So in her team, so the app team and the marketing team. So the app team thought that, okay, we believe that if the customer notices this button, because right now this button is not visible at all. And just in the UI, if that is more prominent, then people will go and use that. And marketing team probably they thought, okay, whatever is happening right now, customers are not aware. Let's launch and enhance our campaign. And I can give another example here. So in my organization, there is this app. As I said, it's a global mobility provider. There is this app where people can come and book cars. So this was based on a data analysis where we found that customers who are booking this car, actually, I think one step before ending the process, they're just not continuing. So the team did brainstorming and things coming up with ideas. And one thing which team thought was, okay, let's do a notification to the user just one day after asking them, hey, you have left this booking, would you like to reboot? And what we ran this experiment, I think, for almost two months and with some specific user groups. And what we found that around 70% of the customers came back and continued their booking. So now if you see the customers who forget about it or got distracted in their mobile, they could continue with their booking. And from a company perspective, the number of bookings have increased. So this is just a small example. So this is the way you have to think about the team. Now the second question, how can we get people to do more of those behaviors? So you can think of now you talk about the features. So this will also lead into an interesting fashion where people think about the goal of people changing their behavior. So sometimes it could be small UI changes. Sometimes it could be social media promotion or advertisements. It need not be your real feature. So these kind of possibilities can open up. So for Steffi, when she asked her team what was happened was some customers, customers may click on pre-owned feature if we enhance the button. So they decided to enhance the button with a different color. And for the marketing team, they decided to launch a cluttered campaign called clutter free botox. So when these are kind of ideas, which is like a minimal effort, but still you can change the customer behaviors. And the third question is, how do we know you're right? So when you run experiments, you measure it and then learn it. This is the cycle there. You just build and just leave the feature. Then you don't know what happened with that. That's what we are doing. We release the features to production and then you don't know what happens with that. Which is why exactly the experiment or A-B testing. So if you don't know A-B testing, it is the alternate testing or split testing, you would say, where some set of features are being tested with one set of users, another test with another set of users. So these are only very some ways. There are different, different ways to do this. However, the important thing is focus on matrices which teams can influence. So if you think about matrices like revenue, those are all impact. It takes a time. However, your product team can still figure out the matrices of the product. Like for example, in our example with Steffi and her team, the marketing team thought of measuring the share rate, which is something they can measure by the team themselves. App team decided to, okay, the number of times the users click the button, we know that maybe they will need to more bookings. So this is why it is always important to focus on leading indicators or matrices which the teams can immediately or very soon measure. And if you see here, these are some of the examples of the leading click rate, share rate, users per transaction. And let's take an example of Netflix. What can you measure? The number of the view time of by the users. These things the teams can measure by themselves. Or maybe two teams can collaborate to measure, but you don't need input from 10 teams to answer this. So the product outcomes or the outcomes leads to impact, use revenue, customer retention, bid use cost, et cetera, et cetera. So some tips from where we have started this journey. Step one, bring awareness to your team. For them to become outcome-centric. Start with a project where you can experiment. So if one team cannot influence the outcome, combine it. So in this case, if you see the marketing team and the app team, they combined created the outcome. And even if it is internal customer, it is fine. So I remember doing this workshop with HRT and asking this question about how they had this problem to increase employee engagement. Now, how can you increase employee engagement? That leads to very wonderful discussions. And data and experiments are your friends. So these are like your core. And maybe if the teams don't have access immediately, you have to kickstart this journey. So like any other journey, like agile transformations, or mindset or scaling, outcome-centricity is also a journey which takes time, depending on your organizational context and people. And what is most important is to aim for progress than perfection. So kickstart this journey with your teams. Tomorrow, ask this question, who is your customer and what customer value you're producing? So with this, I think I'm already on time here. I would like to conclude my short session. Thanks for joining me. And if you have any questions, please feel or if you've got to discuss this topic, please feel free to reach out to me. Thank you. Bye-bye.