So hello everybody, my name is Martin. I hope you can hear me, but yeah, it seems well If you're like me, you probably tried starting a lot of personal projects and never finished them and Yeah, you start all excited and full of energy but that gradually wears off and Suddenly you realize that you cannot reach the finish line it happened to me many times over and Curious thing actually happened on this latest personal project of mine It's called heroes of bronze and there the excitement never wore off And I was able to get back to it every day doing piece by piece until finally I reached the final stages and Throughout the years that I worked on it I actually learned quite a few valuable lessons I think and I distilled those into 10 tips that might actually help you start and finish your own projects But before I do that Let me actually allow me to play a few of the best shots from the project I think that I created over the four years and Kept me quite busy in the past four years But before I get to the tips, let me actually talk a little bit about myself Originally, I'm a 3D artist filmmaker and currently a cinematic director. I'm based in Prague and one of the biggest Professional projects of my career was Kingdom come deliverance and RPG game from Czech Republic And there with a team of several talented people. We worked on cinematics I also if you couldn't tell I work for CG boost where we with fellow artists We share our workflows there, so yeah, that's it about me, but let's actually get to the tips Because this brings me to the first one in 2018 I finished working on Kingdom come I left the company and I really knew that I want to create a short film something that would be mine And I could have it like check. Yeah, I finished a short film I had lots of ideas back then you can see some of them here I started doing storyboards for various fantasy projects I also had some unfinished Star Wars fun film business and yeah, I never never got back to it So I was considering that as well but gradually I realized that I want to work more on historical projects and I've done my fair share of medieval topic But right around the time of 2018. I discovered this amazing book series about ancient Greece and it's also when I first started working with blender testing various scenes and You can see Sorry, you can see that actually This first scene that I created in blender. It was back in the time of 2.79 And I think there the UI finally started working for me Also, I needed some free alternative for Maya back then so this is my first test that I did back then in blender And immediately I was hooked I knew that I want to make my short my future short film in blender and Yeah, I just wanted to learn all the possibilities of the software. I Started working on more assets. I started creating Various concepts some of them you can see here and gradually I realized I don't really want to do any any Fantasy stuff or any science fiction I keep I kept coming back to this ancient Greece topic and that's actually the first and I think most valuable Tip that I'd like to share and that's really pick something not because you think it will be popular or because it will bring you likes But something that you cannot put down that you like burn with passion for such a project and for me It was this ancient Greek topic Second tip is not this much fun, but I think as valuable as the first one and that's really once you're settled with your topic Create a schedule for yourself because we all think that we will be able to work on our projects in spare time But there's never enough spare time and gradually you let the project slide and then you never finish it So right at the beginning I created a little schedule for myself. I knew that few days in the week I will be able to work on it and Then I even increased it so that every day I did at least a little bit a little model little texture polished and animation And that that ultimately throughout several years helped me to finish such a large project So that's tip number two and tip number three at the beginning of your projects You should definitely discover new tools look around see what's new in the world of 3d graphics for me It was Blender back then so I was learning a lot of that But by learning Blender I discovered lots of workflows where I wasn't really good at I knew that I cannot create character meshes at least not very fast and not very nice and I also didn't know anything about rigging or animation and Also, yes creating clothing or sculpting that wasn't for me And I knew that I will have to use some specialized tools for that I made a little research and discovered tools by Reallusion They have this amazing combo character creator and I clone and there I could create my base meshes for all the characters of years of bronze I then send them to I clone where it was automatically rigged and even though I still know nothing about animation I was able to employ another amazing tool and that's Rococo suit So I invested in that and in combination with I clone It gave me the possibility to record hundreds of animations that I ultimately used on the project So so yeah all the characters moving even women in the short film. It's me That was fun And yeah, as I mentioned, I also used Marvel's designer I knew that I'm very bad at creating clothing and this tool helped me a lot Be that as it may Really at the beginning it's best to look for your flaws look for the weaknesses of your workflow Discover tools that will help you with that and then then put them into a pipeline Discover new tools up until a point because once you have your pipeline ready and here you can see see how my pipeline went Once you have this sort of workflow ready and you're fairly confident that you can do with it everything you need for your project Then stick to it and don't go into new tools every day Don't learn new stuff new tutorials because it will just slow you down So at some point I really recommend that you lock your pipeline Don't learn new stuff for example in my case It was geometry notes and I never learned that because I knew I have to finish my short film And if I started working with geometry notes, I would be changing stuff And it would just slow me down and I would never finish it again. So I refuse to learn it I still don't know it. But yeah, well, I'll get to that surely So but also you can see my pipeline here. So I started with some pre-production In Photoshop and some writing then went into blender for asset creation One thing I didn't mention is substance painter. I used that a lot for for texturing in combination with blender. I Used at the end of the pipeline after everything was assembled in blender and rendered out from cycles I used after effects to composite stuff together Fifth point I'm a fan of planning It doesn't have to be anything too difficult but I like to create storyboards for my short films or whatever I'm working on and I also like to create these sheets that you can see here I basically put their thumbnails of all the shots that I plan to do and I dice it up into several rows of information and Those then I fill with colors. It starts with red for not worked on and you go through orange to yellow like almost finished Up you and then you reach green at the end and it's amazing because it's beautiful to see it fill with green You can see there's still some yellow. Those are the shots that I still hate There's I will get back to it. But basically you will you're never finished with your project plan but Not excessively always leave some room for experimentation for example this shot I was messing around with mega scans just throwing stuff into blender scene And then I like put water in there and look kind of nice So I figured I have some boats I can put it in there as well and then I finish up the lighting and what started as an experimentation for one afternoon is One of the favorite shots of the short film for me And that really helped me push new fresh energy into the project And I cannot recommend this enough try to at least like every now and then try to do something that you did not Accept I expect that you would do and it will help you in the project ultimately and then go back to the plan So yeah, and if you have big projects that you're working on on your own It also has this hidden adventure this hidden plus that you can jump from task to task and always keep it fresh So that's also something that can help if you're fed up with one thing jump to another and then return to that previous thing Optimize yeah, I learned it the hard way Basically when I started rendering my shots, I realized I cannot render my shots because I was using 8k resolutions for textures and Yeah, so I learned that I have to optimize a lot and I recommend that you learn it beforehand not not at the end of the project Blender is fortunately very good with polycount so that wasn't much of an issue but Optimizing your texture resolutions is is a crucial point and when it comes to optimization It's also good to use asset libraries or anything that you can buy on the internet That will speed up your workflow for me. It was of course mega scans I knew I will have a lot of natural assets there So I I used mega scans a lot I used some stuff from kid bash that the Roman Empire pack and I just edited it so it looks like Greek stuff Blender is Blender is of course Famous for its add-ons, so I use them a lot I cannot recommend these three enough because they helped me fill my scenes with lots of vegetation So geo scatter botanic and vegetation. They saved me months of time. I think Don't forget to invest in render farm because rendering is very very long process often Unless you're working in with Evie and that everything is amazing you with Evie because it renders very fast But in cycles it can actually be a major cause of you never finishing the project In my case, I didn't really invest in render farm But I was able to string two computers together You can see my workstation here and while I was working on one computer I was sending the data to another one and there it was rendering I think if I didn't do that, I would still be rendering some of the shots. So yeah again It saved me months of time Ninth point is something more about motivation This point helped me a lot Because if you're working alone on a project, it can get quite lonely and then yeah You find yourself crying in the corner alone Nobody to help me and then when you start talking about it with your friends or you start Sharing your experience and results on social media There may come a magical point where people start actually asking when is it gonna be ready and when do post next image or stuff like that really helps you in your efforts and It brought some fresh energy that I needed at certain points of the project Also, what was amazing was that suddenly I started working on tutorials Connected to the heroes of bronze project. So even before I was finished with the short film I was able to teach some people my workflows and they were able to use it on their projects so that's that's always nice to hear and 10th point is knowing when to stop because I'm one of those people who could work on the project forever I'd be the first one to admit that there's lots of flaws I hate some of the shots for their animation close-up facial animations Also, the dynamics is something I have to improve a lot in future But at some point I realized that done is better than perfect and I had to stop I set myself a deadline and I stacked to it even though you could see in the in the axle sheet that there's still some shots that I yellow so done is better than perfect and Really force yourself to finish your project to a certain date And that's it. That's the 10 most important things that I think helped me in major way on this project And because of it, I was able to finish it. Thank you for being able to present it to you Thank you. I should I should I guess I should change the logo Twitter at this point But yeah, so here you can see the social media links if you want to follow the future of this project because I plan to continue it and If you want to learn my workflows, there's a lot of it on CG boost I have my courses there and on my YouTube that you can see in the middle There's lots of breakdown so more technical stuff is on my YouTube But thank you again and enjoy the rest of the conference


I has not seen nor ears heard nor come up to the heart of men what God has prepared for those who love Him, but God has revealed it unto us by His Spirit. My name is Andrés Bisoni and I'm excited to be with Hungry Generation at the Holy Spirit Conference on August 24th to the 26th at Tri-Cities in Washington. We're going to be coming together and we're going to be believing the Holy Spirit to bring revelations of the heart of Jesus, of His purposes for our lives and to empower us so that we may be able to fulfill His plans upon this earth. For more information, you may visit the website HolySpirit.tv or HungryGen.com. I encourage you to be a part of this event. God bless you.


as much as we love stuff we also hate stuff yes do you think do you think in this day and age it's still appropriate struggles yes absolutely I this was like I missed the days when actors were just like a lot of them didn't care like they would go in person and accept sometimes like it was it was a fun thing I like this like it was it was it was kind of standard you had your Oscar and you might get a rising like it was normal it was fun like bring back some fun I like it help me out here Fletcher but I let's look this up I think there was a year where there was actually an actor who got both like they won yeah an Oscar and a Razzie it's pretty pretty epic listen listen to me if you don't have stuff like the Razzie's or your worst list then it's like everyone's participation ribbon for doing a movie no no no y'all took my money I'm go I got something to say right and I told I told a struggle like I did not like origin I love some of it but I'm gonna be honest or you know what kind of forever you know yeah just because it's black and brown doesn't mean you get that body will pass so that's that's that's just all I'm saying man or the ghetto pass body will get okay here we go the da da da da da da Razzie's gnomes Chris Evans and Jennifer Lopez up for worst actors yes Shazam to an ant-man three tie with four oh my god wow that bad I didn't watch the zam to the thing is it actually if you compare it to the marvels no hmm or ant-man no it actually was a pretty standard straightforward entertaining a superhero movie but wow wow so a lot of people who got Oscars and really I'll bring that up in a minute save that save that okay here the Razzie's which aims to dishonor the least successful film of the year has announced nominations for its 44th edition wow that's that's that's awesome that's amazing that's amazing last year's Andrew Dominic blonde led the competition there you go that's probably the most recent one that got both it went on to bag the price for worst film wow I still haven't seen that have you seen that one of course give data review on it it's well deserved I heard it's pretty rough pretty soft core yeah the Razzie's found itself compelled to issue another act of penance last year naming a special word of Bruce Willis hmm after Willis and his family publicly disclosed actor struggles with aphasia a language disorder that caused brain damage Razzie's rescinded the category guess worst performance by Bruce Willis and on a 2020 wow okay yeah I mean maybe you still do movies you're still making us pay money you know but yeah you know we do love you Bruce okay so here's best pictures or worse picture here we go exorcist believer expendables for Meg to Shazam Winnie the Pooh blood and honey I've seen all of these really yeah I wouldn't give it to besides Shazam I would I would give it to Winnie the Pooh blood and honey personally it's terrible I haven't seen that one and I haven't seen it's expendables for I was about to say expendables for was pretty bad in comparison to the others yeah it was and the exorcist believer that was really disappointing what they did with the legacy character but yeah Winnie the Pooh blood and honey was just a question mark why why did anybody why it's terrible huh okay I would what do you think guys do you think that if you're there's no to me this is something as there's no such thing as bad press if you're in one of these films or if you're nominee for worst actor that's pretty good for your worst actor Russell Crow Pope's exorcist Vin Diesel fast sex Chris Evans ghosted they them make to John Voight mercy oh my what say you what say you struggles I'm gonna go with Jason Statham and Meg too because I watched it I thought he was gonna be in it like the whole time disappointed that we didn't get a lot of Jason Statham there a Russell Crow I was just like oh like you know you watch a film like you too good of an actor to be here that's that's watching the post exorcist haven't seen fast ex haven't seen ghosted John Voight mercy John Voight has been like phoned it in for a very long time so that's okay yeah all right okay well here's here's my take on this worst actor to me it's between diesel and Voight I think Russell Crow was hysterically entertaining in the Pope's exorcist with the Italian accent we loved it I can't wait for the next one that's it to me that's good bad fast ex and mercy no okay alright that's just me okay here we go oh controversy abounds with two count them three Latina actresses up for worst actress I think we're we're getting canceled this goes I'm right I'm writing a bigger essay for the for foreign article titled Latinos or Losers in Hollywood and I'm not happy with this worst actress struggles Anna to Artemis Megan Fox Salma Hayek Jennifer Lopez dame Helen Miran Jennifer Lopez all day long like I really was disappointed in the mother like what Jennifer Lopez movie in a very long time like she's just not she doesn't try anymore I swear she's the same person every film I mean I mean I've never I'm biased I'm never gonna give you the fact that they that she put her booty in that dress no that is a performance by by by the best derriere should she should she should win something not this she look that was a fun movie the mother was fun what's wrong that's the slantino award right yeah that's the slantino's yes yes best derriere by a Puerto Rican best derriere by a by a Puerto Rican yeah we gotta say like oh Salma Hayek had her had her like she looks so good we just can't put her she looked good in the movie so it was that's Salma is best geriatric mehikana all right listen I'm going here from what I hear I hear ghosted he's horrible so I might have to go with that all right but I am I'm dead dead against dead dead against Lopez and how and Salma Hayek being in this there's absolutely not these are women are goddesses and deserve better Jennifer Lopez or Megan Fox I have I can't say ghosted because I haven't seen it and I haven't seen the she's am but okay can we agree on Megan Fox okay we can give it to Megan Fox is Megan Fox giving them Megan Fox because I was sensing a little brown on black crime here you know we need to we need to unite by the way I don't see a sister in this one at all yeah cuz they be acting we're supporting actress Kim control Megan Fox again and oh listen it looked like we have some Asian representation here Balin and Mary Stuart Masterson hmm five nights at Freddy Larry's in that film um struggles what's a I love Lucy Lou so no I didn't mind Mary Stuart Masterson and five nights at Freddy's I'm gonna go with Megan Fox she could win she could win like violin cuz I did see Johnny and Clyde violin was you know but it's just Megan Fox I really didn't like her in expandables as an addition and just the acting overall it's just always the same okay and I don't know what that is I honestly I've only seen the bottom two Lucy and Mary I would never vote against those two their their sweethearts we're going with Megan Fox yet again yet again double loser here we go we're supporting actor Michael Douglas Mel Gibson Bill Murray Franco Nero slice the load oh all right break it down break it down girl I really expect him well from Bill Murray I'm sorry and I love Bill Murray like when certain actors get to a certain age I just want to think of them at their best like a lot like with the whole category for Bruce Willis like just I don't want to see my boys go out like that I was disappointed in his performance and I didn't really care for Michael Douglas either like it's between those two the Ant-Man and the wasp was just not great I I totally agree with you both every everything about that film was was was hot garbage whether it's when the quantum mania or any mania it's like garbage mania and yeah probably gonna edge out on that Bill Murray I think putting Franco Nero is really kind of like not fair you know like this is fine Russell Crowe was bad no he wasn't bad was wonderful stop it Franco Nero is is the OG so that's that's not nice we're screen couple so wait what do we say Bill Murray yes okay worst screen couple hmm all right any two merciless mercenaries expendables any two Monday money grubbing investors who donate to the 400 million for remake rights to the exorcist whoa wow wow any two any two any two any two than the that that donated that 400 million anodromous and Chris Evans who flung screen screen chemistry ghosted Salma Hayek and Cheney Tatum poo and piglet in as blood thirsty slasher killers and winning the poo blood and honey I'm gonna go with any two money grubbing investors yes donated the 400 million for remake yes dude they they they ruined it yeah you're absolutely right finally we really instinctually agree on a subject here because you've been wrong on a lot of them you haven't been right you're not right you're not right I was probably I was we have a couple we have a couple of here left here on the razzies hope you guys are having fun dual channels going on make sure you're subscribed to everybody here yes worst prequel remake ripoff or sequel whoa oh I already have oof and yeah man the last one to many of the exorcist believer expendables for Indiana Jones a dial of still beating a dead horse when did the poo blood and honey always gonna go with Indiana Jones so it's terrible I mean that's just like no brainer yeah you know that was a travesty travesties yeah that's a quick quick answer there guys that tells you everything all right worst director reese freak waterfield winning the poo David Gordon Green the exorcist Peyton Reed ant-man in the wasp on to mania Scott wall expendables for Ben Wheatley Meg to the trench at man in the wasp Peyton Reed that was terrible why would you do that yet all that money actually I actually this is kind of weird but why am I why am I thinking this one more so you think David Gordon Green had more say so and it was still terrible yeah I'm saying that I'm also saying that which one is it was a bigger you know betrayal going with that it's like it was pretty bad that ending was bad everything is bad I still hated the way that I mean in the last look I'm gonna go with that yeah thank you all for being here thank you Tyra for being here of course always so yeah vote we got one more worst screenplay the exorcist expendables for Indiana Jones Shazam oh Indiana Jones in the dollar go home now it's direct like this one we were intentional and messing it up can I go home now we're gonna go with Indiana Jones so yeah there you have it guys


Everybody, my name is Chris Morrill. I'm a Senior Product Manager of Technical Products at Amazon Alexa, focused on the books category of shopping and voice commerce, that intersection, and I'm here to talk to you today about a suggestive topic. When in doubt, seek them out and what the teaser is. We're going to talk about customers. We're talking about customer feedback mechanisms today. Brief introduction. Well, great news is that we can already check that off. We're going to do a little bit of contact setting. Then we're going to talk a little bit about a specific feedback mechanism that I've used in the past called advisory panels, and then we'll end with a little bit of recap. Now, just before we get started, the focus of my discussion is going to be on application. We're going to go through a little case study that's not fictional. I'm just drawing on examples from my product management every day life and the situations that I've run into so that I can share some of the things that I learned along the way, things that have worked for me, and honestly, we're going to talk about some of the things that didn't work for me. The point is that after this talk, I want you to be able to take things away from this and go out and try them. I love applied classes. My discussions are always going to be around applied classes. There's a key warning here, which is that this is neither mutually exclusive nor is it collectively exhaustive. There are many, many different ways of doing this. The purpose of this discussion is not to boil the ocean or present a theoretical examination of many possible frameworks for collecting customer feedback. I'm just going to talk to you about one that's worked for me. Customer feedback and you can start to read through on the left is an app called Discord. During a beta program that I ran, this was the bugs channel was always a popular place for people to go in and report problems. I use that to illustrate, as a PM, I want to maximize the value of every feature. I'm constantly making trade-off decisions between customer value, developer velocity, and time. By developer velocity, I might mean number of resources because resources is a lever that we can pull. But I'm always thinking about what is that customer value? As I think about that, customer feedback alongside some quantitative research data that I have, having feedback from the actual customer I find has been a way to help crystallize some of what the customer value is. For new product development, especially in the spaces that I've worked in where, yes, there are similar use cases that I could look to. There's innovation in adjacent spaces where I could take a use case. But when it comes down to it, finding the right product market fit in these new product launches, new technology innovation, I found that that's where going and just directly speaking to a customer when I was in doubt was the fastest way to be a tiebreaker in a situation when maybe two data points disagreed or maybe our design team was convinced that one specific approach was better than another. Customer feedback has been that way direct. Customer feedback has been that way that I've found, really helps. I've done this a couple of different ways throughout my product career. We're going to talk today about advisory panels, but as I alluded to in the image in the previous slide, there's also beta communities, which can be really useful ways of gathering a small subset, a representative sample of your customer base, your target launch customer base, and giving them access in a programmatic way, giving them access to early builds. You run into beta communities all the time, you're probably constantly opting into them. I know I always opt into the best ones with the best of intentions, and then probably never follow up on half of them.  Then the other one that I would say is post-launch engagement, which has also been useful to me just monitoring, what are the channels that customers might use to communicate with the company, the product team, monitoring those, and then just not being afraid to, if somebody trashes your product on Twitter, I mean, using judgment, but that's a place where I've gone and said, it sounds like you care a lot about this product. What's making you so angry? Sometimes some of those conversations haven't been as useful, but most of the time I take away at least an understanding of a customer's deep frustration point, and I tried to compare that to, did I miss something in my prioritization framework? But let's not get crazy. We're just going to talk about one of those today. Let's talk about a couple of prerequisites. Before we get anywhere down the road of talking about putting together an advisory panel, I'd be very clear on the target customer, because at the end of the day, when I'm building an advisory panel, it means that I've got a product in mind. I have a collection of resources and a timeline to deliver value with those resources that's in some way higher than the opportunity cost of whatever those resources could have been doing otherwise. So to get the most value out of an advisory panel, I have to be really clear on the target customer. Who are they? What do they look like? What do they like to do? What do they hang out? How do they talk to each other? How do they solve problems? Being really clear on the different dimensions of the customer, one, even earlier on, helps me identify what's the customer value, but then I can use those dimensions to start to pinpoint who are my early adopters? Who's feeling this pain point that I'm solving? Who's feeling it most acutely? Who's gonna be most excited that I'm solving this problem? And then here's where we get into some of the soft skills, reaching out and pitching them on participating in an advisory panel. I'll talk about that a little bit in a second. About the how, but then just sort of it, my tip at the bottom of pitching an early adopter or several is a great indicator for product market fit. Especially, depending on in the, actually I think I've found in both B2B and B2C use cases, early adopters are always happy to tell you that you're wasting their time. And the degree to which my target early adopters are receptive to a pitch asking them if they'd like to be a part of my advisory committee or advisory panel, helps me sort of gauge how close I am to product market fit. If in my email outreach or LinkedIn or talking to somebody on the floor of major conference or whatever channel I decide is the right way to approach early adopters. If in that first couple of minutes, they're interested, they understand the problem that I'm solving, they agree that there's a value to be solved. Then in that case, then I know that I'm closer to product market fit. If I'm trying to explain the product to them or trying to explain the feature, the value, the pricing strategy, and they're just glazing over, I'm not getting much traction, it can signal me to go back and relook at my value proposition and relook at the customer problem. So just a really great way to sort of assess risk early. A picture in the background is me and two other gentlemen pitching some folks in a, this is just a pitch competition in business school. Why did I do a pitch competition? Cause I had no idea how to pitch anything. I had done some persuasive speaking, but not a lot. So I just sort of use this picture as an example of, it was very uncomfortable, but I think it was just an awkward, when I was dressed up in a suit, I'm like tech, why? But it taught me how to present things and that I didn't realize at the time, but doing things like that subsequently helped me. So we got a little bit of, so what has this help aside from what I've talked about already in terms of faster achievement of product market fit and giving me some benefits in terms of feedback, which we're gonna dive more into. Another critical element of this, even if you didn't care about the product market fit is then thinking about feature launch. So establishing an advisory panel helps me enable the measurement of customer satisfaction over time, whether I'm measuring that in a survey or qualitative interview or click stream data, it enables me to start to measure a benchmark, which then helps me start to think about, well, what is the, how satisfied do these customers need to be to be willing to pay for it, ultimately? And how satisfied do they, or whatever the KPI is. I've worked on products where we, what I established was correlation between customer satisfaction and engagement over time or some measure of value over time. And then the third thing that I think is sometimes, sometimes overlooked or has been in my experience is that if you crush it, which is a completely technical term, but if you rock it in a beta and the folks in your beta product launches and they've got a sense of ownership, they feel like they've been heard during this beta, they walk out into the world telling everybody about it because they feel like it's not, it's not your, it's not my product, it's our product, that they fed into, that they, hey, check out this little feature. I gave the feedback, it's blue, because I said, red's an offensive color. And just sort of making that up, but having those early adopters turn into evangelists is very, very useful. And I'll talk about that more. It's very useful at launch and beyond when those early adopters turn into, in some way drive adoption of additional customers, whether it's through network effects or through sort of a head torso tail business where the head of the business defines what the torso of the business will do. We were to talk about this situation called Skill Flow Builder, this product that I shipped, but I realized that I would be amiss to proceed without describing what's an advisory panel, an advisory panel, simply put is like a small scale beta community. It is in a situation in which I'm looking for consistent feedback from a regular group of customers that represents the target segment that I'm gonna go after at product launch. I am looking for between three and five customers. In this case, I've used advisory committees in times in B2B situations where it's not feasible to have 200 companies participating in a beta, or situations where the customer's time is expensive or the customer is not easily accessible. And so representing finding three to five customers who are accessible or I'm willing to pay the cost of accessing them because they represent a broader market is when I look to assemble an advisory panel over a beta community. An advisory panel can be, sometimes I may be looking for more strategic feedback versus tactical feedback as in the, usually when I have executed beta panels, those are, it's more tactical feedback. It's a AB study, it's a, or it's a, you know, it's an AB test, it's a pricing study, it's a, you know, comparing one feature to another. And with an advisory panel, sometimes I won't, the, with an advisory panel, the trade-off is, most of the feedback is going to be qualitative, so it's going to be more directional in nature. Broad take away, advisory panel, three to five, three to five customers representative of the target customer that I'm going to go after. And they will assist in from the, you know, can be helpful as soon as I start contemplating a feature or solving a customer problem all the way through product launch and beyond. So let's talk a little bit about Skillflow Builder. So the goal was, notice this problem of developing voice interactive entertainment experiences was very difficult and was especially frustrating to professional developers who maybe come from industries where tooling is, industry tooling is mature and fully featured and usually available as a service coming into developing for voice interactive experiences where there was less tooling and they, and the existing tools were less mature. So the goal was, at the end of the day to enable development, faster development of these experiences for professional developers. And there was a key there of professional developers in that we were not for the purposes of this product, we're not going to tailor towards hobbyists or developers, a single person developing a small shop, somebody, a hobbyist, somebody not doing it for a living. And so our target customers were these early to mid-stage studios, some agencies and a key insight that we guided much of the early product development was discovering through some initial customer interviews that this is potentially obvious, this is potentially obvious, but that these customers have very low risk for unproven technology because they are in a content production flow where they want that production process to be as deterministic as possible. And when I say deterministic, I mean that the inputs and the amount of time and the output of a process is as there is as little variance as possible in differences between running the process, whereas non-deterministic process, I don't know, I can put it an apple and it comes out a carrot with legs, that's a non-deterministic process. And a horrific example, you can, a better example of a non-deterministic process might be if we're doing creative exploration. So in a creative exploration where we are brainstorming for a new, we're doing a brainstorm, that's non-deterministic, the inputs and outputs may not match from one brainstorming session to another and that's by design, great, excellent segue. So just this recaps a little bit, but so the advisory committee, we built relationships within Skillflow Builder, built relationships with three target companies. Important here that they were representative of the segment that I was pursuing because what I was looking for was fidelity of signal that at the end of the day, when I'm talking to the advisory committee, I want feedback from them that is representative of the broader market. And what we did is gave them a seat at the table. So involve them in early, early feature design meetings, early wireframing, we even involve some of them in some early brainstorming, helping them, giving them a sense of ownership as much as possible was key to them feeling like they could participate and that their feedback was heard and that they generally speaking understood some of the trade-off decisions that we were making which helped lower the perceived risk of them adopting the products that we were developing. We also, I found a great use of time with them was problem solving. If we identified a problem with really difficult trade-offs, one of the first places I would go is just reach out to them. In a previous talk, I discussed a sort of difference between there are scrappy and there are spendy ways to get things done as a product manager. And sometimes it's just as scrappy as reaching out to a guy on Slack or talking to a designer on LinkedIn and saying, hey, we've got this problem, this really thorny issue, hear the trade-offs. I mean, what do you think? And getting that additional feedback of someone outside the team who potentially would have to adopt this or use this in the future, gained some really great perspective. And then we couldn't always give them everything that they wanted. The backlog was always much, much longer than what they were, what we were able to deliver. But we were always explicit with them with why we were making, what was the prioritization framework? Why were we making the trade-off decisions that we were making? And that came to be very helpful, especially as we ended up expanding into a broader beta. What we found is that they would then answer questions for other beta members. So when another beta member might say, well, I really wanted feature X before I could even go answer that question or comment, someone from the advisory committee had already answered it, which was tremendously helpful. So let's just move out of the theoretical and into the actual, let's talk a little bit of a day in the life. And this is absolutely real. So on the left hand side, what you see is a syntax, a simplified syntax that's based around narrative and the expression of narrative interaction with an Alexa device where the interaction pattern is the Alexa device says something, the customer says something, Alexa device says something, the customer device says something. This syntax is built around facilitating that interaction. Early in this product development, the team said designers and writers will learn to use the SFB in this case, that skill flow builder syntax using code editors like VS code and exhibit A to your left. The product manager, who happens to have a bachelor of arts degree boldly states, no creative will ever write in this, never. The fervor of that statement, the passion, if you will, falls upon deaf ears. The team is completely unconvinced and is believes that the best way, the best path to market is to ship only modules and a state machine that process this syntax without any visual affordances whatsoever. Challenge accepted. So again, real life, said product manager, emails one of our advisory committee, advisory panel members and sets up a meeting with two of their designers and a writer to get some feedback on this syntax. That PM also invites the entire team to attend and has the designer, our team's designer, walk the members from the advisory panel, walk them through this syntax and get their feedback, which generates this verbatim. We will never, ever period, ever exclamation point write story in a code editor, which is why eight months later when we shipped the product, there was a React based desktop application that was an abstraction on top of that syntax. We didn't get rid of the syntax, the syntax was useful. And I will say, as much as it pains me to say this, truly it was the engineering team that proposed that. They did have the last laugh because not 18 months later after we had launched this product, a designer from that advisory panel company ended up saying that what she found so great about the product was the syntax. And she loved that she had learned the syntax. And once she learned the syntax, it gave her so much flexibility and freedom and she could work so much faster. And so it was on that day that I actually went back to the team and said, you know what, you were right. And if we could have just gotten more designers and writers to ramp on it, maybe we could have shipped without a visual editor, but I'm not sorry. I think some other things that the advisory panel did for us was certainly around beta testing. So once moving out of sort of an early alpha phase into sort of first requirements and the more formal beta testing, once we had collections of features available, they were very helpful as super users in those beta tests. And I had to be careful to not overindex on their feedback because they were already familiar with the product and its use cases. And so had to make sure that the betas were consisted of both members of our advisory panel, but also other companies that we'd solicited to make sure to balance that feedback out. But they're also phenomenal at pointing out edge cases that just aren't obvious to the team as we are building, you know, day to day, especially around things around different operating systems, edge cases in tech documentation or blind spots in our tech documentation. Open questions about, well, will you support this SDK or this SDK? What will you do when they say SDK is end of life? Those types of helping the team look ahead and come out of the sort of day to day feature development that can be very focused in the nitty gritty. That was really useful. And then also establishing that exit criteria, which I discussed a little bit as part of the so what, you know, the what is that CSAT threshold for not only what is the CSAT threshold, that's sort of the launch criteria, but by exit criteria, in this case, I'm talking about confirming my hypothesis on the mix of features that collectively represent enough customer value to overcome barriers to adoption. So an exit criteria saying we are, the product is we are ready to exit beta and to move into a launch, once we have X number of features and have met Y customer satisfaction, because those two things I am confident that if we have both of those, we will achieve product market fit and have a successful product on our hands. So this is a sort of the result of what happens at launch when you launch with an advisory panel. So this is a small company called Electronic Arts and they were members of the advisory panel. And as you can see in the verbatim, there's some discussion about around using tools for developing, in this case, they reference skill flow builder. And the results of sort of forming this committee and making sure that they were, they were with us all the way from pre-technical alpha, all the way through post-product launch was we went and instead of a member of the team or a member from management announcing the product at a industry conference, we had someone from the advisory committee or someone from the advisory panel announce and it was some folks from electronic arts that ended up announcing that product on stage and it was, the product was adopted and it was successful. And if as I looked back over the hundreds of decisions that we as product managers make over the course of a product's life cycle, I think about all of the small decisions that later proved to be impactful and the difference between the successful product and a not successful product was the times where I remembered a verbatim or stopped long enough to give somebody a call or send a text message and ask, hey, you know, what do you think about this? You know, how would you think about this problem? Ultimately what it did is it earned trust with the target customers because instead of trying to drive adoption from a perspective of you should try this, the adoption message was show not tell. Take it from these three customers who participated in this phase of product development, ask them. And having those verbatims helped tremendously. And this is actually a sort of an overview of the stage at the, that was at the industry event where it was announced. I think this was right before, right before it was announced. Just recapping in general what we have talked about. So just want to honor that talking to customers is hard, but it's worth it. I completely acknowledge and have experienced multiple times that finding those initial customers, zeroing in on them, walking up to somebody and saying, hey, I have this idea or, hey, I think this is a problem. You know, or, hey, talk to me about your experience with a problem, it can be a little, it can be a bit intimidating, it can be, it can feel unnatural. What I've found is that it's very worth it. And that there are many different ways to ensure that I've got the right amount of customer feedback as I go through the product development lifecycle. But advisory panels are one that we've talked about today. Again, about three to five participants who can talk both strategically and tactically. They're more valuable at the outset of product development as I'm, well, I'm still trying to refine feature requirements while I'm still trying to determine product market fit. And in fact, one technique to remember is that pitching early adopters can be a great way to get a indicator as to if you've achieved product market fit. Because if you have, you'll know, because you'll have really quickly, you'll have a short list of early adopters who want to be on your advisory panel. And then there's other ways of generating sustained customer feedback like beta panels and also monitoring post launch channels of communication. And then ultimately advisory panels have helped me launch many products over my product management career. And it is always humbling as a product manager to see where others have come together and contributed towards a feature or product that I'm launching because they leave their sort of their fingerprints on the product which to me is always inspiring. I'd always rather build products together when I just enjoy it more. So that's it. Thank you very much. Again, Chris Morrill, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, always happy to connect and continue the conversation. And thank you so much to Product School for having me. I always enjoy these talks.


For the record, NPR absolutely is U.S. state propaganda. American liberals are in an uproar over Twitter's recent labeling of national public radio as U.S. state-affiliated media, a designation typically reserved for state media from governments the U.S. is trying to topple, like Russia's RT, China's CGTN, and Iran's Press TV. In an article titled Twitter labels NPR's account as state-affiliated media, which is untrue, NPR's Bill Chappelle attempts to argue that his outlet does not deserve to have the same labels affixed to it as state media from naughty governments like Russia and China. Quote, Noting the millions of listeners who support and rely upon NPR for independent fact-based journalism, NPR CEO John Lansing stated, NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us in this way. A vigorous, vibrant, free press is essential to the health of our democracy," end quote. It is an interesting choice to spotlight NPR's CEO John Lansing while trying to argue that NPR is not state-affiliated. Given that Lansing spent his pre-NPR years as the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM. USAGM is the U.S. government narrative management umbrella which runs over U.S. state propaganda outlets like Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, and Voice of America. In a 1977 article titled Worldwide Propaganda Network built by the CIA, the New York Times explicitly names Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia as part of the network constructed by the Central Intelligence Agency to circulate propaganda. As fair.org's Bryce Green recently noted, USAGM received $810 million in U.S. federal funding in 2022, which is more than twice the amount RT received from Russia for its global operations in 2021. Lansing's history is not an anomaly. NPR is regularly overseen by executives who came directly from senior positions in Washington's official propaganda network. From 1998 to 2008, NPR's president was a man named Kevin Close, who previously ran Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty and then returned to that job after his decade-long NPR stint. A man named Ken Stern became NPR's executive vice president in 1999 and was appointed CEO in 2006. Prior to that, he was the senior advisor to the director of the USAGM's International Broadcasting Bureau. So, it is a bit funny that John Lansing is now cited complaining about NPR being labeled state-affiliated media on Twitter given that he has devoted his life to promulgating U.S. state-affiliated media. NPR receives funding from the U.S. government, consistently advocates the information interests of the U.S. government, and is routinely run by professional propagandists of the U.S. government. You could spend hours of your life reading through FAIR.org's NPR section to see the many, many ways that platform has exhibited wild biases to grease the wheels of the U.S. empire. If NPR is not state-affiliated media, then nobody is. In his efforts to argue that his outlet is not state-affiliated media, Bill Chappelle also hilariously points out that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended NPR as a wonderful exemplar of journalistic integrity. Quote, when asked about Twitter's decision during the White House's daily briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to address Twitter's content role specifically, but she also defended NPR's journalism. There is no doubt of the independence of NPR journalists, Jean-Pierre said. If you've ever been on the receiving end of their questions, you know this, end quote. Yeah, great argument, Bill. The White House says we're good, so we can't possibly be U.S. state-affiliated media. Defenders of NPR try to argue that the label is inaccurate because NPR only receives a small amount of its funding from the U.S. government, between 1% and 15%, depending on whose talking points they're reciting. But this claim is undercut by NPR's own claim that federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public, and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR. It's probably also worth saying that if I was receiving between 1% and 15% of my funding from the government of Russia or China, I feel quite confident that Twitter would slap me with the state-affiliated media label immediately, as it has so many others. If you've conceded that you receive government funding to any extent, it's hard to then argue that you are in no way affiliated with that government. It's probably additionally worth noting that NPR receives a massive amount of funding from oligarchs like Bill Gates. When you live in an oligarchy like the U.S., receiving funding from oligarchs is not meaningfully distinct from receiving funding from the state. But what's especially revealing is the reasons people are given for why the state-affiliated media label is detrimental to NPR. Twitter has labeled national public radio as state-affiliated media. A move some worried could undermine public confidence in the news organization, reads a tweet by AP. The tweet paraphrases a quote from PEN America's Liz Woolry. For Twitter to unilaterally label NPR as state-affiliated media on par with Russia today is a dangerous move that could further undermine public confidence in reliable news sources. Think about what they're admitting here and what they're not saying. They're acknowledging that this label that's been getting slapped on the media from nations which disobey the U.S. government undermines public confidence in those outlets, which means they know Twitter has been using that label to undermine public confidence in the media from nations which disobey their government. They're just not taking that understanding to the obvious conclusion. That this means Twitter has been functioning as a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. Indeed, the problem with the state-affiliated media label hasn't so much been that it exists, but that it will always be unevenly applied. The label gets pinned to outlets like RT and China Daily while left off of known U.S. propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Voice of America. This designation is also nowhere to be seen on other outlets which receive a far greater share of their funding from the state than NPR does, like the UK's BBC, Australia's ABC, and Canada's CBC, and the Saudi Press Agency. There is no valid reason why NPR should carry the label of state-affiliated media while those outlets I just listed should not. So, while NPR is unquestionably state-affiliated, the fact that it is the sole anomaly in Twitter's otherwise consistent policy of pro-U.S., pro-Western bias, is a pretty clear sign that this designation did not come about because of an interest in truth or facts. The explanation could be as simple as the fact that NPR published something that Twitter's new CEO didn't like, such as its recent article Dogecoin Prices Spike after Elon Musk changes Twitter logo to the Shiba Inu Dog, or it could be something even simpler, like the fact that NPR doesn't support the same politics as Musk. In any case, the state-affiliated media label is plainly a propaganda construct designed to suppress unauthorized speech and facilitation of the information interests of the U.S. Empire. If it was being used to promote truth and critical thinking, it would be applied to every mainstream outlet in the Western world, because all those serve as propaganda organs of the U.S. Empire today as well. While the official job of outlets like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia is to administer U.S. propaganda, their unofficial job is to give people the impression that they are the only kinds of institutions which administer U.S. propaganda. All this bickering and squabbling about whose voice should be uplifted as trustworthy and whose voice should be squelched as untrustworthy is just a manifestation of the fact that powerful people understand something most ordinary people of the public do not, that whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you can exert control over the way people perceive reality, then you can control reality itself. Until the public becomes more aware of this fact, our lives will be subject to the whims of oligarchs, government agencies, and mass media propagandists. Not until then will we be able to awaken from our propaganda-induced coma enough to shake off the psychological manipulations which keep us marching to the tune of oligarchy and empire, and use the power of our numbers to force the emergence of a healthy world that benefits us all.


Greetings and welcome to Math Help for Science courses. In this video I am going to go through and discuss scientific notation calculations. So how do we go about doing calculations using scientific notation? So what we want to do first is to review a little bit about what we mean by scientific notation. So let's quickly take a look at that. And what we mean with scientific notation is that this is a way to be able to conveniently express both very large and very small numbers. In science we often have numbers that are much larger than we are typically used to using or that are much smaller. And because of all of those zeros involved in those it makes it much more convenient to express them in scientific notation which is based on powers of ten. So when we set up a number in scientific notation we split it into two parts and these are going to be multiplied together. So we take the digits term and the exponential term. And let's look at a quick example of this. If we take the number ninety three million not too bad to write out but it still does have all of those zeros. We write that as nine point three times ten to the seventh power. So we've split this up and it gets much more convenient to write these numbers and to be able to do calculations with them as we will see today. In this case we have the digits term here nine point three and the exponential term is ten to the seventh power. So let's look at how we go about doing some calculations with these numbers. And we start off here. What we really want to do is work with each term individually. So we don't want to work with them together. We're not going to work with them all at once. We're going to work with them individually. So we're going to work with each part of the number in scientific notation. And what we want to do is to first look at the digits term and get those combined. Then we're going to combine the exponential terms together. And finally we want to bring it back into what we call standard notation meaning that there is just one number to the left of the decimal point. And I should say one non-zero number to the left of the decimal point when the final number is written. Now these can be done very easily using a scientific calculator and you can do it all at once putting the numbers in there. And I will show you briefly how that can be done towards the end of this lecture. But let's look at doing a couple of them by hand first. There's a little bit more to it this and it depends on whether you are adding the numbers or subtracting the numbers or whether you are multiplying and dividing. There are a couple of different steps. So let's look at examples of each of those two. But first if we want to look at an example of addition or subtraction let's look at the steps that we need to take. So if we are going to add or subtract numbers first of all we have to make the exponents the same. If the exponents are not the same you cannot add or subtract them. So we have to let's look at two examples here. Let's look at our first example and that is 7.5 times 10 to the third plus 4.8 times 10 to the third. Now in this case the exponential portion is already the same so there is nothing else to do. We can just leave those alone as they are and add them together. So we would have 4.8 plus 7.5 gives you 12.3. So we just add those together and then our answer would be 12.3 times 10 to the third power. However this is not in standard form. So what we want to do is to convert this into standard form and that means we want only one non-zero digit to the left of the decimal point. So we have to move this digit one place and that means that we then have to adjust the exponent a little bit and we have to change the 3 into a 4. So our final answer would then be 1.23 times 10 to the fourth power. So if we add 7.5 times 10 to the third plus 4.8 times 10 to the third we would get 1.23 times 10 to the fourth power. Now let's look at an example where we do have to change that and we'll be looking at a subtraction example as well. So here we have 4.7 times 10 to the negative fifth power minus 1.8 times 10 to the negative sixth power. Now we have to convert these to be the same exponent. So that means we have to change one of these numbers to make the exponent correct. So we can do this with either one of them. It does not matter. You can change either one whatever you find more convenient. Let's try changing this one and let's move our decimal point one place to the right. That will make our exponent more negative so our exponent will go from a negative 5 to a negative 6 which is what we want to match this one. So then we can write this number instead as 47 times 10 to the negative sixth power minus 1.8 times 10 to the negative sixth power. Now the exponent is going to be the same so all we have to do is do the subtraction. 47 minus 1.8 would give us 45.2. So our answer would then be 45.2 times 10 to the negative sixth or converting it into standard notation. So let's move the decimal point back one place to the left that increases our exponent from negative 6 to negative 5 and therefore gives us our final answer which would be 4.52 times 10 to the negative fifth. So those are just a couple of examples of how you can go about adding the numbers. So let's write our answers over here for the bottom one we just did that that was 4.52 times 10 to the negative fifth. For our first problem when we added the two numbers together we got 1.23 times 10 to the fourth power. Now that's how we do addition and subtraction. Let's look at some examples of how we would do multiplication and division. Now when we're going to multiply or divide these numbers it's a little bit different than adding or subtracting. What we want to do is to first of all multiply the digits together and then we have to either add or subtract the exponents depending on whether we are multiplying or dividing. If we are multiplying the numbers together we would add the exponents. If we are dividing them then we would subtract the exponents and of course as always we reduce it to standard form. So let's look at our first example. We of course first of all we multiply the digits so 5.38 times 2.58 is equal to 13.9. And that's what we do those just using again just the digits portion all we did was multiply them together. Now in this case we are multiplying so when we are multiplying 10 to the seventh power times 10 to the negative fourth power we are going to add the exponents so that becomes 10 to the power of 7 plus a negative 4. Now if you are adding a negative number that is the same as subtracting so that would be 7 plus a negative 4 is the same as 7 minus 4 or this is 10 to the third power. So that would give us our answer as 13.9 times 10 to the third power. However it is not in standard form so let's adjust that again and we want to move our decimal point one place to the left change our exponent increase it by one because we moved to the left and that would give us our final answer and that would give us our final answer of 1.39 times 10 to the fourth power. So this problem would equal 1.39 times 10 to the fourth. So let's clear this so we can look and do our last example here and now let's look at our final example and what we want to do now is divide two numbers we have 2.86 times 10 to the negative third and we want to divide that by 8.58 times 10 to the sixth so first we divide the digits so 2.86 divided by 8.58 is equal to 0.333. Now we have to do the exponents if we are dividing then we want to subtract the exponents so we have 10 to the minus third and we're dividing that by 10 to the sixth so that is going to become 10 to the negative 3 minus a positive 6. So negative 3 minus 6 becomes negative 9 so this becomes 10 to the negative 9th power and now we will have our final answer of 0.333 times 10 to the negative 9th. However as with the previous one we do have to convert that back into standard notation so our decimal point in this case we do not have a non-zero number to the left so we have to move our decimal point one place to the right that makes our exponent change by 1 so it's going to go from negative 9 to negative 10 and our final answer once we've converted to standard form would be 3.33 times 10 to the negative 10th power so this becomes 3.33 times 10 to the negative 10th and that would be our answer for this one. Now let's look briefly at how we can do calculations with these using a scientific calculator and we give an example here of a website that you can use so this is an online calculator that you can use it does not depend on what kind of system you are running you can go to the website linked to here and that will open up this calculator and allow you to use it. Now how do we go about using a scientific calculator for these types of calculations? In reality it depends on the specific calculator everyone is different on many calculators there is a key label double E or maybe EXP and there are multiple variations of those and other things that can be used as well but the key thing is that you want to use this scientific notation key here you do not want to use the multiplication key so even though we write out a number as 2.5 times 10 to the third you do not use a multiplication key when you enter the number when you get to this you would use the EXP key so what we would use on the calculator here to see is you could enter a number here 2.3 and then you would use the double E key in order to enter that so 2.3 times 10 to the 16th minus 9.0 times 10 to the 15th you are using this double E key instead of the multiplication key and then you just enter your number another example 6.0 times 10 to the 18th gets written as 6.0 E18 and that E again comes from this double E key the other numbers you would enter exactly as normal but when we write it this way or see it this way in the calculator then a 6.0 this means this part means for example 6.0 times 10 to the 18th that is simply the representation in the calculator and it is that double E key is what you want to use you never want to use the multiplication key when you are entering scientific numbers in scientific notation into a calculator so let's finish and summarize here with what we have gone over today and first of all we talked about scientific notation and reviewed that a little bit it is a way to more conveniently express the very large and very small numbers that we use in science classes we work separately with the digits and exponential portions if we are doing these calculations by hand you have to separate out the two and do some work there combine them and then take them apart do the calculations and then combine them back together if we use a scientific calculator however this can be done in a single step so that concludes our discussion of calculations using scientific notation we will be back again next time for another topic in math help for science courses so until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class