So, one thing I want to talk about is the product categories page. So if you click on the first link there, that is a page that we've been using for a long time now at GitLab, and in the beginning it was a way to tell folks, especially within GitLab, what each product area is working on. And so, for example, we always tell people who are triaging issues and so forth, like, you know, assign this team label, blow it all up. So this page has grown in usage. And one of the uses is that there's this thing called categories as well as stages as well as features. So there's a hierarchy. So if you click on the other thing there, which is a link there, there's department stages, categories and features. So departments are dev versus ops and then stages, which are the seven stages, or I guess there's nine now if you count everything. There's categories and then there's features. And then at one point there was capabilities. And I don't know why we, I think folks in product marketing and working with CID said that they didn't want to have that level of complexity. So basically, there's these four right now. And so if you were paying attention in Slack about like half a year ago, you saw like, I think it was Mark Fletcher was working with CID to get everything into something called features YAML. So that's also related there. So if you click on features YAML, it's a really messy list right now at the moment of a lot of features and part of this taxonomy and then so we're slowly cleaning it up. And so there is a bunch of uses for this, for these four categories and in particular features YAML.  And so for some attributes, we'll say like some really obvious things like, is it which tier it is in? So that's pretty obvious why that's useful. And then there's things like, who are the competitors? There's even like an attribute for like ROI and stuff like that. And the reason why there's all those attributes is that this source of truth, features.yaml is driving a lot of different pages on our website. A lot of the product marketing facing pages. So for example, it's driving that product categories page, maybe not obvious. Well, it actually wasn't before, but now it is so that that's good.  So it's driving a lot of those things and then there's product comparisons with other competitors and so on and so forth. So that's why you'll see comparisons as well. Like you'll see like GitHub and like another like Jira and stuff like that. So if you search for issue boards, there's one entry there and then it'll say like GitHub is partially, Bitbucket is false, Asana is false, Jira is true, CA Adrocentra is true, Zebia Labs is true. So all that is driving all this other things. So it's a bit crazy right now. I don't know the future of it if we're going to keep using features YAML, but it's I think it's one improvement because I think we have a categories YAML. I believe so. I'm pretty sure we do. So that's already improvement from just having features YAML. We have a categories YAML and what else was I'm going to say, so this was brought up because Sean pinged me on letter B on a recent plan categories change that John Jeremiah. So if you look at the product categories page, it shows you like all the stable counterparts in all the other departments, right? And so product marketing for plan, actually for the entire dev stage is John Jeremiah, if you notice that. And so I've been working closely with him to clean up the categories. And so you'll see things, for example, like we have our categories are the big one are project management, the big ones are project management and agile portfolio management. And we have other things like Kanban boards, which is sort of weird. Like why is why is that feature called out as its own category? And that's just to really differentiate it and say it's a category and not a feature, even though it's sort of not really true. But we want to be able to do like comparisons and communicate with the industry that this is a thing for us. So some of these are driven by multiple needs and that's one of them. Another one is like service test, for example, and that's sort of weird for a category again. So we might roll that into a different category in the future. And then we have things like a value stream management, requirements management and quality management. So that is also illustrative of the purpose of these categories in that we actually might not have any features in these categories. So for example, value stream management, we know what we want to do, but we don't have actually a lot of features there at all right now. And even less so for say requirements management and quality management, we don't even know what's really our vision and that's something on my homework list to do and I've been working on the past couple of weeks. But those areas are, we just are not competing there. But the fact that we're already putting it in to our product categories serves multiple purposes, one of them is communicating to the industry. We recognize these things. We care about these things if you want to contribute or you want to send us an email about it and ask us about it, of which customers do. Then it's there and so that's serving one purpose and it's also a signal. For example, right here it says on the product categories page it says value stream management, requirements management and quality management are planned 2019. So it's telling the market that these are things that we're interested in next year. So that's why it's serving all of these purposes. So that's all that to say that won't impact day to day your work. We're still building features and it won't even impact, as I know right now, the documentation. So you can think of where would it even impact? Even documentation, I don't think there's a clear plan yet, especially from a documentation team, on how we should align categories. I think it would be nice, but there's just so much debt to clean up from just categories perspective and then the product marketing side. And then we hired a new CMO recently. So I expect there's a lot of change there that is going to impact the website and maybe impact some of these categories and so on and so forth. So that's why it will probably be a while before it will really impact this team here. But it's just good to know how we're communicating with the wider community. And so the one thing I can see perhaps it would matter would be when we're naming things, right, when we chose the word epics and it took a long time. And then the next thing we're going to start naming is are we going to call them subepics and I think we don't want to do that. And when we do requirements management, for example, are we going to call them requirements? Are we just going to call them issues? Because we're unlikely to invent a new thing, a new object, to satisfy the requirements management piece, right? And so that would be relevant here. So I wanted to just highlight that. If no questions, Sean, you're up. Yep, just a couple of things. The first one is that we renamed functional group updates to group conversation since the last one we did, but we also made what I think is a very good change, which is that they apply to the whole stage group. So the front and the back end, the UX product management quality people working on plan rather than just a team, which is like the plan back-end team. And so this is our first one. Since that happened, the way I've been doing it historically is using GitLab pages and this JavaScript library that lets you write your slides and mark down. I'm hoping to change in that, but it looks like we're doing that again this time. Pedro is volunteered to help out with the conversation so that even the presentation part is more conversational and it's not just one person going through the slides. If anybody else would like to help out there, please post on the merger quest. Otherwise, feel free to post stuff. I'll be working on this throughout the rest of this week. So if there's anything you think we should include that's notable that we've done in the last eight weeks or that we're going to do in, well, I guess the next eight weeks, but maybe that's a bit too far out in some cases, then let's mention that. And yeah, Victor, I think you said you were away for that conversation. Is that right? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, Pedro and Annabelle, I see as well, which kind of makes sense because it's two days before Thanksgiving. So I'm assuming it'll be quite a quiet one anyway. But yeah, I'll see if other people are interested in participating too. I'll be up for that, Sean, by the way. Okay, excellent. In conversation, I'll be updating the content. I already got the things. I just haven't gotten to it. So I'll be updating a couple of highlights and then I'll be up for participating in the conversation. I wanted to ask, what did you feel about yesterday's Create, the format of having the conversation jump across three people? Was it good or? I haven't actually watched it yet. I missed it. You mentioned something on the Create. I think you will watch the slides then. That's fine. Yeah, I read the slides, but I haven't watched it yet. So yeah. We just split it up into three stages and we each took sections. So how did it feel as you were part of it? It felt natural. I think we were expecting more questions at the end. But that also means that we covered a lot of ground. I don't know. Cool. But it was smooth and we covered pretty much each part very well. So I think it went well.  So I guess we have the three of them. Yep, sounds good. The other one is just a really minor item. So throughput labels are a thing. Throughput labels is probably the wrong term. We're tracking throughput as an engineering team. What that means is that we're just literally counting the number of merge requests by team in different categories. There are some questions about how those categories work. So for instance, we don't currently have one for documentation, but we probably should have a separate one as opposed to putting it in backstage or feature or undefined because it's really its own specific thing. But those feed into those charts, which I've linked to, I personally am not going to be using the charts for much initially. I think the idea is to just start tracking it and getting the data and then go from there. But if you create a merge request, just try and make sure you include the plan label, first of all, because I'm not leaving going to see it if it doesn't have the plan label, probably. And one of those throughput labels, if it applies, if you include more than one, that's fine. There's a priority ordering. So community contribution is also a feature. We'll count as a community contribution, for instance. But yeah, there's not really much to say on that right now. I just wanted to, Pedro's asked if it's a small change as a feature proposal. So feature proposal means any positive, I know that's not the right word. Yeah, feature proposal also covers enhancements, I guess, is the best way I would say that. So we're actually considering renaming the label to just feature because feature proposal doesn't really make sense for a merge request as much as an issue. But yeah, we sort of discussed whether we wanted to track that separately from an enhancement. I think we decided we didn't care right now. So what's backstage? Is that like tech debt or? Yeah, backstage is tech debt, but also stuff like, gosh, what's a good example? So I've been using it for things like, say, Yaka makes a change for ethics in E. And she needs to make an equivalent change in C. You could say that's tech debt, but it's not tech debt because we haven't actually accrued any debt yet because we're doing it straight away. But it is a backstage change in the sense that no user will ever notice this change. This is like just work that we have to do that is. So I would have thought that would be another feature proposal or one because the first one was here. I mean, I don't know. So if the e-emerge request is a feature proposal in this case, but Yaka needs to refactor some common code in CE as well, the separate CE merge request. The CE merge request itself isn't really a feature because CE doesn't change behavior. It just changes like its internal structure. That's what we mean by that. Tech debt definitely fits in backstage as well. Just to be clear, the backstage is like a super set of tech debt for things that aren't. So it's very code specific, which I think is the point of this exercise. Yeah, I think essentially it means if the merge request wouldn't have a change log entry, then it's probably backstage. That's a good way to think about it. Because our danger bot. Andrei has asked about multiple team labels on MRs. Yeah, there's a question here in the issue. I've already commented there. Yeah, I wanted to hear more of your thoughts, Sean. I mean, especially because we discussed there, but is there anything else that you want to add? Because I definitely want to have both of us in sync. Yeah, basically what I'm trying to express in that issue is that I don't think we need to care that much. Yeah, if some overlap, it's not going to be that many overlap. Just double turn, it's fine. Yeah, it's probably fine. There are some legitimate cases where things might overlap, and I think that's OK. Maybe if we ever implement label sets where you can only have one of a particular label, maybe if we change these to custom fields, for instance, the team, then that will be an issue. Yeah, this won't be solved until the tool forces it to be. Right, exactly. I don't think we should be wasting spending too much time on the tooling around that that is in the lab, because I think it's kind of an edge case. So yeah, that's all I had. Kushal, over to you. Yeah, so I just wanted to discuss around the design proposals that we have in mind for scrolling the timeline of whole Matthew. I believe it is already under discussion like what approach we want to go through with. But since it is scheduled for 11.6, no matter which approach we go with, like having a button to scroll the timeline or having a scroll bar, it would require back end effort for the both type of design that we approach with. Like it would need to hit API no matter whether we scroll or whether we click on the button. I think that if we go with the button approach where we would click on next or previous just to shift the timeline by the duration that we already have to step ahead or a step behind. In that case, there might not be any back end work needed because the API already has support for query columns for start and finish dates for the epics. But if we do go with the scrolling part, then it will require some effort both from the front end and back end because we would want to assess how much user is scrolling and how much we want to show. Instead of just user basically scrolls a bit and then entire timeline shifts one step back or one step ahead. Just basically wanted to start conversation regarding the UX of how we want to approach this. I think we're leaning away from the infinity scrolling because it's just gonna be really janky when things pop in. On that note though, I am still drowning in discussion regressions. So I haven't had a chance to look at this and I'm out next week for like 10 days. So this wasn't marked as a deliverable. So I wasn't really high on my priority list, but wait, is it? No, okay, thank God. Yeah, label is missing for deliverables, but milestone is set to 11.6, so yeah. Right, I think it's going to be a button, but I don't see the UX being finalized in time for this release. Okay, let's look at, I'll share my screen, why don't we use this time to manage the portfolio management stuff? So... Yeah, we still have a lot of time, so. So this is a great feature. It just goes to this board, if you noticed. So we're doing this, we're going through this, which is great. So I think Kushal is still working, so we're sort of cheating for Kushal and I guess Felipe maybe, where you folks are still focused on portfolio management. So that's the case, for portfolio management, it would be, this one would be highest priority and then going down here. So if we don't get to this one, I think that's fine. And, because we do still have, for example, the promote one, I guess that's only back, I'm remaining right, and I'm just looking at. So Kushal, do we need to rearrange anything or are you gonna run out of things to do, which I never wanted to tell anybody that. So in case we are unable to do this scroll timeline thing for roadmap, what we can do is that either we already have something that needs to be prioritized and find that one, or I can include one of the items from our epic refactor and include in this release because out of the items that I'm covering for 11.6, this one appeared to be the major one earlier today. And you just wanted to have a good handle on the UX because it's a major one, right? That's totally makes sense. So why don't we do this, Kushal? Let's talk about this one in a second and I'll put in our agenda and have that be like the big deliverable even though we want it to be small, like the big one that is crucial. And then this one, the UX is pretty much done, right? It's just copying the UX from the other things and then this UX is done as well. So I wanna leave this here because it's in the list and then when you get to it, let's insert the tech that things, not tech that, yeah, the refactoring thing that you wanted to do. So let's not move this. And then so for Edible, that's the same message for you, right? So this would be the highest priority for UX design. And then I think we talked as they were, you're working on subepics anyway. So don't worry about like getting this ready if you don't get to it. Does that work for you, Edible, as well? So you said that you're away next week, so we're gonna have to make sure. Yeah, that works. Okay. Who's the UX attacking the attached an Epic to an Epic? I didn't see anyone assigned though. That should be Edible. So do you want me to assign to you, Edible? Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, and so yeah, let's talk about that right now. So this one is, what did I, oh yeah, promote issue. Okay, so yeah, let's talk about that afterward then. So this one is, the reason I created this one is because we really want to be able to, we already have this, so this is not new. So maybe I should add this to the Epic as well. We've already been talking about of Epics Forever and Edible's been doing a really good job of doing the design and thinking about all the edge cases. So it's ongoing work. The reason why I created this separate issue is we really want to be able to ship something really, the smallest thing as soon as possible so that we can demo it for an analyst and get on a report very soon. So that's why, and these reports are once a year, right? So if we're able to demonstrate, we have functionality essentially for, where this would be falling is if you go back to here, like product categories. And if you look at, if you look at this, which is Agile Portfolio Management, and I don't know where this goes to, okay, this goes to a product page. Okay, so there's a lot of words with no links, right? But then Agile Portfolio Management are supposed to be doing these things. But what really matters at the end of the day is there's like a couple of key features in portfolio management that analysts and customers will mark highly on. And one of them is having multiple layers of things, right? We're calling them Epic, so customers will call them like, or different tools will call them like Epic's features, issues, stories, tasks and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, just having the ability to have multiple levels is what's crucial to us scoring high on this report. And so we want to help the analysts check that checkbox. And so we can't really do that right now. We have Epic's and then issues, so that's maybe like a one layer and then we have tasks under issues, which is like half a layer if you think about it. So it's not really convincing. And so in talking to private marketing and sales, we're saying that or private marketing, John especially asked me like, can we ship something in time for a demo so that we can score high? And so my thought is that we're so close in terms of a design, and we don't need to be able to do the whole thing with the roadmap view, the visualization. Can we just be able to ship the minimal functionality? And even though it's not gonna be really awesome out of the gate and it wasn't gonna be anyways, but the fact that we can have multiple levels, then that would enable those folks to check the checkbox and enable us to demo it. So when we say multiple levels, it's just like an Epic can either be a parent or child, fine. So you can just have two levels of Epic's basically, like this is a parent Epic and it has these children, or this is a child Epic and it has this parent. Would that be fine or am I a bit confused about how many levels we have and how many extra levels we need to get basically? I think the working sort of number I'm using is like five levels because it should be at least one level. Then that's like four. Right. And then the reason I'm coming up with five is pretty arbitrary because three seems reasonable and you wanna have more than three, right? And then like four is an even number and five just like looks like a new one. Like that's what I mean by arbitrary. And I mean five's prime, so it's a better building block. Prime number and it also, if you look back to one of animals earlier designs, again, it's going back to strategic initiative and then feature and then or maybe Epic, right? So strategic initiative is like the CEO thing, right? And then the executive thing and then breaks down into like maybe three, four or four Epics and then those are like departments and then each department might have multiple product managers or project managers and then they build down. So maybe like five. I'm just thinking of like an org chart almost. And so that's where I'm getting five from. And then for this issue specifically, we don't actually need to show those five layers all on one page. We just need to demonstrate that it can be five. So that's why in my proposal here, I'm saying can we just have like the ability to add here? So pretend this is an Epic right in my screenshot here and just to add something. And it's not an issue, you just add an Epic. So you can add an Epic, you click on the Epic, you can also add another Epic. And so when we're demoing it, we're just showing that, oh, look, you can add like five Epics and that's enough. But we don't actually have to show all five, you know, like literally on the same page, it will be nice, but then that's not what's crucial. What's crucial is that we have functionality that you can have five levels. Where are we limiting? Just to be clear around the limiting. So if they are just related, it's fine to do whatever because there's no related, just means related, right? For groups, we limited at 20 nested groups, I think. And I would be reluctant to go above that without testing it because the way we calculate the hierarchy is reasonably efficient, right? But we don't wanna push our luck, essentially. But 20 should be like, I mean, maybe I'm gonna sound like Bill Gates or whatever here, but 20 levels of Epic should be enough for anybody, right? Like. So that's another reason why I'm using just the number five is also to illustrate, because I know there's been on-court conversation about we have to constrain it, we can't be totally crazy. And I don't, I think we should leave it unconstrained from a user perspective. And then Pedro probably disagree with me, that's fine. But then there's all these technical reasons why we shouldn't. So it makes a lot of sense. I told Admiral yesterday or the day before that I think it makes sense because we probably wanna constrain it anyways. So let's, if we're gonna build this here, then we probably need to constrain it because if we don't constrain it and then somebody adds like a hundred and then we take that away from them, then that will be terrible. So we can't do it. So my point being is that this, let's build something that's the smallest thing that is possible. And I think the smallest thing that's possible is just literally just attaching an Epic to an Epic and then having a parent pointer. Maybe you don't even need the parent pointer because in the demo, we're just going one direction. And then, but the unfortunate thing is we probably do need to build in the constraint somehow just to protect ourselves. And that's not for the purpose of the demo or the MDC, but it's the purpose for not giving the people ability to have a hundred levels of Epic. Well, what's the main issue with the 100 levels or more? Well, there's the technical constraint is I think that's the obvious one. Yeah, we don't know how that will perform. We don't know that it will be a disaster, but it seems like risky to assume that it will work fine when we know we had performance issues with subgroups initially. So from a technical perspective, like Victor said, we'd rather not impose that constraint on someone after the fact, but there it is. And even if it's a fairly arbitrary constraint, like if people are hovering for like more than 20 or whatever, or more than five or whatever. It's much easier for us to test that once we've got ourselves in that situation in the first place. But it does mean that like Victor said, we're doing work that we may not need to do, but that's fine because we're iterating. So like- Yeah, that was my point. Okay. And for UI, for UI is also very much more manageable as a first iteration. Right. Well, if we were ever going to show these in like a tree view, you're gonna have to- Yeah, the UI part, that's the part that Victor was hinting at that I have a bit of a strong opinion. Yeah, and so, I mean, like we can argue that's a different thing. Yeah, exactly. So I think the ability, like if you tell me, like Sean, oh, it's fine if they create infinite epics inside of epics, I'm fine with that. Technically, as you said, it might not be the best thing and for numerous reasons, but then the interaction in seeing all of those epics together and encouraging people to have that kind of structure, I think that's the experience problem. Right. And so there's two, at least two points here. So there's two discussion. One discussion is we just have to do a good job of designing this and for, like, I mean, visual design, technical design and like just product design in general. So that is ongoing discussion and, you know, Annabel is leading that from a, you know, UX design perspective. And then we should all support her in, you know, what that is along the way. So that's quote, unquote, one stream of work that's ongoing and that should be high priority because, you know, that's strategic. And then so I see this particular issue as a sub stream of that main stream of work that we need to do as soon as possible. And so that's why I purposely created a separate issue for it. So to highlight that fact and then put on the mouse on 11.6. So the demo is gonna be January 18th, I believe. And so what I've been telling people is that if we do this in 11.6, obviously it will be available on gilab.com and that's great. If we don't have it ready for 11.6 and we do it for 11.7, it will still be available likely if we meet the freeze on time and everything, right? So that's why I put it as high priority 11.6 by one that's informed the team that there is a buffer there but we want to do this as soon as possible. And it's also the reason why, if you look at this, it's sort of inserted in some other things that we said we would want to finish. So that's where we're at. I have a question regarding the epic. Can an epic be, can an epic have two variants? Ha, that's a great question. I just pinged Annabelle and Pedro last night. I have not checked my notifications. Right now the answer is no, currently. Well, no, no, no, no, no, right now the answer is there's no design for it yet. So, but my assumption up to last night was that, was the answer was it shouldn't have more than one parent. I want to challenge my own thinking but I'll let Annabelle and Pedro answer that right now. Oh, I didn't get that. Is it on Slack or was it an issue? I put that in an issue somewhere last night, so. Okay, I'm thinking no, but I need to read the issue. It should only have one parent and multiple children, only one parent. Right, right, like a tree. Exactly like a tree. Yeah. Is there any use case that you were thinking, Andre, that it might be helpful to have multiple parents? No, I was just thinking about in terms of UI whether we'd have one parent or multiple. That was my question. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, so I'm thinking whether I should start branching off to a new topic. Probably not.  Let me, yeah, let me just go for it because it's like, okay, let's at least figure out, make sure that everybody's comfortable with this because this is important. Like, I mean delivering this. So, like, is everybody comfortable with this from a design and like implementation perspective? Is it reasonable that we can ship something in 1.6 at latest, 11.7? Does that make sense? Yeah, if we're just doing this basic kind of copying of the issues, I could look into something else, but right now that seems reasonable. And like you were talking about a pointer to the parent issue, that's not necessary, but we could just add it in the sidebar like we have that milestone thing and the issue we could add something to the epic. Yeah, like the design-wise, I think it's, we can just reuse that, so that should be obvious, but my thinking was that you could, we can literally recreate this whole box and call them epics and put them right underneath, right? I was thinking either that or just literally do this and you can paste in epic as well, but then we have to like change these words and these counts, which might be messy. So that's my first UX pass at it, so. But yep, that's it. So if that's fine for everybody, I really wanna talk about multiple parents, but I'm gonna control myself and maybe- Oh wait, sorry, just one more thing. Now might not be the time to talk about it, but I think it would be great if we could finalize the UX this release so it could be developed sooner. I mean, I know we have not buffer, but I don't really like to push our luck with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So- No, no, of course, yeah, so. I have a few more days once I finish all the regressions and then I'm out for like 10 days and then I come back. Pedro, is there anything specific that you, any opinions you have on this right now or do you wanna think about it? I'm sure you have a lot to- No, I only have one. It's not showing more than one level. That's the only thing. Other than that, you can do whatever you want. We're just doing one level deep at a time, I think. That's the bare minimum MVP show direct child and that's it. Oh, I didn't see that written there. Well, I mean, that's a suggestion at least to keep it as simple as possible. Okay, yeah, yeah. No, if that's what you're thinking, I agree, yeah. I think it needs to just show one because if we start thinking again about like showing the whole tree, then that gets into the broader- The design and discussion. I don't wanna make something and then change it. Yeah, right, right, right, right. Other than that, I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion of above or below. I mean, if we have a box as Victor was suggesting, like maybe have a box of epics below the issues, it might be slightly easier to miss if you already have something like this and you might miss that feature. The same could be said- Put it above. Yeah, or put it above. The same could be said if you turn this box into epics and issues that could also be easy to miss. I don't know, but I don't have a really strong opinion. Is there like budgets? What do you think will the issues, the epic will have more issues or epics? Because if it's less epics than issues, I'll put the epics first, because then it's less of a jump of issues. And the other point I wanted to make in terms of UX is I'm totally fine with one level. I completely agree. From our perspective to implement, I think we just need some guidance on how to show limitation once you're five levels deep or n levels deep. How are we gonna show the user that and add any more there? That's just sort of- Just don't show it.  Yeah, just put the limitation 20 levels deep and don't show anything. I never get there. So we can do the box, but then they'll be asking, where's my box? Yeah, I think that's a good- For some groups we just know, right? Right. For starters, that'd be fine. Yeah, I mean, if it's literally just an MVC, and our level of shame is really low or high or whatever direction it's supposed to be, then I think it's fine. Even just sticking a box above or below, I think it's fine because for my purse, to me, that it'll come up with something amazing anyways, and so we're gonna come back and reinvent it anyway. So I don't see it as a huge waste of time or anything like that, the fact that we put that in. Of course, we're gonna have to refactor it later on, but to me, that's not a bad thing because our goal is to show this off to an analyst and have us be on a report. So there's a lot of value in that. That's something new for GitLab, right? But I think there's a lot of value in that. All right, I'll take that. I like your idea of putting the parent epic in the sidebar because that mimics what people could be expecting in terms of the structure. It's unfortunate that it's separate from the child, from the children, but we'll fix it later. That's how I see it. Like, I think. And I see in the future growing that to the depth. So you'll be able to see not just the parent, but you'll be able to see like the five levels up later, like way later. I think I saw that in a mock-up that Annabel showed earlier. So I thought that was really very useful and simple, which is nice. One cool thing that it'll be nice to have if people reach the limit of five, 10, or 20 epics is to send something in the usage ping or something to us. So we know, okay, there was this one instance that reached 20 epics or these 20 instances or 100 instances and so many people are reaching the limit. That could be helpful. For us to understand that maybe 20 is too few epics. We're doing five though, right? We're five, yeah. You keep saying 20 and you're freaking me out. Yeah, I was saying 20 just because, yeah. Let's, it can be five, I don't care. Are we saying five now, as the limit? I think technically it could be more, right? Sean can comment, but I think UX-wise it might be wise to have five because maybe you don't want more than five, like you don't want like 10, right? Because there was also the UX concern about not letting users go crazy, right? So I'm fine if you wanna just set it at five or three, like, no, if you say three, I'll argue with you. But like five, I would not argue. I think that we can, we should let users do what they want, if technically feasible, but the experience should encourage a certain behavior. So like if we designed the experience to encourage having just one or two levels deep, and it's like we're on purpose making it not that easy to have a 100 level deep tree, I think that's already enough. But if users want to go through the trouble of creating 100 epics deep, unless again, I think it's just technical. Okay, yeah, well, I don't wanna drag this too long. So I'll let Annabelle and Pedro fight that out because I was getting from Annabelle before that she wanted, Annabelle, I'll just let you answer. Did you want to like hard not let customers do users more than five, or do you wanna do what Pedro was saying, like encourage not more than five? I think I originally did want to put a limit on it, but that's when I was thinking in terms of sort of stripped agile pyramid style. But I don't think we need to, I'm leaning towards, you know, let them do what they want. But for this, this tiny portion of the whole epic, I think limiting it to five, I quite like that idea because then if we do expand it, then it'll be a good thing. And like you said, if we go down, it would be a catastrophe, I don't know what people would do. Okay, so let's just, let me just update the issue right now. And one more question. Andre said, would you expect an epic to have more epics or issues? I think issues, but was there an answer to that? Would you know, Victor? I would say I agree with Andre. Well, there's no answer. I don't think there's a clear answer because we don't know how people are using this yet. But as a project manager, would you think it would be more issues? Yes. Well, unless it's the, it's the inner nodes of the, if it's the lowest epic, like the leaf epic, then we have a bunch of issues. But if it's the first one, you can have a lot of epics inside and no issues. Right, right. But in that case, that's fine because you should always have epics first, in that case. Right, because that will always work out because if you have a lot of epics, then you'll have like no issues. That you could probably do some interesting statistics. Like if you have a high number of child epics, then the probability of having a high number of issues is low. If I'm just thinking about the tree, literally I'm just thinking about the tree. I think it's a safe bet. So just epics first, right? Okay, I'm just gonna write that in the issues. Or just randomize it every time you refresh the page. I like that. I'm just kidding. Flip a coin. I agree with Andrei, epics first. I'm just not sure and I'll let you Annabel figure out what's the best interaction design if it's to have merged lists, two separate lists, like epics above and issues below. I bet there's some things to explore there. Okay, so I don't know if I have to job in nine minutes and I'm frantically trying to slack somebody. But anyways, I'll move on to the last topic, which is a promo issue to Epic Quick Action. So I just wanted to ask where we're at on status on that issue, because I thought we were actually gonna merge it for 11.5. And so I just wanted to know that if it was blocked or something like that. Yeah, so Yarka and I worked on that one. The front end and back end were done, like the basic functionality of the feature was working, but Yarka figured out like the back end changes that requires an entire promo action to go through were quite complicated and it required some basic largest changes basically, which is why it got set from the release. But again, Yarka would know better what was the blocker which pushed it out of the release. Thanks.  Just the exit. The type of thing I was talking about earlier where I need to refactor stuff in the scene. So Yarka is, well, it looks like it was last pushed to like pretty recently, so she's still working on that. Yeah, but I'm clicking through the environment to see she's put something in 24 minutes ago. So that's great, as long as it's not, it's ongoing work. So that- Yeah, it's not stalled. Let's not block by anything, it's just needed more work. That is great. I mean, if you look at our kickoff talk, that was only one that missed the only direction issue that did not get merged. So I think people like Sid and Yoke and Mark care about that. So that's great for the planning that we were able to do every one except one. So I think we had like five or six direction issues. So it's really awesome that we got everyone but one merge. All right, and so I'm gonna go ahead. Yeah, just asking one question. From the previous milestone, we added the possibility to filter by none and any, which one is the new option? Is it the none? They're not new, they're just renamed. It was just like no label before and now it's just NO and E. And then actually there were some cases where I think it was missing. And so there was just some gaps in various places inside Gillab, like search bars and like issue boards and stuff like that. And then a couple of community contributors. I think one of them is a, two of them are core team members, I think. Jacobo and George. Yeah, so I basically reviewed a few of those community contributions. So we introduced any option to milestones. So earlier it wasn't possible to look at the issues which have at least any milestone assigned. So right now, up until then, what you could do is that you could select milestone filter and then select none. And it would show you the list of all the issues which do not have any milestone. But what if you want to look at the list which has milestone assigned, no matter which milestone. So that's where any comes into the picture. So that was the new feature that I did. Cool. Thanks for your show, that makes sense. All right, so anything else we should talk about? I'm gonna stop myself from talking about multiple parents. That's it. All right, I will put this up on YouTube. All right, thank you everybody, bye now. Okay, except wrong.


What's up everybody? Jason here from jaspyscasebrakes.com. We're giving away a 4,000 NT 3k spot giveaway with this 2021 Panini Prism Sella one box break Random teams number one. So again guys the way this works is first we do the break. Randomize the 30 customer names with NBA teams Remember no better in common ship, but we're gonna rip open the whole box and at the end of the break We'll take all 30 customer names Randomize them and the top name wins that four thousand dollar spot for only one forty seven ninety nine So let's do the break first. Here's a dice roller With of course the customer names right here from Sean down to Gretch There you go. So this is for the break first. Let's roll and it is a three to five eight times. Good luck one two three four five six seven eight One of the eight times Dimitri down to Gretch. So again, this is just for the break eight times here one two three four five six seven And it was a eight right? Phoenix Suns down to the Houston Rockets All right, well, I'll go through all the teams just because it is a whole box But maybe we'll just don't keep the trailer in the post Dimitri with the Suns Gretch with the Jazz Sean with the Pacers Gretchen with the Raptors Lewis with the Thunder Chris with the Kings Lewis with the Lakers Kevin with the Celtics Gretch with the Bucks and Bulls Lewis with the Clippers Alan with the Mavericks Joe with the Pelicans Bennett with Spurs Alan with the Warriors and Nuggets Dimitri with the Wizards Ruben with the Pistons Lewis with the Blazers Gretchen with the Nets Brian with the 76ers Dimitri with the Hawks Kevin with the Cavs Gretchen with the T-Wills Lewis with the Magic Gretchen with the Hornets and Grizzlies Sean Kirkham with the Nets or Nick sorry Jason with the heat and Gretch with the Houston Rockets So again, this is a whole cello box guys, so I thought it was a pack, but actually it's a whole box So like I said, we'll probably just keep the trailer in the clothes because it is just a filler box Stick to what you got Let's do the break and of course we'll do the randomizer as well to see Who gets the 3k spot It's a whole prism cello box The cello of the pack always gets stuck at the bottom of this. I've noticed in this prism nicely centered as well red white and blue That's sweet. There you go. Whoever has the Lakers again. This is a whole box break Lakers Lewis with that one It's pretty nice. All right. Good luck guys. So we're gonna kind of skim through this as most of this is gonna be base John Wall Silver Green Jay Crowder Xavier Tillman rookie and Niko Manian I heard he's actually like in Spain now, not in the NBA Tristan Thompson Patrick Williams. He actually tore it up yesterday in summer league Bertons, Jonas Valentinas and killing Hayes instant impact Silver Jaylin Smith Anthony Edwards, very nice Tyler Hero Gordon Hayward Sadeek Bay Jordan Clarkson Bobby Portis Sabin Lee Silver Pashall, Keras Lever, Malachi, Cassia Stanley Miles Burgess, Jamaias Ramsey Danny of Deja, Tyrese Halliburton, that's nice Jada McDaniels Luca Stefan Curry Silver Ooh and a Lamello Green. That's awesome right there Charlotte Hornets, Gratchin. There you go Gratch Very nice box already. Very very nice Paul George Lamarcus Aldrich little USA doing Wade Onyeko Konglesadik Bay Brian Forbes Dorian Finney Smith and Donovan Mitchell Dominance Isaac Acoro, Tyrese Maxey Vince Carter Ricky Rubio Cassius Winston Silver rookie Deandre Ian Payne Pritchard There you go All right, so there you go. There's that right there pretty nice so far and then you have the red, white and blues Luca Isaiah Stewart nice precious Achua Vernon Kerry Jr Devin Vissell Emanuele Quickly, some good rookies in here, Steph Curry, Udoga Zabuki Cole Anthony and Aaron Nassman. This is a great box Sort of been a great personal Did Bowman baseball come out yet? Bowman Chrome, I think that's supposed to come out in a week or so Two weeks maybe but Bowman baseball it came out like like, you know five six months ago Uh, Dimitri was going on brother. We have to sell out those fillers, but that's pretty much it I think we have to do one of each filler twice So so far we've sold 13 spots already The fillers that you see on the website like the one I just did right now We got to do at least one more of each of those so honestly man It could be later tonight, and I think if not the latest tomorrow Since we sold all the spots straight up already. I think we sold 12 spots straight up And like I said the rest of them were sold in fillers So I'm about to give away a spot right now And then like I said, whatever other ones are remaining still on the website But we're really close It could be later tonight or like I said by tomorrow. Yeah, perfect. Yeah So once we sell all those out like I said, I think we might have to do one more of this one And then I think maybe one more of another one, but that's it. All right guys, so there you go Very nice box right here. You have all these rookies in the red, white, and blues And you got hallowburn, rookie, lamello, green and the Edwards base and athe, lebron, james, red, white, and blue And of course all these other silvers, greens, rookies, etc Alrighty, so let's switch things guys And like I said nick has already posted up another sell-out box again We have to do a couple more of these other fillers But again, we are super close for selling this out guys it could go tonight But if not the latest tomorrow, I think it's gone So let's continue that and again, we were supposed to give away a spot here So here's the dice roll. Here's the customer names again Remember customer name at number one gets that spot in the $4,000 break Good luck roll Two and a four six times called good luck number one after six times gets the spot one two three four five six Boom, Gretchen, congratulations, there you go So Gretchen after six times you get a spot in the $4,000 break So again, another one of these breaks has already been posted Again, I think that's the last one we have to do Including all the other ones that are on the website So again, we're getting super close guys, so let's continue to sell these out I appreciate you guys, jaspyscasebreaks.com


Swarm intelligence, SI, is a collective behavior exhibited by groups of simple agents, such as ants, bees and birds, which can achieve complex tasks that would be difficult or impossible for a single individual. This article was authored by Yenneve Elchuler.


The visualizer's got non-verbal signals or they're tap, tap on the board across the modeling. Who are your teachers in your school that are struggled with the remote teaching? As we know, hand signals makes a big difference in the pattern, but they're virtually all though. Hurry up, chewing them in the bin, that type of stuff. So use hand gestures is the first question strategy. So it's not the number of questions, it's the type that feedback and assessment has to be timely. So when you pose the question matters and how you respond and what's the third planet in the solar system, really important to have that pause because it gives you from a work in low memory time to digest what I've said. So hand gestures, pose the question, pause. Behold not the technique called gaze. Now I've got my little teacher screen behind me here. It's like you do physically. So I've got my little camera over here. I can now talk to you over here. So add in more data. All these things make a difference. All I've got are two versions. Version one, seven times something equals 28 and make it even more powerful. I'm emphasizing the important bit we need to work out. Eye contact, pride of your video matters. Now the danger is you're gonna be limited by teams, Google Clashroom or Google Me. If you're watching on a desktop, I know that my camera is in the top right corner. If I point down there, that I am interacting with the slides. And let me give you a cheap alternative. One in your purse, one in your classroom drawer, one at home, put it over your webcam. So suddenly I can do right kids, watch me. So this is my little academic background and when I do my doctoral research, my supervisor always says, so what? What does it mean? Now I used to do that one so what? But I've now learned that if I go there, it's so what over there. Right, now what we're gonna do and what can be to do about it? So hand gestures, if you've got the pause, you've got the gaze back, got the video size on your screen, the visualizer, then you've got non-verbal signals or then tap, tap on the board. Plus the modeling. That's the modeling. That's the modeling.


for United States government small business innovation research or also known as SBIR program awardees. Rachel's expertise and experience makes her a valuable asset to any startup or to a small or medium-sized business. She has a proven track record of success in leading large-scale projects developing and implementing business strategies and building and managing high-performing teams. Prior to founding BVV, Rachel led numerous large-scale projects worldwide, checked us out Tesla, Inc., including the company's first Gigafactory, flagship showroom construction in Japan, a $1.2 billion state compliance program launch, and a $37.5 million education and workforce development initiative. Wow. In addition to that, Rachel's 30-year Navy career included key posts at sea and ashore, such as principal advisor to the chief of Naval operations and the master chief petty officer of the Navy. So without further ado, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce every one of you to Rachel Costello. Rachel? Right. Hi, everybody. Rachel Costello here. Super excited to be talking to you today and talk about one of my passion project, which is customer discovery. So whenever, should I go ahead and start, Nick? Yes, you should. Share your screen with us, please. This is going to be a very interactive presentation, so please feel free to come up and ask me questions or drop a question in the chat box, and then Nick or Michael will take care of that. So what you learned today is customer discovery concept, business model canvas, creating your persona or avatar, interview basics, assumptions, validation, and interacting with total strangers. Like I said, if you want to ask questions, feel free. You have time to do that between lectures or use the Zoom chat box. I know Nick's already told me about me, so I'm not going to deliver here. But I want to think I'm going to ask you right off the bat is asked each of you in this workshop to write down who your spirit animal is. Mine happens to be border collie. So I'm not sure what Nick's is or Tammy or Michael, but for all of you in this webinar, please just drop in what your spirit animal and maybe Nick or one Michael will read it off to me. It's just a little icebreaker. So we'll get started. What is customer discovery? So customer discovery is a secret sauce you often hear about behind every successful startups and businesses. And why do we need customer discovery? Because you know what, it's tough enough for all of us in each of you to be a startup or business owner. You need a process in order to make sure that you're tracking your KPI and watching your business grow on scale. Startup failure rate unfortunately stands at 90% of a business formation to five years on. And businesses fail, and I will not belabor you. I'll just go cut to the chase and go straight to why some of the start businesses fail. It's because they executed a business model without validating the ideal solution. Basically, built the wrong thing. The number one reason for failure, you built the wrong thing. So if you built the wrong thing, you're going to hire poorly. And you're going to lack focus as an owner or startup founder, and your sales will suffer because your sales team have no idea what they're selling. So as you can see, becomes a daisy chain effect of failure. So about according to the study done by Harbor review, about 4000 companies that have failed. That's exactly what happened with them. They built the wrong thing. And they built the wrong thing because they didn't talk to any customers or users to see that was what people wanted. Let me talk about some of the case studies here. You may remember some of these big name companies blockbuster Kodak and even taxi services. Each of these industry and companies share one thing. They failed to continue the customer discovery. Once they had the market and our product market fit down and they had the market share. They failed to keep up with the customers needs and desires. Blockbuster was doing great. Every blockbuster in that each store in every state and most of the towns, but eventually you got caught up by Netflix, and they went bankrupt. Why, because they failed to keep up on the needs and the trends of the market and their customers. They had 99.9% share of their film processing for many, many years. Nick and I were just talking before the webinar started about Polaroids, but codec also failed to keep up with the trends, the digitization of images. So once that got became a mainstream codec to fell because they felt to do continuing to do the customer discovery. The story behind the taxis, the old days of large uncapped cars, rude drivers and very sketchy operation in the taxi industry was caught up by the ride share, the Lyft, the Ubers, and now we have a cruise taxi, roll up taxi right around some of the cities like in Austin, San Francisco. They failed to keep up with the customers needs and desires because they thought, well, customers are always going to need taxi. Yes, but they did probably not predict the rise of the ride share industry. Some of these may be familiar to you. The codec had their disposable camera, although it's coming back now with the younger trends, younger assets. You have Blackberry, who was the market leader at one point. Even Apple had their failure when they brought out their message had the Newton in the early 1900s. They all failed because they kept failed to keep up with the customers and also to continue to customer discovery. A little bit about me and my stories. The reason why I teach this webinar and this workshop. The reason I start doing customer discovery as a business is because I too failed to talk to my customers and gauge the market. It's a medical device as my first startup. In fact, it's probably somewhere in the DAV archive when they interviewed me for my first PVC. It failed because I did not talk to my customers. I also started doing wargaming because I was one of my roles that I had in an AB. That too failed because I didn't talk to my customers. The software startup that I have founded with my co-founders, we had a great product that could have gone very far, but we didn't do customer discovery. So I want to just point out that I'm passionate about making sure that your business and your ideas grow and scale. And I hope that you can learn from my failure and use that to your advantage. I'm very fortunate over my 30 years in an AB and also in the last 10 years as an entrepreneur because there were people that believed in me. People that gave me resources and people that connected me to resources in capital. I'm excited to give it back to all of you in the fellow PVC fellow, the several American veterans to learn from my mistakes and hopefully this will be a starting point for your successful business. So think of customer discovery as a continuous and arduous journey. Many businesses that I just talked about earlier failed because they didn't want to do customer discovery. Customer discovery can be very tedious. It's not sexy, but you know what, it's really, really important.  People that want to give you money and you increase your success fivefold. I'm not sure there's a baseball man out there, but it's one of my favorite codes, quote, that was given to me by my mentor at capital factory in Austin. And everybody has will to win. What's far more important is having the will to prepare to win. So think of customer discovery and customer development as preparation for you to win. If you haven't seen this business model canvas, it's available for you for free at the strategizer, which is a company that started by August riser that developed us. It is a, I would say a living document, a business plan, if you will, to allow you to plan your business by going through the blocks and make and writing down what those, what your plans are for each of those blocks, and by completing down nine blocks, you could have a potentially a very viable business plan. To create a nonprofit space, there is another model canvas called the mission model canvas, and this is designed for social impact nonprofit organization that may not be necessarily be making money, but it allows you to measure your, your impact through, you know, what you've done for your community. So to recap the business model canvas and a mission model canvas, you got three major blocks, you got the desire ability. Does your customer in your market. One, what you're sort of what you're producing or what you're servicing feasibility. Can it be scaled and viability. Can you make money or make an impact. Over time, I, as a practitioner for business model canvas, I come to realize that there's two really important blocks within the business model canvas. In fact, I would even venture to say, unless you have this two blocks under your belt. You may need to pause what you're doing to ensure that you're saving time, money and effort. So that is the discussion for today is our ability block.   Right.  Value proposition is, what are you offering the users and customers. How would it benefit them. And most importantly, why should they care. It's what's called a product market fit. When you have a customer segment down. You know who they are. And if you have a value proposition identified, you have what's called a product market fit. And these are the two things you need to move and move forward with your business. This is a campus at UC San Diego. And I tell the faculties and students, unless you have the value proposition customer segment down for a product market fit, don't even start anything because you'll be wasting your time and money. This is another free resource available to you through strategizer. It's called divided proposition campus and I will go in detail this in a minute. There's a lot of time. People business owners, students with ID idea, or even a Bible business will come to me and say, Here is my customer segment. I don't understand why my business not scaling. I don't understand why I'm not making sales. If you have more than, say, three customer persona identified in your business block, you're probably have too much. You're trying to boil the ocean, so to speak, you're trying to sell everything to anybody, everybody, which means you're not going to sell anything to anybody. So you need to make sure that if you are going forward with different customer segments, you need to make sure you complete this by proposition campus to understand better who your customers are to make sure it's a product market fit. The customer discovery by number. As I said earlier, it can't be tedious. And, and the reason is you need to actually get out of building and talk to your users and customers. So unless you are expert at interviewing, I'm not even I may still learning, you need to do about 20 interviews, talking to strangers in order to get your muscles, you know, flex and start to learn how to interviews total strangers. You need about 40 to get used to talking to total strangers, and about 60 to start seeing patterns.  It's not talking to your siblings is not talking to your friends at the bowling alley it's not talking to your former colleague at the bfw or recognition. It's not talking to strangers people that have never met you before, they're the people is going to give you a true assessment of your business ideas in your service. Because, as you know, if Nick had an idea. And if you went to his mom is a mom, I had this wonderful idea for a business. What would Nick's mom say. Of course just going to say Nick that's wonderful idea you're going to make millions is calm mom tests. This is the reason why you need to talk to strangers. The goal is to have 100 plus interviews under your belt, and this is just not people with just ideas for talking people that's currently in business, you should be always be talking to your users and customer in game, more insight. Because when you have 100 plus insights, and it's inside data driven, not emotion driven. You have a pretty good idea of your product market bit. And imagine how the investors will feel, imagine how the grant writers or grant givers will feel that you go up to them said I've interviewed 100 plus people, total strangers, and my product market fit assumption is based on the data that I've gotten from them. So this really no excuses. Now you all parents I've told you, I told my kids, don't talk to strangers. So this is your one time license to go talk to lots of strangers. Any questions so far. Rachel we actually we actually did have one question. I'll throw it out there. John asked us and chat. What was what space was your med device startup in and he's been a device for 10 years and currently with a startup in pulmonary space. Okay. So, I had it was actually a medical device to allow post operative patients asleep sitting up.  I was a benign brain tumor called acoustic neuroma.  I was very lucky that I, the tumor was identified early. So it was a small size of my face is usually a lot bigger. When you have a brain surgery.   So, I, my partner I created a device that allow is not a horse collar because you know when you have brain surgery have tubes coming out of your everywhere. So it's basically a kind of a hard to say, which is why it didn't go well. It was basically a PVC pole with a with a head rest that we created, and it was great idea people loved it MBA hospital, but I didn't talk to anybody, I thought well, I'm the customer. It works great for me is it's going to sell a lot. So that's, that's why, yeah, I hope that answer a question. Should I continue Nick. I think that's all I think that's all the questions we have for right now Rachel. Yeah, okay, great. Yeah, what do we start. We need to first create your customer persona. If you already done it before. Great. If you haven't never done it this be perfect opportunity to do it in a very safe environment.  Andre Andre is not organization. Andre is not a company. Andre is not everyone. And this is one thing to really remember, because oftentimes when I talk to start up founders and small business owners when I ask him, tell me your customer, who your customers are. I'll say, everybody. I'm trying to sell my device to Department of Defense. I'm trying to sell my, you know, my medical device to all the hospitals. And that just becomes too large, because then you're boiling the ocean. And you're maybe spending a lot of time trying to enter the market entered organization. And without really seeing any success. So the idea is to be specific as possible. Andre, I need to know Andre's age, where he lives, his employment status and his family. That's called demographic. Psychographic is his motivation, his goals is challenging his pain points right. Let's say Andre is 25 years old. He lives in Mountain View. He works for Google, and he's married. And just him and his wife. His motivation is to buy a home in San Jose, which is pretty next to impossible right now. His goal is to own a home. So if you start a family, his challenges are driving from East County, which is based across the Bay, in order to get to work in Mountain View at Google. His pain points are long drives, not enough time with this wife. He's tired from commuting. So how do I solve his problem? Demographic is easy to solve because you have an idea of who he is, but oftentimes, and myself included, when you could solve their psychographic problem, which is their motivation goals and challenges, it's a better time of identifying their needs and actually solving their pain points. So why create customer persona? Because you need customer persona in order to create a cohesive customer segment, right? Remember under three customer personas for this one. So customer pain points, build an assumptions list and test and validate those assumptions list, which will give you insight. And by reiterating pivot, you could define your product or services based on your customer segment and customer persona. So I'm going to do a quick personal exercise and I don't know how many people we have on the webinar, but this actually is good exercise if you've never done persona creation before. Give you two minutes to create a starter persona. If you already have one, great. And we can talk about that a little bit more. And this would be available. I think, yeah, the recording will be later. So feel free to use this as a starting point. If you have a customer, what is it that you're creating for them, right? So what is their pains? And what is their gain? Gain meaning that if you have a service and product already developed, what would they gain from using your product? And the customer job, what is their daylight? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to accomplish? In case of Andre, he wants to make enough money to buy a home, but he also needs to make sure he gets to work on time so he can keep this job. So any questions on that?  And once you have it, I like you to drop it in a chat box and then we have Nick read it out to us. So I'm going to time you guys. I'm here and I'm reporting for duty, Rachel. I have something to report. Yeah. And if not, it's just a, it's just a really good way to think about who your customer really are. Can you go back to that previous slide so everybody sees that, that, I guess you would call that a chart or a graph or something. Yeah. This is good one, but this is, this is good one here too. Because you need to be able to say, I was solving next, next pain point. I don't think he has one, but if he did, I would be really granular on who Nick is. Nick is from Northern Kentucky. He lives in down, he's very familiar with downtown Ohio. He currently commutes from his home in Ohio to the DAB headquarters in Kentucky. He's married, he worked with DAB, his motivations are, you know, doing a fantastic job as a director of PBC, looking to scale and grow, maybe more investors. Challenges could be PBC and DAB partnership is fairly new. So, you know, how do, how does he get out more and find more investors and get on his, his new venture out in the wild. And the pain points, this is where I will be interviewing Nick to ask him, tell me about your day, what are your pain points? That's kind of good. Yeah. Because oftentimes I'll ask people, you know, business owners and students and faculty, tell me about your customers. Like, I don't know, he's, he's a guy and, you know, he's missing San Diego. And I'm like, okay, well, go deeper. Okay, he's a college student. Okay, what grade? You know, where does he live? And that's kind of detail you need to know because, because then you can start really going deep and finding out what their pain points are because Nick's pain point may be different from what Michael's pain point is. Maybe certain different from what Tammy's pain point is, right? So if you start trying to solve everything for everybody, you're not going to get anywhere. So that helps. Yeah, is, does anybody, if anybody wants to share, plop it in the chat, otherwise we'll continue. I think that was a really good example. And I, if you don't mind me saying Rachel, I think it's important, like no, no venture is too big or small to think about what the customer is. And I think that many people who, who have started a business realize that their idea of a customer, like I said in the opening remarks, really when it comes down to what the customer who's actually buying their product could be fundamentally different than the person you assume that it is. So that's why we're talking about this. I think it's awesome. We do have a few messages rolling around rolling around. So Richard throws in there. Moss is his, his, his, his name Moss and Moss is a 28 year old male in Atlanta, Georgia with a spouse and a young child. He's a security analyst for a Fortune 500 company. He wants to know conclusivity, whether the infrastructure he is responsible for is properly configured and up to date. So his organization doesn't get hacked. He has a lot of infrastructure and doesn't know where to begin. That's great. That's a great awesome. Yeah, that's great. Well, I tell you what, let's move on. I'll jump off of here and you can drive on. Okay, so I'm going to keep repeating this is you need to interview 60 plus potential customers to gain valuable insight in order to de-risk your idea of a 50% MC. I'm going to move on to creating your value proposition. So value proposition is the other blog that we talked about. What are you offering them? You mean the small business owner or start founder? And how will your service or product benefit your users and customers? And most importantly, why should they care? Just because you think that your service or product is best ever, why would they care about that? Right. And how would it benefit them? It's all about them. It's not about your idea, but it's all about your customers. Because if they don't care about it, if you can't tell them why it's going to benefit them and what are you offering them? They'll most likely not even talk to you or buy your product or service. So this is the other block of the value proposition canvas. Remember the circle was your customers. So the customers, you need to write down, you need to identify their pains. What would they gain if they had a magic wand? And then what are their job, you know, gain in life is like. Then what you as a business owner and start off founder are creating and it's called the gain creators and pain relievers and a product and services. So basically, if you put those two blocks together, as you can see in this presentation here, if you see a pain on the customer side, everything that you're offering as a product and service need to be built to address that. So your pain reliever is relieving the pain point of your customers. And what they're seeking to gain is what you're creating through your product and service. So before you, if you already have a product and service develop, that's fine, because you could still talk to customers and users to refine your product. But it's best to first identify customer segment that needs something. An example is again going back to the Department of Finance. What do they need? I even go granular. What the special operations command need, but then special operations command have smaller entities, they have Navy, Army, Air Force, even Coast Guard, right. So instead of boiling the ocean, you need to pick an enterprise for me would be I'm picking the Navy SEALs because I'm from Navy. So I'm going to see what needs they may have that I could solve. This is for you to use. It's called Valid Proposition Worksheet.  Valid Proposition is what is it about your product and service that's going to help them do their job or go through their life better by solving their pain and gaining something out of your product and service. Any questions? Okay, so this is another exercise. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but Jason has a question and Jason, if you want to come on, you can come on and ask me. That's so great. Rachel, thank you for being here today and all your experience. This is all very relevant to providing a service to customers and I think it's worth me asking the question, perhaps others have the same question through the lens that you're kind of explaining this. My service that I intend to create is a service for an art therapy program for veterans and there's no forensic takeaway. It's very much intrinsic, I guess, in terms of the experience the veterans would have. I'm wondering how this model that you're talking us through might pertain to that and nonprofit or if a service isn't necessarily a tangible product. Thank you. Okay, so art therapy, it's interesting that you brought that up because Naval Medical Center here in San Diego just completed their three year studies on PTSD through surfing. So, I guess what you're asking, you know, how, how would this be relevant to nonprofit? Is that you're asking? I guess how could I better identify my clients through a service aspect provided internally to them of their experience conducting art therapy, versus trying to push a product that they may purchase at a demographic or an area, I guess, would identify a client base. This client base is very specific and the service is an experience. So, your customer base would be a, you say therapy, so I'm making an assumption that it's therapy through PTSD or is there specific? I guess generally it would be a forum that veterans could come to with a guided art therapist and work on a project and the project would be kind of like the medium for them to just kind of further discuss some of, you know, their situations in the military and it provides a forum for them to kind of express it without going to a psychotherapy group. Okay, okay. So, I would probably start with, I guess my question would be, why would, what would be the reason why the people that one will come to the art forum is that are they active duty are they retired. Are they disabled and start, that's why I would start because then I will start with talking to a group of potential users, so to speak, of your art therapy forum. Why, you know, the reason why they would come to create an avatar, right, or persona. Rachel, Rachel was a command master chief in the Navy says pretty, you know, when you're more senior you are less people you could talk to, right, and be safe. So what would compel me to go to our therapy forum. And I guess one of the reasons would be it's safe space. It's art, expressing my grief or my joy through art, which will relieve my stress. And is that kind of, am I getting close to what you're asking. Yeah, I think you're asking it through the lens and what you're trying to teach it and so I appreciate it. I'm following along with you. It's very helpful. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, great. So, I know that, but thank you for that question, but I understand that customer, when I say customer to do it could be seen as specific. So think of it as if you want to flip to go back to mission model canvas. So, this is very specific to mostly product right, but, and some services, but this one is more impact so maybe it will help if you think about it, not as a customer but as a beneficiary. Right. And then the beneficiary, instead of having a revenue streams, you'll have what's called the mission achievement which is like how your impact that your art therapeutic forum have for your beneficiaries. So, I'd be happy to talk to you more offline and I'd be happy to share my, my, you know, my, my contact information through Nick, you want to talk more about it because there is a little bit of a difference between these two. But it's basically the building blocks the same. I really appreciate your insight and you've got me thinking differently about how my customer base might benefit from this service even though it's not tangible. So thank you for the opportunity to ask in your presentation. Yeah, first. Yeah. Okay, so in the interest of time, if you have a proposition identified, feel free to put it in the chat box. And when you're doing that, I'll just keep going. And then this is another important part aspect of customer discovery because they need to go talk to strangers. There's no point in sitting in the room or sitting in the library or sitting in the business center, thinking about how great your business going to be or your services, you need to go out and talk to a human. So you need to first ask yourself what assumptions are you trying to test. It's kind of we just had that discussion just a few minutes ago is you have a list of assumption you need to write down and it could be an Excel spreadsheet. And those are the assumption. So you need to go talk to strangers and validate or invalidated, right. Because by asking your users and customers to validate your assumptions, you can identify customer needs better. And by validating your solutions, you have an insight. So you have an assumptions, you go talk to customers or users, which is called experiment. You have an insight based on your interview. Then you come back to assumption that it validated the invalidated and you keep going to the loop. And this is another aspect of customer discovery that can be considered a little tedious because you're basically talking to a lot of people and getting your insight and going back and to a drawing board so to speak and you know, tinkering with your idea or your product. But by doing so, you're really refining your idea, your service and your product to need to meet the customer's needs. So how do you interview, how do you go talk to these strangers. I get questions about is video conferencing and in person better than surveys and phone calls. The survey is great. It's very expedient and you could talk to a lot, you could ask a lot of people a lot of questions in a very short period of time. Email is cold email same way cold calls are same way, but you know what you can't you can't get emotional response from them if you're just doing surveys and emails and just cold calls. Like I said in the slide here, if you can see their people's dilate when you see that the light bulb light up and you know, figuratively, when you talk to them about your idea. That's when you gain a true insight. So I would suggest to you that video teleconferencing and there's zooms or in person interview over a cup of coffee is much more insightful and productive than a cold calls cold emails and surveys. There's a lot here so I would suggest you watch this webinar and then, you know, if you have any questions, you know appropriate to contact me and ask me. You start with your assumptions, right. You could do that through social media. Find out through Facebook, Instagram. What do people care about, you know what is it, what is the biggest pain they're facing right now, and what would be the biggest game that we get. You can do prepped and it's a lot come up with hundred names target list. Network with your friends you can network here you can network through me network through your local veteran service organization. There's one million cups everywhere. Just get the names right and then develop a plan of how are you going to discovery again going back to what assumptions trying to test and how you validate or invalidated. You can reach 100 customers connect with me on LinkedIn, feel free to my LinkedIn connections. People are actually more willing to talk to strangers. If you connect through connect with them through Facebook or LinkedIn. And I have a template that you can use here. Say hello, my name is Rachel. I trust you are doing well and adjusting to the new normal. I have a DAB PPC entrepreneurs, and I've just taken a master class on customer discovery. I'm investigating whether art therapy forum would be valuable solving today in the post pandemic world. I got your name from Rachel, who said that you're the smartest person in the industry government and that you really had a valuable advice to offer. This is important. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just need 15 minutes of your time to ask a question. Thank you in kind regards. This is a template you feel free to use your email or even in LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn has a word count limits. So you may want to put this on a chat GPT or barred Google bar and shorten it. But if you want to connect to them to any anybody, especially on LinkedIn said I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just need 15 minutes of your time to ask a few questions. Most likely don't answer. And I've used this template for my students and my SBIR awardees, because they do have to talk to lots and lots of people, and it's actually got pretty good rate of return. So feel free to use it. Thank you, people. You need to be making sure that you're asking open ended questions, not leading questions, and always ask why five times. Nick man had noticed when I was talking to earlier, but I asked a lot of questions, and I may not ask why, but by asking one question and then going deeper and deeper. I'm amazed on the insight you get from people and Nick, I wasn't really doing it on purpose, but it's just, it's my nature that I'm curious person. So I'd like to know I'd like to know people so it's why I was asking all those questions, but I got to know you though pretty good during that short discussion. Just remember that discovery is not selling your idea. The moment you try to sell your idea. What you're talking to will shut down. So always make an effort to listen.  If you just let them talk, you're going to gain all the knowledge that you need to refine your, your ideas. And if you are, when you are talking to your interview, you need to either write fast, or ask permission to record, because as much as you think you're going to remember, most likely you are. If you have a team, be great if one person can interview and the other person to take notes. But most time is probably just you so write fast or just be open say do you mind if I just record you, if they say no, he's going to write fast. You should be talking to everybody right user buyers CEO mom or their kids, but don't forget the more people that you speak to. There's potential to do the customer segment canvas they saw earlier, which is tedious. What are some of the good questions. This question. No, this question. No. There are leading questions right. This one. It's a great question. If you had a magic wand, if you had a magic wand, how would you solve this problem and they'll probably talk 20 minutes. Again, leading. Good question. So, if you get this answer. Great. Keep me up there when it launches. It's a bad one. They're just being polite and saying no compliments are not data delays, even worse. Right. And compliments are not commitments. They may say it's a great idea. Unless they say, let's talk next week, or here's my card. That's, that's a no. This one's a little tricky. Those are good signals, right. It's the commitment to meet again. Introduction to someone in a company like a CFO, right, especially decision makers and commitment to a trial. You want to get to this. That's interesting. Can you tell me more about that. So you're thinking, well, so what, what's all this tedious customer discovery? Where does that matter? Another case study. Do you remember your first car? So I actually did this with the high school students two weeks ago. And I challenged them, okay, you want to get your first car. You want model three, or you want the Ford. And how would you present this to your parents? So I made him do a customer discovery on their parents. And the assumption they all said was like, you know, that's going to be a hard sell because my mom wants to save car for me to drive. So she's going to definitely go for Ford. And my dad will think that, you know, I'll get a lot of tickets for having a red sports car. So if you'll not, you know, allow me to get that car. So I had him do a customer discovery on their parents. And I said, look, figure out your parents, you know, them best, and create a valid proposition. And tell me what their, what their personas are like. And actually the students came back and the teenage, you know, a teenager, I think they're all 15, 16. You know what, I was able to come up with a valid proposition to tell my dad, who's a, you know, trying to the very frugal person that dad, model three has a $7,500 federal tax incentive right now. And because there's only one gear, the car, you know, doesn't has a longer, lower cost of cost of ownership in five years. And my mom, who's a safety freak, and thought the on the four is a safe car, but it turns out that this particular model has a kind of a spotty track track record when it comes to safety or smaller three doesn't. They were able to come up with a interesting valid proposition by doing customer discovery in your own parents to potentially push for a car purchase. They have a homework to come back with me in about two months to see whether they got the car or not. So we'll see. This one is assumption exercise, and I will not make you do this, but I will give you this particular creation worksheet. Now, what I want you to do for this one in your own time is make sure that when you're creating the assumptions to be ready for interviewing, you know who the customers are, what assumptions you're making. How are you going to test your experiment? And because how are you going to know that your assumption was wrong or right? What key learning insight did you gain from it? And then yes or no was assumption validated. And I'll cover the stakeholder type in a minute. So the stakeholders, you need to know the difference between a user and a customer. Okay, users are the people that are going to be actually interacting with your product or benefiting from your services. But they're not necessarily the buyers. In fact, users usually are not the buyers, right? The Model S or Model 3 that I just showed you earlier, the red car. The users are the teenagers, right? But the buyers are the parents. So you need to know the difference because the parents may have a different needs and different desires, different pain points than what the teenager has, right? So I also have what's called a several tour, who is probably the one person that's going to, whose sole mission is to derail your idea. For example, let's say your digital device to a clinic in San Diego, right? Your job is to make sure that you don't come bring that new product because that new product that you just new device may cause him to have to rethink about his supply chain. And it may, if it's an AI based product, it may cost him his job. So he's going to be, you know, he's going to make sure that your product or server doesn't get into to the purchasing agreement. The idea also is to, you know, is, if you could convert the saboteur into a champion, then you got it made, right? Then you have an insider that could potentially be your influencer to buy your product. So it's also important if you already know who the saboteur are, then you could do a customer or a profile sheet I showed you earlier and figure out what their pain points are. The tournament or champion example is let's say I'm trying to sell disabled American veterans a t-shirt and Nick is Nick is a t-shirt wire, right? So, but Nick's is a user. He's not a buyer. So you have to find out who within disabled American veterans is actually procurement manager and find kind of start doing a little customer discovery on procurement manager. If you go to customer, and he may not be willing to listen to you because like, look, I already got a t-shirt vendor. I'm good.  It's, it's the company owner is actually a disabled American veteran member.  He's local. He's in Kentucky. He has a lower cost than what your current vendors are. And oh, by the way, you working at DAB, wouldn't you want to support a guy like that, a business owner like that? Does that make sense? That's kind of how you could turn a saboteur into a champion. And Nick, I'm sorry. It's a DAB as an example, but that's kind of what I, I've always tried to explain to the students and, you know, business owners and startup founders how to turn saboteur into a champion. So, knowing a difference, not just a customer, Andre or Psalm, you can also identify the stakeholder type. So I hope that made sense to everybody here. So, don't assume you understand a problem because you, unless you've done customer discovery, you don't. And even after you understand, the problem is going to always change. So you need to be doing constant customer discovery on journey. And you all are very smart people. Well, so it's harder when you think you know, especially if you're in that space already, it's hard to do a discovery. And again, by interviewing 60 plus potential customers or users of beneficiary, you gain a valuable insights and you risk your idea by 50, 60%. This is what I want to get to. Yes, sounds really, really interesting. Can you tell me more about that? In fact, why don't you follow me to my office? Here's my business card. We can talk more about it. That's what I want to get to. You want to get to past 90% failure and a 50% increase in your potential to succeed. Here's what you learned today. I hope it was helpful for you. I would love to hear from you to see how else I could help. And Nick, please feel free to share with them my email address. And then I'll have you talk to more of you when you have time. Yeah, thank you, Rachel. I know a lot of people in the chat have asked for the slides themselves. I've sent a few resources out for you, like some of the templates, the business model camps, et cetera, as far as the link goes. So they can find that. But yeah, we'll figure out a solution for that for those people who like that. But again, I want to thank you. I know we're kind of close on our time. Just like the Army, I mean, we train to standard not the time. So I do want to take a moment to have people ask questions. If that's something they want to do, if they have some questions, we want to always be able to answer some of those. So I don't know if we had any on social, Michael, but if you do send them over to me. But I did have one. I think this gentleman actually, I think Al Blake, he might have bounced off already.  Thanks for sharing your life journey. Much appreciated. Thanks very sweet. From a constructive and critical perspective, curious what approach did you, did you exercise to overcome uncertainty and risk, while additionally gain the support of sponsors and stakeholders to assist with funding, given any respect to the past or ongoing handicaps. The basis of this question is rooted in how certain community programs enable equity and startups entering into the commerce market. Some, if not many, may only be able to generate sponsorship and reports through singular or alternate means. So that's kind of a multifaceted question. Yeah. So when I started my journey with my medical device startup, it was completely strapping. I was able to gain a lot of free resources through organizations like SBDC, Small Business Development Centers, and PTAC, which is now called APEX. There are tons of accelerates and incubators through universities. I would definitely suggest that you go to local academia, city college, their office services. Also, there are grants out there that you could apply for. So I would definitely keep in touch with them. Then I asked your question. I'm trying to. Yeah, well, he's gone, but I mean, I think it's a nice to just address it. And yeah, there's lots of resources that the key ingredients are lots of resources out there. You just have to get created. And I think if I may, you know, understanding your target audience and understanding who it is that's buying or multiple segments is a really important. And like you said earlier, not sexy thing to do, but it's very necessary nonetheless. Yeah. So we don't have anything on socials. I'm going to ask one question before we before we get into some final announcements. I've got a whole list of them here just for this purpose and this purpose only. Can you share at least just one real world example of a company that has benefited from your like once when you work with customer discovery efforts but some that's worked with or maybe it's in is an academia, etc. Oh, benefit actually yes so the course I the course I teach at UCSD. Absolutely we just renewed a contract they actually did benefit from the customer discovery because we I did a deep analysis on, and that my own discovery process on what is it that the university students were looking for, as far as type of courses that that's been offered by by the university, and they had they hadn't done a real case base, you know real problem being solved by students before. So by asking the students what they were looking for we're able to go from two teams and eight students to 35 team 35 students and eight teams and three years. Wow. Yeah, I mean I'm sure there's I'm sure a lot of us do customer discovery, without thinking about it right. I mean would you would you say that the customer discovery process you know when you think about it from an academic standpoint or textbook style and looking at the different worksheets that you've, you know spoke about today. It that makes it seem very challenging because it's it's very step by step but in reality we do you believe I believe that we do this a lot. Yeah, all the time about whether it's our friends even in social settings. Things of that nature but it's, it seems like a very difficult process when you put it down on paper and you're sitting at it at your desk thinking how the heck do I find out who my customer is. That's the reason why I did the first card and now in case study for the high school students and you're right. We do customer discovery every day we do customer service and social setting dating, right, buying a product or trying to figure out okay how do I get my my mom or my dad or my brother sister do something so that is all customer discovered by knowing them knowing that pain points are knowing what they know that you're doing that. Yeah, so it's not it's but it's something that. There is a step but yeah, like you said it's it's a you do it every time. Yeah, well thank you Rachel for all that information I know it's fact it's almost so much information, believe it or not that there's probably another segment worth of that you can teach on. It's a continuous process as Rachel mentioned, you know it's it's you do you do it once but you don't just stop there it's continuous process much like the life cycle of a business so. Thank you for all the knowledge you share today and we'll be sure to connect you with anybody who, who asks that we are going to share your contact information and the event that there's people out there that really want to connect with you and a deeper level on this. So, I want to thank you specifically Rachel for coming on today. I know it's a little bit of your time we always appreciate that. I also want to thank all of our everybody out there and in time and space who's tuned in today to our dv patriot boot camp caffeine connect. We always appreciate your attendance engagement support, any way we can get it we're here for you. We have a few announcements before we part some part our ways today so our next caffeine connect is going to take place on November 16. Same time, 2pm same same time in place, and you can you can find this event on our website social media dv patriot boot camp and LinkedIn or Facebook, and also event right applications are going to be opening for our page our next patriot boot camp cohort which will be. The next one we're looking for is going to be in February of 2024, so we're eight through 10th. So stay tuned on our socials and our website look for that application to open up and we'll be sending that marketing out here in the future and if you're not aware of what dv patriot boot camp is your first time joining us. It is a transformative transformative program that we held we hold in person that empowers our founders and the veteran and military community, including spouses. We want to make sure we emphasize including your spouses with comprehensive startup education mentorship access to resources, and of course this wonderful community committed to your success. Another announcement, our next dv shark tank which is going to take place in November November 2 at 2pm is is going to be happening after we complete our cohort in October. So stay tuned for that one as well. And yes we do give away free money it's based on the popular TV show TV show shark tank so stay tuned for that it's always it's always a good time. And then, lastly, coming up Veterans Day is November 11. So we have dv has dv 5k we love to throw this out there for anybody who can walk, roll, run or ride. And what we're doing is raising funds to thank those who served and raise awareness for our ill and injured veterans. And so you can do this by participating in the dv 5k which is held in person here in Cincinnati on November 11, but also you can do a virtual program between November 11 and November 30, and you can register at dv 5k.org. So we hope to see you there I'll be there running the race with my family. So I hope to see in Cincinnati if not hope to see online. So, last thing, please if you haven't done it if you haven't taken the opportunity to follow us on social media please do so. We're starting to do more and more there and that's a really great place to stay connected with things coming up. So you can do that on Facebook or LinkedIn primarily at dv patriot boot camp. And so we'd love for you to follow us there. And if you can stay tuned for our next Friday tomorrow, I think Michael will be posting our next founder Friday, it's a great way to stay connected I think Rachel's been on there. And founder Friday once and if she hasn't she'll be there in the future. So follow us on social media and then until next time, please everyone activate mentor create and grow.


Breaking news, Jaden, Hossler, and Nessa Baert have unfollowed each other on Instagram. The last sign of the end times is happening.


This is a system-wide SCP Foundation Alert. Please pay close attention. The Chaos Insurgency has launched an attack on Foundation sites. All sites in South America have been destroyed or temporarily disabled. The Chaos Insurgency have taken possession of a number of SCPs. These SCPs include but are not limited to SCP 080, a Super Ball which bounces with extreme force. SCP 308, an Aztec coffin which gives immortality to those who lie in it. SCP 4400 Ash America, an anomalous weapon of mass destruction. These SCPs will be recovered from the Chaos Insurgency at all costs. Secure. Contain. Protect.