So, the presentation is about our experience at eBay, building a private cloud. It will be a two-part presentation. I'm Jesse Martin. I present Cloud Architect at eBay and I present the reason why we built a private cloud and what are the components that we extended in OpenStack to make it work. In Subu, we talk about why it's not enough and Subu is leading our engineering. So the main reason why we built a private cloud at eBay is agility and you can go back to our analysis conference presentations made by all our executives in 2013 and you can see that every one of them listed accelerating innovation as the primary goal for eBay. And you can also look at our CTO's number. You see that the rate of innovation doubled between 2011 and 2012. So what this means is the number of features that developers were able to push to the site doubled during that period of time. And this means that we had to improve developer agility and our developers can develop code and push it very quickly to the site. So the first high-level goal for us was to enable agility. And the second reason is that we wanted to build an infrastructure that could support all the various parts of eBay. So you may think that eBay is this weird entity and it's made of many different adjacencies or companies that we acquired over time and each one of them have either their own environment or they have a portion of our data center dedicated to them. They might have even their own ops team and their own practices to manage the site. In addition to that, each one of those companies or entities have their own sub-environment like one for QA, one for their secure applications, one for their production application and so on. And you can imagine that if you had to build separate infrastructure for each one of those environments and companies, it would get out of control very quickly. So the main goal for us was to provide also an infrastructure that could be shared between all those entities and provide the same level of isolation and agility that they used to have with their dedicated environment plus more efficiency by consolidating everything. So what we did is we built something that really looks like a public cloud except that it's running inside our data centers. What it means is that it's frictionless. You don't need to have approval tickets or anything to get an account and start deploying VMs and deploy your application. It's isolated, multi-tenant.  And we wanted to have the experience of a public cloud which means that you don't see all the seams between different environments, right? So it's a large cloud that can accommodate all the infrastructure, all the requirements for all those companies, not like many different clouds that would be dedicated to each one of those companies. So really it looks like a public cloud. So what it means, the result of that is that we, from June, May 2013, you can see the growth of users and you can see that at the point the number of projects is increasing because we gave users the possibility to create multiple projects to deploy their application in multiple different environments. You can also see the start of distribution of users between all those different entities that I talked about. So the big one is eBay, the smaller one next to it is PayPal. And then there's all these other entities that are starting using our infrastructure. And you can imagine that it's a lot of flexibility for them to have this shared infrastructure instead of deploying their own dedicated infrastructure and managing it. The number of VMs created since May, it's 100,000 VMs created and deleted. And you can see that the curve is like a hockey stick. And it's kind of scary because in terms of capacity and pressure on the team, it's starting to be quite huge. And this is the number of cores. Every week we are adding machines. And in order to build a real cloud, it means that you cannot tell users, stop provisioning VMs we are running out of resource. You cannot do that. So we have to make sure that we have a pipeline that is efficient and we can bring machines every week into the cloud to adapt to that demand. And I think that we are like 15,000 cores in that environment as of last week. So what did we have to do in order to build a multi-tenant cloud on top of OpenStack? So you look at the blue components are entities that already exist in OpenStack. So on top of the infrastructure, we define regions. So that's a concept that already exists in OpenStack. But on top of it, we need to define availability zones. And availability zones for us is similar to what Amazon defines as an availability zone. So I think that allows people to define isolated environment where they know that faults will not impact the other environment. VPC is really the same concept that what Amazon calls a VPC. It's a dedicated cloud for one of those entities. So it's a coarse-grain multi-tenancy concept that allows, for example, like our GSI or their entity to have their own self-managed virtual private cloud and they will either give it directly to their users or use another mechanism to deliver those VMs or projects to their users. And on top of it, you have projects that are the typical OpenStack project concept that you know about. So when we double-click those, what does it mean? So we have large-scale networks that are shared across all those projects. And we abstract the network and we partition it using virtual networks. We have multi-tier storage, or we soon have multi-tier storage, as soon as we deploy the Cinder component that supports multi-tier storage. And they can be used either by block or object storage. And we have commodity hardware because we need to have also a cost-effective cloud. So we have the same constraints than a public cloud. We have to not make revenue, but at least be cost efficient. And on top of it, we have different flavors. It could be flavors for front-end type of workloads or all the way to HPC type of workloads where we have our analytics team or adopting or running some analytics workloads. And we support Windows or Linux images. And we have two styles of images. We have images that are commodity-provided. And we don't control what people put in those images. And we have images that we customize in order to implement some best practices or integration with our infrastructure. So on top of those concepts, we have the VPC concept. And each one of those objects will be mapped to a VPC. And we introduce the notion of class of service, which is kind of a set of policies that you can apply on top of a VPC in order to give it like a different behavior. So VPC, you don't really know what are the security policies. It's up to you to define them. But since we provide shared VPCs, for example, for developers, we know what they are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do. So on top of those VPC, we define configuration templates, if you want, of policies that then customize access control cost or even location in the data center. And we add in the OpenStack API or OpenStack component, we add to multiple metadata, if you want, to the various resources that OpenStack offers in order to map those resources to the notion of VPC. So for example, a project for us can be assigned to a VPC. So you create a VPC and then inside you might have different projects. And each VPC has a different set of projects. You can assign a network to a VPC. So a network would be private to a VPC. So if you have a developer specific VPC or a PayPal VPC or a GSI VPC, which are entities in eBay, they will own that network and no one else will be able to get on that network if they decide that's their policy. And in the dashboard, we had to customize it in order to allow users to select VPC or Availability Zone. And do some modification of the scheduler in Nova in order to allow the selection of networks, either based on capacity or the previous tags that we put for VPC or class of service. And in images also, since we customize image for integration with a specific environment, we have to also specify if the image is specific to a VPC or if it's an image that would work in any VPC. So I can explain a bit what kind of VPC we have. So we have one VPC, which is like a public cloud, it behaves exactly like a public cloud.  You can build some experience and immediately expose it to users. But it's completely in a DMZ. You cannot access any of the internal resources of eBay. It's really like if it was a public cloud available across the internet. But also we have a VPC that is like your desktop and an extension of your desktop. So you can run a workload, for example, for development or for testing of an application that you are currently developing. And you can see, for example, that in one, we can have integration with our LDAP for allowing users to directly log in their VM. So our image have an integration with LDAP, corporate LDAP, so that they can directly log in with their login credentials. But if it's the public version, like the public VPC, they are completely shielded out of the corporate network. So they cannot use their corporate LDAP credentials. They have to upload a key and use SSH keys in order to log into their VPC. So that's the type of difference that we had to build in our image. And then we have to tag those image with specific capabilities and specific compatibility with VPCs. So that's at the high level what we had to do. And I'm going to give the mic to Subu, and he's going to tell you why OpenStack is not a cloud. So thanks, JC. I took over the cloud development as a chief engineer over last year. And one of the first things I learned in the last few months of my experience, starting a cloud was that OpenStack is not cloud. So a couple of months back, I wrote a blog post that making a point that it was not cloud and most folks that have built private clouds, large clouds, get it immediately. Yeah, we know that. But if you ask a lot of folks who have built smaller clouds, less than 50 machines, hypervisors, that's not very clear. A lot of people see that OpenStack is a cloud in the box. You get, you deploy like DevStack, boom, it's there. So the key difference is that what our customers see, because at eBages, like JC said, we think and act like a public cloud. That is, all the APIs that OpenStack has are open to anyone. Whether it's creating VMs, taking snapshots, bringing your own images, write your own cloud scripts, whatever. And what they want is an API abstraction that lets them do what they want to do without permissions and controls. In two minutes, they want to VM, most common use case. What they also want is cloud as a service. They don't want a software. Artenants don't like to deploy and maintain soft OpenStack deployment. What they want is a service like AWS, like Rackspace Public Cloud. So from here to get there involves a lot of things. That is totally outside the purview of OpenStack as a core. For example, even before to get an OpenStack up and running, we spend time on network design, infosec, deal with firewalls, getting the builds up and running, we have CIFR changes on board the infrastructure. Like JC was talking about capacity addition. How can we add capacity quickly? Can I add a half rack in 30 minutes? So that's the time we have to spend automating and building the tools. Config management, we spend a lot of time automating our puppet infrastructure to make, to push changes to production. That's not what customers see. What customers see is the blue box, blue circle. They want APIs. But what happens behind the scenes? Same thing, high availability. And in order to get a good time to recovery, we have to also invest a lot of time in log processing, metrics collection, monitoring of the cloud. Not the VMs, but the cloud infrastructure, alerting, incident resolution, like things go wrong, how do you communicate users? How do you deal with their availability? And then, of course, user experience, that it is seamless. So we decided to expose, in fact, a likely customized version of Horizon, so that they are in charge of all interactions, customer support, spending time with developers to explain how to use it, how to get around, or how best practices. SLAs, defined SLAs so that they can trust us. So the journey, what we noticed in the last year was that for the first six months, it was awesome. You get a VM in two minutes, or a block storage of a terabyte or whatever size, and that was agility. Now, what people want is availability of the cloud. So we have to set SLAs. Not just that, we have to build mechanisms to measure SLAs. How do we know that we are up five nines or four nines? The, in addition to that, upgrades. So for example, last year, we were on SX, S6 to Folsom, was a nightmare. We had to literally forklift each VM from an S6 cloud to Folsom. That's a lot of work for us. Capacity planning, how do we know that we are running alone capacity, how do we onboard capacity? How do we scale out remediation? Like hypervisor is alerting that there is an issue with their memory or desk. How do we deal with that? Auto-scaling, metering and charge back, monitoring, alerting. Those are, again, features that customers want. But ultimately, what we want is a cloud service, not as a software.  But also, you may not know that you have to go through all that when you start out. At 50 hypervoiders, you won't see it. When you have more than 50, go to 100, 150, you start to see the pain or investments that you have to make to run a service, as the cloud is a service, not as software. So we thought we could talk forever on each of these bubbles, and there's a lot of work. So we picked up some topics that we experienced in the recent months and want to share our experience and learn from this conference. One is we look at log processing metrics, how we do collect metrics, how do we do alerting, what's the pattern for scale out, so that we provide availability for the business, as well as a scalable infrastructure of the cloud, and how do we deal with things like builds and config management. So let me start with the monitoring. We approach this problem in two angles. When I started this effort, I was working alone as a developer on the team. And usually something like this happens. A user starts, hey, I want to boot an instance of an image. Now I boot minus, minus image, image ID, flavor, my VM. Happy path. Two minutes later, you've got a VM that has an IP. You can access it to it. Things are good. When things go wrong, the user says, is the cloud broken? And I get anxious. I just log into each hypervisor or scheduler logs and all that to figure out, oh, no, no, it's not broken. You did something wrong. But that's fine when you have five developers using your cloud. But when you have 50 or 5,000, things change. Two things, you have to find out from that question if this answer. You want to get very fast, because that controls your time to recovery. So let me actually dive into that specific use case. That's just one use case, most common use case. So when you create a VM, as you know, let's say you go through Horizon. Request goes to Nova API. Then the scheduler got the request through RPC. Let me see if I can get the mouse pointer. Yeah, I think it's OK. It's OK. It's coming. OK. Scheduler gets a request. Scheduler finds out the host. It does network selection, because we do network selection based on the classic service. The request goes to the Nova compute. You get support, which in our case, it talks to the MVP controller. We use MVP for the virtualization of the network layer. And the next step is Nova compute gets the glance image from the glance. You set up to KVM, boots of VM, goes to the cloud in it. Everything else happens. Now, there are many points of failure in this. For example, RabbitMQ might choke. Just 10 days back, we had an outage that starts at 8 in the morning evening. And we don't know why provisioning is failing. So after a while, we figure out, oh, it's RabbitMQ. One of the notes is dropping messages. We have to do something about it. Capacities choose. Oftentimes, scheduler dumps a warning in a database table, calling instance false. And because there's no capacity, hypervisor scanout, or network port scanout, our quantum plug-in failed. Glance is down, or it timed out for some reason. In fact, we had one case where without thinking much, we deployed a load balancer behind in front of Glance APIs. It was choking. It was throttling our traffic for Glance images. So it was failing and provisioning was failing. Now, the thing is that at that point, when it hands off, Nova hands off to LibVert, it says VMState is active. You look at the dashboard or Nova show, it says green. Awesome. But user is a psychont login. Because some things happen after that. Like, for example, it might not have gotten DHCP. Because again, there was a delay between, let's say, quantum and DHCP agent. Or there was a failure, some other failure there. Or the metadata timed out. Because cloud rate goes through metadata API to download, let's say, the SSH keys. So you may actually get a brick from Nova. So in the at least stages last year, we were actually literally logging into each machine to figure out what was going on. And we had to change that. So the way we approached is that very straightforward, each component in OpenStack does a good job of logging, except that they all log in different ways. They're inconsistent. The way things are logged. And we use what is called as LogStash, which is an extremely well-written, flexible logging, log processing framework. We use that framework to transport log messages into Elasticsearch, where we then use Kibana. Kibana is a dashboard built for LogStash on Elasticsearch. We use that to basically search for logs. Now, three things we have to do here. Two things we have to do here. First is the Glock patterns. So LogStash is just what is called a Glock pattern that you can inject. Let's say I want to process Nova API logs. And you know the structure of what the API log looks like. And then based on that, you write a pattern to extract different fields, like log levels, time stamps, messages, and whatnot. And they end up in the Elasticsearch cluster. The beauty of that is that it's horizontally scalable. Right now, we process a few terabytes of log messages every month. And usually, it takes about less than five seconds for a log message to appear in Kibana from the time it was logged. So if I say Nova Show, in five seconds, I have the trace of that request in Kibana. So the outcome was that if I know the request ID of the command, let's say Nova Boot, I can trace where it went through, whether it from Nova API to scheduler to hypervisors. Awesome. We spent another sprint a few months back to actually process more data out of logs. So we started collecting response codes, latencies from all the APIs. Now we can see, I think the picture is too small here, but these are response codes and latencies for one of the APIs. Now from VCO or VIT, I know if the latency is increased or response error codes increased, I can track that. More of that. Now we are able to get all this data. This is great. But often that's not actually what I want. What I want is metrics. Because logs are great. When I know something is wrong, I can go back and debug. But I want to see metrics as an operator of cloud. I want to do monitoring so that I can set thresholds and get alerted when things go wrong. I mean, of course, it's a pager if you remember. It does its job. I mean, we can react to errors. So what we did was that we took what we built for log aggregation and introduced StatsD, which is a small node program open source by 8C a couple of years ago. What it does is it actually starts counting things. Starts counting things like error codes in the last 60 seconds. If you see higher rate of errors, we can count that. We send that to Graphite. Graphite for as a time series store. And Xabix, we used Xabix for alerting. We started with Nagios. We were not happy with the experience, mainly because we didn't find it as programmable as Xabix was. So we switched to Xabix and then expanded that to all the infrastructure for all open fact nodes as well as MVP infrastructure. We start even the block storage. We aggregate that into Xabix. So we have lots of lots of data. In fact, we have too much data now. We have too many graphs and too many alerts that can actually flood us. Again, we still have an issue. If the user says he's the cloud broken, we got better. But still, the answer was a maybe. We were always not sure if the cloud is working the way it's supposed to work. So then we had to go back and do some more work. So we looked at other sources of information. So if you look at database, let's say a scheduler failed. And database has a table called instance false in Nova that has a complete exception stack trace. That's useful. So if you look at it, if you can count those exceptions, if there's a higher rate, you know there's a problem.  And you can actually see if an instance is in a task state longer than maybe a minute, there is an issue. It's stuck. So we start counting all those things and publish two graphite and Xabix. There's one more thing. We actually get some false positives out of this model. Because sometimes, let's say there's no alert. Maybe because nobody's using the cloud at the time. It's a weekend. It's down. Nobody's using it. But maybe there was a problem. Or false positives because the user has a mistake. Let's say somebody who started a new image that has a bug in it on all projects is failing. And to avoid those false positives, we wrote something called a stack watch, which is a small bot that looks at all the KPIs that we want to track as a cloud operator, like provisioning VMs, or creating volumes, ping success rates, ping latencies. We take that and simulate those user actions. Those are controlled actions so we can measure the outcome. We do that, and then again publish data to graphite and Xabix. With that, we are able to say, if there's an incident that cloud is not responding, provisioning is failing, we pretty much know before users know it. We get the logs. We get the alerts. But in addition to that, we use the same data to actually present that information to end users. So they can actually answer that question on their own. And again, it's like a wall of fame or shame, depending on if your numbers are good on that status board on the right side, it's wall of fame. They're bad, it's wall of shame for us to improve that. So this journey took about two, three iterations over a period of a year. And we got into much better state as we scaled. We were able to react to incidents much faster. So that is what we did for logging. The next topic I would like to talk about is the scale out. So as JC was pointing out, we took the public cloud as a principle in our minds, even though we are operating a private cloud. And there's always a tension. For example, as we start adding hypervoices, infrastructure grows, when infrastructure goes, things start to behave differently. Like rabbit mqs or network gateways, things like that happen. So we have to find a way to split the cloud into multiple clouds. But if you have more than one cloud, you don't have a cloud, you have a problem. Because users start to see multiple clouds. And that's not a good user experience. So there is this tension between also availability because if you have one single cloud, all x are in the same basket. If you have multiple clouds, users get to split the application across different availability zones. And so what we looked at open stack patterns, like availability zones, if anyone recalls in SX, there's something called availability zone, which is an unfortunate choice of name at that time. Probably made sense for a simple VM cloud. It no longer makes sense. Because it does not let you create availability zones like you can do, for example, on AWS. Here's one as this notion called regions, which is a way to group API endpoints into groups. And NOVA has this notion of cells that from grizzly onwards. So we tried to do a mapping exercise between what open stack provides and what we need from the cloud. And looked at AWS. The model is very straightforward. People understand that, which actually makes a good balance between availability of the application and the scale out. Because as a user, you see maybe 20 odd availability zones in a single cloud. You still get that single cloud experience, but are able to spread your application across availability zones. So in open stack, it became a bit tricky initially and after some analysis, we actually found out what's the right pattern for business. So on the right, you see all the data plan components, hypervisor, block storage, network drivers, and storage. And on the right side, you see the, on the left side, you see the control plan for that. There are two things that we had to consider. One is that in open stack, unfortunately, the line between the control plan and data plan is not always clear, depending on your architecture. For example, if I take my neutron or quantum API down, is the cloud working? If you're using DHCP, probably not. Leases time out, and leases don't get renewed, and your cloud is down. So that line is not very clear. Same thing for Swift. Of course, Swift is understood. It's in the data path. It has to be available. So there are these dependencies. Also, the other thing we considered was that if I am creating infrastructure in an availability zone, I need to know which availability zone I'm creating that infrastructure in. So there's a strong coupling between the API endpoints and the data plan infrastructure behind those APIs. So we sort of do a boundary to define what an availability zone for us means. This is not know-why availability zone. This is our model of availability zone. Again, very similar to what Amazon does on AWS. So we draw a line around the APIs and the data plan. Very simple model, easy to explain users. And we map the two, the concepts that exist in OpenStack. So that's how our model looks like. So we have three regions. Again, that region here is not what you see in Keystone. Our definition of region is an independent deployment in a data-centered area, which may have multiple buildings multiple spread apart, maybe a few millisecond latency. And the choice we make is that each region is fully independent. If there is a failure in that region, it's totally isolated from other regions. Then further, we break down each region into multiple availability zones. That includes all the availability zone services and the data path for that behind those APIs. Again, that's mapped to in Keystone like a region. So we have to do sort of mental mapping between what exists in OpenStack and what we need to arrive at a multi-region experience for our customers, making it trade off between availability and user experience. So the final topic is the built-in deployment. So this is basically a journey of what went through, what happened when we started the cloud. Initially, we started Ubuntu, SX, do the APT install. Using Fabric, we sort of set up the cloud. 50 hypervisors, awesome. It was painless. But as we grew, in terms of scale, as well as the team size, that started falling apart. We then invested in puppet infrastructure and foreman. And we are able to create pet test clouds. That means each we have few test clouds where we can roll out changes and test them. But what we found was that relying on a public repository like APT was not good enough for us because things break and we have to make fixes to it. Sometimes we have to pull down changes from the next version of OpenStack like we had to pull changes from Grizzly to Falsum. Same thing we did last week. To quantum, we had to pull down some changes from Trunk. So that model started breaking down. And the last design summit in Portland, we talked to Rackspace folks. And we actually found out what they were doing, sort of learning from their experience and expanded what we were doing. So we invested in three things. A bare metal provisioning layer for the entire topology from hypervisors to controllers to MVP infrastructure. Then we dished APT packages and went to virtual environments, Python virtual environments, which to create completely self-contained car walls and use that as a deployment unit. Still using foreman and puppet. So today, we are able to bring up a test cloud in a few hours and to complete working cloud so we can test things in that cloud. So from pet clouds, we went to cattle clouds. And that also enabled us to do patches and partial upgrades. So we don't have complete, we don't always stick to the same release of open stack. We sometimes mix and match based on features that exist in certain components. We still have some problems in what we are doing. One is puppet, as we know, is change orchestration is hard. With scale, oftentimes we want to roll out changes to a subset of hypervisors or a subset of controller nodes or one part of the infrastructure. And with puppet, it's not working out very well. So we are looking at other alternatives in addition to puppet to work with Salt Stack or something else to orchestrate the change. Again, foreman UI, it worked out well when we were a small team. But doing click ops, what I mean is that you go to the UI to make state changes, conflict changes, that doesn't seem right anymore. So we are looking at, again, alternatives on how to solve that. So in this process, what we end up building was a full orchestration, topology orchestration that works out of the box. So we are working on open sourcing that complete automation, that includes the logging, aggregation, log aggregation, elastic search, Xabix alerts, and all the tools that go with it. And we are working on getting it out. Xabix templates, we worked with our colleagues at PayPal to actually build a good set of Xabix templates to monitor everything from hypervisors to MVP infrastructure to solidify it that we use as a backend device. The tools that we wrote and the lot of work that went into creating VPCs, we are, JC and I, are thinking about how to make it part of the community so that we don't have to work around the core. Today we are working around the core. For example, we had to map, we had to reduce scheduling to get what we want, network selection, or managing projects, or managing projects in each domain, in each VPC. So there's some gaps that we found out. And we want to contribute on scale out patterns that what we learned from the last year. That brings to my last slide. Thank you. Any questions? Yes, please. Actually, the question was, this looks like a complicated change to OpenStack. What I want to say is that we didn't have to tweak or fork OpenStack to make this work. Thanks to the community, the extensibility models that exist in Keystone, Nova, Glance, Whiskey, things like that made it possible for us. So we still are, our core is the same as what we see in GitHub.com. It's no different, except that we introduced code to extension points, like scheduler, host selection, network selection, or Keystone project mapping, things like that. It was not hard at all. I think the concept, it took a while for us to find the mappings. So the question was, there are too many components in this. Isn't that complicated, complicating your topology? I think there is no choice, because when you're running a software, when you're running a service, you have to have the support mechanism, support tools to run it efficiently, because our commitment to business is availability for the business and efficiency. And we can't get there just with native OpenStack. And there's no out-of-the-box solution anyway. So we found that we have to build it ourselves. I think we have to leave the room now. Thanks.


You guys had a wonderful main course. Thanks for staying around for the dessert. Obviously, this presentation is a bit different, even if we look past the fact that I'm a guy. No, he didn't notice that. I'm also not a developer. Okay, so what am I talking about? Well, when the organizers asked me to come up with a topic for this talk, I really wasn't sure what to talk about, seriously. In fact, we only settled on a topic like the beginning of this week. But I thought it may be useful to, I understand that most of you are developers, so we thought it may be useful to maybe give you guys a sense of how about the other side of the fence, what does a product manager do? Like, maybe I can start with this. How many of you are actually product managers? Anyone? I want to be good. You're at the right talk. And the fact that there's no product managers is good, because whatever I say, no one can contradict me, so that's great. Okay, so let's talk about defining what it means to be a modern product manager. Like everyone else, let's start a little bit about myself. So actually, I'm not a dev now, but I actually did start out as a developer. So I started out as a Java web developer. That was like 15 years ago. So if terms like J2EE, EJBs, entity beans, hibernate, spring framework, if that means anything to you, congratulations, we're about the same age. Since then, I spent about 10 years trying different things in technology. I've always loved technology, so I wanted to do stuff in tech, but I tried different things. So I did coding, I did sales, for a period of time I was doing biz dev. Then I went to Microsoft, I did some developer relations there, met a bunch of great people, then I tried marketing, and even last year at Microsoft I was leading a business there. But then, through all those 10 years, I realized that really my passion was in building products.  What do I do? Easy, become a PM. So currently I'm the director of product at Viki. This photograph is of me about 15 kilograms ago. I used to be a B-boy, believe it or not, but looking at my stomach, obviously I can't do this anymore. So what is a product manager? Basically, what a lot of people tell you is that the product manager is the CEO of the product. That's nonsense, you are not the CEO of the product. Unless you also have the ability to hire and fire people, you're not considered a CEO of anything. So a product manager is basically a business function that is really focused on maximizing the business value from a product. If you want to look at it visually, when you're talking about building a product, there's actually three main functions. There's UX, which stands for user experience, there's technology, the tech aspect of it, as well as business, whether your product fits the business needs or not. Basically, as a product manager, you have to be well versed in all three disciplines and hopefully experienced in at least one of them. So this is where you are. The other way to think about it is that as a product manager, your goal is to find a product that is feasible, that is valuable, as well as usable. If you have a product that is feasible and valuable but not usable, no user experience, no one's going to use it. Likewise, if you have a product that is usable but valuable, but it's not feasible, you can't build it with current technology, it's also useless. You get the idea, right? So holy trinity of product development. The modern product manager is not so much a dictator as more of a consensus builder or a glorified note taker, okay, if you want. So let's say you have customers that want a particular feature in your product or your CEO says, Jonathan, I need this bill, I need your homepage be redesigned again. So what do you usually do, right? No, you don't go and talk to your stakeholders or the customers, you take notes and you go back to the developers and say, hey, this is what we need to build. That's actually very inefficient. The modern PM actually tries to shorten the distance between your engineering team as well as your stakeholders and our users.  So one of the important things that a product manager does is to shorten the distance between engineering stakeholders and users, okay, not to become a gatekeeper, that may be the old way of doing things, but no, the modern product manager doesn't do that, all right. Another important thing is the product manager identifies and prioritizes the right problems for the team to solve. Honestly speaking, if you're working in a company with any kind of complexity, you will have a product that you'll feel is never perfect. And in fact, there is no product that's ever perfect. You may have a list of hundreds and thousands of things to do. You can't work on it all at once. So really, really important is to be able to focus the team and say that, hey, okay, we do this first, we knock that down, then the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. And the third point is also very important. A product manager doesn't go to the engineering team with the solution already in mind, okay? It's not your job to figure out the solution because to be blunt and honest, you don't know what the solution is, right? It's the team's responsibility to come up with the solution. Now, as the product manager, you are part of the team.  And yes, once the team gets together, figures out what the problem is, make sure it's the right priority, and then comes up with the right solution, then this is where the product manager documents the decision. Like it's very interesting, right? Like you may have a meeting, like a two-hour meeting with your devs, design team, try to figure out stuff, right? Okay, great. At the end of two hours, you got what you need. Everyone knows this is a path forward, this is the right design, this is the right solution, and then the PM has to go back and write the documentation, the specs, and do everything. That process of writing the follow-up emails and the documents probably takes up like five times longer than the meeting itself. But like I said, that's what you are. A PM is a glorified note taker. Okay, so for those of you who'd like to be note takers, who have a career aspiration of being a note taker, a PM is for you. Okay? And of course, most importantly is basically a PM hurts everyone to move in the right direction. Okay? Now, a product manager, what is it not? Okay, well, a product manager does not write code. I mean, you have talented engineers for that. Now there's some exceptions. Like for example, I'm special at Vicky because I commit to master directly. Yeah, I have faith from Sherman and the web team and my web engineer manager to do that. But I try not to mess things up too much. But no, but generally speaking, a product manager does not write code because engineers do that, okay? You also don't create mock-ups. And again, product managers, we like to think we're creative. Sometimes we'll do a wireframe or two. But for the most part, we don't do that. We don't do that. Neither do we have the skills to create a high fidelity mock-up. So yeah, you have designers for that. We don't sign deals that goes without saying. You have talented business people to do that. You don't plan PR. I mean, you get the idea, right? Basically, there are other specialized functions in your organizations that have specific roles to do. So you just have to worry about hurting sheep. Okay. Important skills for modern product managers to have, okay? Let's do it in a countdown style. We'll count down the top three skills, in my opinion, that a product manager should have. Saying no. Saying no is the third most important skill to have, okay? And this is, again, very important because you really have to know what to focus on. Your backlog, your wish list, you know, you may be bombarded by requests all over the place from your users, from your CEO, especially from the CEO, from your stakeholders, from your business people, you know, and the last thing you want to do is to go to your dev team and say, hey Sherman, I really need this by today. Can you do it? Hey Sherman, can you put this aside and focus on this one instead? Can you help me build this feature?  You basically go to them every day with a different request, okay? So saying no is very important because you need to know what is important to focus on and you have to shield the team from additional noise, all right? Always be ready to answer the question. Okay, fine. Let's say everyone died, okay? Everyone got hit by a bus. You only have one dev left and you can only deploy that one dev on one thing. What would that be? Okay, so learn how to say no. And I mean, yeah, it's easy to say but imagine your performance reviews are being done by your boss and then your CEO says, but John, then I feel very strongly about this website design. Then you have to use some verbal kung fu to deflect that. Number two, most important skill to learn is credibility, okay? And this sort of goes without saying but if you have a vision of a product and you want to push your vision through to your engineering team, you have to be credible, right? Sherman, am I credible? Pretty good, yeah? Okay, all right, cool. Okay, lunch. Yeah, so if you don't have credibility, all right, then there's no way you can sell a vision because you may say that, oh, I'm the PM, I have all these great ideas. This is what we have to build. No one will care, right? You will not be able to push your vision through to sell your vision to the team. Credibility is earned, not given.  You have to earn credibility by showing that your positions, your vision is backed up by data, right? You have actual user reports that say that, okay, this is actually user behavior, we want to go this way. And basically you have to prove yourself that you can be capable of making good decisions, right?  So I hope I'm credible, all right? Sorry Alan, okay. All right, what's the most important skill for our PM to have? Any guesses?  Communication? Sort of, but not really. Okay, never mind. Empathy, okay? So in my opinion, empathy is the most important skill for our PM to have, okay? So let's talk about the obvious part first, all right? You have to have empathy for your customers' pain points. You have to understand how they're using the product, why they're using it, and what pain are they suffering. Now granted, at Vicky, we don't always have full empathy of our customers' pain points, especially our community of users, because no matter what we do, they'll still stick around for some reason. But that's not the right mentality to have, right? So you have to have empathy for what's their pain and then how you can deal with them. But beyond that, you have to think, again, any organization or company with enough complexity is not only about product and engineering. You have the design team, you have the customer experience team, right? The people who actually suffer when customers complain and issue support tickets. Then you have our BizDev team, you know, you have your marketing team, you have PR, you have CEO's office, you have all these different stakeholders in the company. Now, if you operate in good faith, you'll believe that everyone's marching towards a common goal of doing right by the customer. But every group of these people, each of these stakeholders have different perspectives, have different considerations, and have different priorities. As a PM, you also have to have empathy for those people, right?  What's the impact for customer support? What's the impact? How would that help or hurt our content team from getting additional content? So it's very important to have empathy for your stakeholders as well. And of course, it goes without saying, but you have to have empathy for engineers and how they work, and that's really the most important thing. Like, for example, at Viki, we have an unofficial rule, like PMs shall not approach the desks of developers until after 5.30 p.m. And that's because we have an open concept, so it's sort of distracting if people just go up to you all the time and talk to you. Especially, you know, as devs, sometimes you're in the zone, right? So usually if I need to talk to a dev, like say for example, I need to talk to Sharon about something, I'll go behind her chair. I'll see whether she's listening to music or not. Is she focused on coding or she's doing her New York Times crossword puzzle? All right. And then if it feels about right, then say, hey. No, but usually we try not to do that. And then because we use Slack for intercom communication, so we usually Slack message. And then if, for example, you Slack someone, and then they reply immediately, okay, it means that their context has already switched right. Then it's okay to go and approach them to talk, right? Because frankly speaking, I came from organizations where it's more efficient to go talk to somebody than to send an email or to Slack. But whatever, to each his own. But regardless, the point is you have to respect and have empathy for how your developers want to work. Okay? Now, a million dollar question. All of you are devs here, or at least most of you. At least one person here is thinking about being a PM. So how do you know if product management is right for you? Well, you may be a closet PM. If, number one, as a dev, you love pouring over data that helps quantify the impact of what you build. Now, it's okay, right? Not all devs need to be overly concerned about numbers because honestly speaking, that's what the PM is for, right? To get the numbers, to get the feedback, and making sure that the product team is on track. But if, as a dev, you feel the urge to, yeah, I want to find out, like, how my feature is doing, what's the impact? You know, then maybe you have some signs of being a PM, right? Do you feel energized working with other people in your company outside of engineering? Do you like to talk to your marketing folks or to your recruiter, for example? You know? Everyone likes to talk to a recruiter. Hi, we need more colleagues. Right? Do you like talking to your CEO? Do you have a one-on-one schedule with your CEO? I mean, not to, like, curry favor, but because you generally are concerned about the company and the direction and you want to know more, right? That's all cool, right? Yeah, then you may be a PM material. Do you get a thrill from leading workshops like brainstorming sessions and ideation and documenting down the conclusions? Do you feel ecstatic when you put pen to paper and write things down? Do you love documenting stuff? Do you live in Evernote? If you like documenting things down and write complex documents, then yeah, maybe PM is for you. Lastly, you know, are you opinionated? Do you have an idea of what your company should build next and can't wait to tell everyone about it? You have this great idea and I just want to tell everyone.  You know, yeah, I'll get my job done, but this is really what I want to build.  Does this apply to you? Sort of, no? Okay, alright, too shy to answer, okay. Okay, so, that's really it for me. Thank you, so, yeah, I hope some of you will consider product management as a career path once you get bored of turning out code. Never. Thank you. Yeah, I know you're going to be a career dev. Any questions for John? He's the most empathetic person in the team. Is it? Really? Okay, lunch tomorrow. Yeah. Okay. Are you more product manager? Unfortunately, no. Unless you want to take my job. No, we don't have any product manager openings right now. But we have plenty of dev openings. Yeah. Okay, any other questions for any one of us? Or the, all good? If you can talk to us. Yeah, don't pice it. Yeah, don't pice it, yeah. It is awesome. Thank you so much John to share with me.


Welcome to Toffy TV. It's the final word from the Algarve Cup and joined by Sarah Halcom from the Blue Room to the Scorse. Two games, no wins. Yeah, do you know what though? I think performance is wise. I don't think there's anything to be too worried about. I think there's some really obvious signings that need to be made. But we didn't have those players who don't know what we can expect until they do come in. The first game for me played a load of kids, pretty much. Few of them impressed. Nothing too exciting. I think the main positive of that game, as I previously said, was Mo Vessage. I think he played an absolute binder. Not everyone's going to agree with that. I think he's someone that people still seem to have this view etched in their minds that he's not up to the standard, that he's a championship style player. He's not good enough, he's rubbish, nowhere near to the standard. I think he's just got to remind himself of certain games that he's played. I always refer to the City League Cup games, but not just that one. That's just the one that for me stands out for all of us Blues. He was the best player on the pitch and he's so classy. He can find the past. He's got a bit of toughness about him, a bit of grit and determination. For me it's more a question of whether he can stay fit, but I like the latter for me. That was a positive one. I think what Mo was writing about the fitness, he was never stringing any games together, because he couldn't string any games together. He couldn't get a run in the team to see how actually good he is. On his day he is a good footballer, not only defensively, but I think we've seen at times under Roberto Martinez. He's a footwear spot on. He's clearly loves playing for the club, loves being around the club. He's actually an interesting one, because I think when you look at that game and those players, it was about some of those players. It was almost like a trial for them, because Michael Silver had said before on that. This would be the weekend when he'd start looking at cutting players down. I think he took that and went with him with two hands. It would be interesting because we are striving for a midfielder. I think he did his course no harm at all. I thought he did really, really well. He was at the centre of everything defensively. You've seen the ball he played to Sandro. It was absolutely brilliant. Sandro should have done better when he hit the post. But I thought he was excellent. He's definitely one who played his way into possibly the squad. I think he said afterwards as well to Sky how the training was better and how it felt better on the Michael Silver. He's obviously enjoying it. It would be interesting to see over the next couple of weeks what the club decides to do about the future. Definitely. For me he's someone that I'd like to see in amongst the first team squad for next season. I think it would be a real shame not to see him giving that chance as you've just said there. Having that proper pre-season in, having that regime now in place. I think for all players it's kind of given them a clean slate to go we are treating this as if it's our first day at this club. We're going to impress this new manager and see where we can go with that. But for me, like you said, he did his course no harm whatsoever. The other one I'd say he's done a course no harm is actually Sandra. Again, very mixed bag of responses towards his performance this. But I think he's crossing off the ball as well whenever he takes a set piece. I think he's banged on. He needs the score doesn't he? That's his problem. The thing he's played, what he started off for, I think he has. Well, obviously he's been playing out on that right hand side because there's been no tail walk-off. And obviously Lachman's not played a part in the last couple of games and Alassia hasn't played a part. So he's been instrumental on that right hand side. But you're right, not scoring against ITV when it's 22-0. And then, you know, we've seen him for a couple of chances against Berry and then he's hit the post. So he's been good and I think, you know, playing both games as well has been good for him. He looks stronger, I think he looks fitter. I think that's a big part of it having a pre-season where he didn't have one last season. But I still think, I think what he is and what people think he is are two different things. I think he is a right side of it, or even a left side of a three. He's not a central striker because he's a right. And if you go back to the goals he scored when he was in Malaga, a lot of them were sort of outside of the box or free kick set pieces, as you said, dyneson set pieces. So I think we have to change our idea of what he is. My only worry is, is that when players are fit, you know, is he going to play against in the head of Towson? No. Is he going to play ahead of Bill Walker? No. Is he going to play ahead of Neas? I don't think so.  Is he, you know, for me, he still finds himself down in the Pekinode. And I think that's the worry.  Even any half decent team has been looking at him. So if they decide, it's up to him to keep fighting if he wants to, if he really wants it. I don't think he really wanted it last season. So it would be interesting to see what the next couple weeks again does he really want it. Definitely. I think you've hit the nail on the head with what you've just said then about, is it is a case of how much does he want it? Because fair play to the lad. I think he was kind of pushing for the move to Spain. That hasn't gone ahead for him. So he's making the best of the situation he's in. And he's really thrown himself into the training, into the games. As you said, he's had more minutes than anyone, I think, in this pre-season. So that's got to, he's got to be feeling that Marcus Hill has got some kind of faith in him. Or maybe it is that he's just really trying to figure him out before he makes that final decision on whether he stays or goes. But for me, that pekinordi, you said, I tend to agree. I think maybe Yma, I don't know. I think you probably would. I don't, I don't think Sylveth sees him as a central striker. He put, that's it. And I think that's, that's correct as well. I don't think he is. You're going to be someone that's going to come in instead of a jengtoason or instead of a umanias kind of thing. But, you know, in terms of, I know we've not got Europe next season, but we've got cup competitions and stuff. Could be a good player to use in those kind of games, in cup games and cup competitions. He's certainly not somebody that I would be upset to see in the first team squad, you know. But on the other hand, I don't know if I'd be that upset if he left either. That's where he sort of falls between, you know, on two sides. So, I think he's young, he's got youth on his side. I think maybe what happened last season with him was because he came in so late after playing in number 21, your old number 21. Maybe he didn't figure out what he was. But, you know, you would think Cooman and Walsh haven't watched him, haven't gone out to Spain and watched him, would know what he was. But I don't know whether they had enough time on the training ground to figure that out. And maybe that's where the problem stemmed. And because the season just seemed to go so fast and so many games in a short space of time, no-one ever had time to really work on what he was. And because I don't think Cooman was a coach, I don't think he coached that many players. So, I don't think that situation was ever addressed, not just for him, but for a lot of players. So, I think that's where he suffered. And you could say the same for other players like Klassen never really developed this positional sense or what was needed to adapt them to the Premier League. And I think so far, I think we've seen that change with Silver Sofa, that he understands what his role is. Maybe faturist, faturistly, because Theo Wolcott isn't in the squad, he's got to see him a little bit more. And that ultimately could really help us in the season if he decides to keep them. Yeah, this is it. It's all practice and he's getting the minutes in there. He's getting experience playing with the rest of the team. So, it's going to be doing the lad, the world of good, I presume, confidence-wise. You just said there about Cooman as well. And I don't think the man had any kind of man-managerial skills about him whatsoever. So, for these young players, you spoke about his age there, he's just 21 now. And you think for a kid, really, if that age should be... I mean, he doesn't look 21, 22. I mean, he looks like he should be on the doors in town. He's got that kind of physical side to him, which I'd like to see a little bit more of, because once he gets bumped, he normally just goes down. That's another thing, if he's got to lane that, it's from a bump to him, he's got to bump him back and roll with it in the Premier League because he's stronger than other players. And if he's stronger, instead of hitting the deck at every opportunity, ride the challenge and you probably will get more chances if you get into the positions. That's it. And I think the games that we've played so far will probably have helped toughen him up a little bit. Because we've seen he's been getting chunks taken out of him, hasn't he? But, you know, part of me doesn't mind seeing that. Because, as you said, it's getting him kind of bloody into the style of things a little bit more. So, yeah, it'd be really interesting to see what he'll be like with a full pre-season under his belt. I think there's obviously a few more games coming this week. And I'd like to see probably a little bit more. But yeah, walk up for me, we've missed him certainly as well. And you've got to think when he's fit again, he's going straight into that starting 11, isn't he? He's won that it will go straight into the team. I think, yeah, I think they were the main two.  I think you just did what he always does and you know what you're going to get from him. You're going to get that rattedness from him. But it was just disappointing that the likes of Clasen had his goal disallowed and Sandro hit the post. Because I think that was the represented, you know, that little bit of extra that they both just need to settle down. I'll be honest, I was disappointed with Clasen. I don't, I watch him and I've given the lad every chance. But I just don't think that his skill set adapts to this heaven side. I just don't think it does. I think maybe where he wants to play, we've got better players and where they're trying to play him. He doesn't really fit. And I think also, I think he needs a team, almost built random. I see him as almost like a kale kind of player that you have to, almost like a luxury, something that you can, you'll arrive late in the box. I just can't see it work and I really can't and sometimes that just happens. Yeah, and it's a shame, isn't it? I think when we brought him in last summer, we were all excited. Ajax captain, you know, and he's chosen to come to Everton and thinking he's going to be a bit of a star player for us. And it's just not gone that way at all. And we've all been kind of rooting for him. Haven't we as a fan base thinking we'd love this lad to come good because the way he's kind of been treated and he's still showing that grit and determination to crack on. But yeah, largely anonymous in all of his play. And when he does, yeah, he was very unfortunate because that goal should have stood that he scored. But even that, that's just one of those, isn't it? That's it. But then there's other opportunities he has and he always seems to fluff it. He just, we're all dying for him to do something, come good, score a goal, like get an assist or whatever. But you know, that's what he has to be doing. And unfortunately he's not delivering even now at this stage with his preseason. So yeah, I'm starting to think that he's got to be moved on. He strikes me as one of those players that will probably start the season at Evan. But I imagine towards the back end of the window on the continent, because obviously their window stays open, they can still buy our players. And I don't imagine Evan will sell many players after, but I can see him as someone who will end up moving to take. He's sort of maybe a week into the season when it's quite obvious that he's not going to be playing games or something like that. And he's, you know, he's, it's clear that he's not, he's not seen as, he doesn't look like he's seen as one of the, one of the people even fighting for those places, because he just hasn't gone. I don't think he's got that intensity that Michael Silver's looking for in his midfield, because obviously we've set up. You can see the way he wants to set up now. You know, it's a high press with the full backs getting forward. And the midfield have to really be on it. And he just seems to stroll about in his own, at his own pace. And he, I think he does, he does want to get involved. I just don't think he's got that change of gear. It's not quite clear, but it's just, you can tell it's there. And it's a very different standard, isn't it, as well? From what he's come from to coming into the Premier League, you know, massive, massive difference in standard of football here and the pace and the physicality. And, yeah, it's starting to look now that he just hasn't got it in his locker, unfortunately for him. Unfortunately for the club, because we spent quite a bit of money on him. He's had so many chances now. And I do think, as we said before, it's a new pre-season, new manager, changes, fresh start for everyone judging on what we've seen so far for me. It's not quite going to cut it. As I said, you can tell by the fact that, you know, in the games he's come on as a Sorbonne. He doesn't really seem to be part of the first 11. And you think about it, he's not part of the first 11.  He said he wanted to stay, he wanted to fight for his place. I just don't think that he's got the intensity, I think, for me to get into the team. No, we'll wait and see, but I mean, as you said, it was mostly kids playing. So it's hard to really judge those kids. But Pennington, not for you now. No, I don't think he's got anything that we need. And I think he's watched 24. He's not as young as what people expect. He's 23, 24, so I don't think he's as young as people think he is. And I think, I know he's just signed a new contract, but I just don't. I think he's the kind of player that maybe you let go somewhere and maybe put a buyback closing or something. And then wait two or three years and see what games of football comes to be. But I think he looks like one of those players that will have a good career at a level, maybe like a duffy kind of player, but has to play football. Because he looks like a kind of player who needs experience. Definitely. And as you said at that age as well, now is the time when he really should be getting his regular football. And he'd come back from Leeds, wasn't it? And to be honest, I thought that he was going to end up leaving and signing for them. So I was quite surprised to see that he'd signed a contract with us. But yeah, he didn't do anything for me to particularly stand out. Someone, again, I'm not too fussed. But no, that's it. But I think the left back for me, Robinson, is passing and stuff was poor, but that lad is quick. No, the difference with Robinson is. He's younger, obviously. You know, he's got potential. To be honest, I wouldn't say that was a big part of his game. What we've seen because I've watched him play, watched him play for the 23s, I watched him play for America, watched him play for Bolton. That lad's got everything that you need. He just needs to hone it and get it tighter and become more experienced. I think that was, I think he was, I think it was enough game for him, I think. But you see him with his pace. Listen, if you're a defender and you make mistakes, if you can use your pace to solve those mistakes out, then that's a big thing. And you can almost use that pace as, well, I'll lay in the other things because I've got my pace. And I'm gone. And it's the same with the other end as well. You know, James Coleman never started as a great defender. He wasn't even a great attacker, but what he had was pace and what he'd get himself into situations where he had to get better because it allowed him to go, but it forgave so many other sins. Having pace will do that for you. And obviously he went on loan, which was this last week, mean bad. He went on loan to Blackpool and got a promotion. And Robinson is learning the other way. He's got a, he's, you know, he played in a team that survived.  But I'd like to see him go on loan to a club striving to be promoted. Yeah. Or, or, or I mean, I don't think it would happen because of just the way the Premier League is now. Was a team where he played weekend and week out in the Premier League, but I don't think that will happen. But if you play for a championship team where he was striving to win and played every week, then I think that would be ideal for him. Yeah.  You get that winning mentality. The style of the way you play football and everything is different if you're striving for that instead of like looking at who's, who's underneath you and, and trying to stay up. So I think some of that maybe came across in, in his game. Some of his passing when you're looking for him to go forward, he's playing it a little bit cautious. Some of his passing was off, but I think he's someone with bags of potential. Like you said, his pace, that is an uncommon thing. He's got youth on his side. I would tend to agree with you there and like to see him. I'd love to see us bring it. We need a left back, sign a left back, maybe see him go out on loan again, cut his teeth a bit further. But he's someone that I certainly have been watching this preseason and thinking we've got a real player on our hands there for the coming future. Yeah, because I think if we brought a, if we brought, say we brought a left back in this week, you know, him and, him and whoever that is, I'm not like literally not saying anything because you say a name and it doesn't happen. And then you're like, yeah. Most wanted, most hated. I wanted to take it two weeks ago and now, you know, no, but say we bring a left back in and you've got veins and those two play for the position this season. And then maybe veins bars out at the end of the season. I'm not saying he will, but maybe let's say he does, right? So, and then you bring Robinson back. You've got then, you've got then a young left back and then maybe a mid-20, 20 left back fighting for that position. I think that's a perfect scenario rather than, rather than a 19-year-old and a 33-year-old, which are just poles apart. You've got to have players who are not, but you know, to have a good squad in football, if you've got two players fighting for a position, of course you're an experienced on the team, but if you've got a player hitting his P and then a younger player, that's ideal for me. That's okay. It's not quite the same, but Seamus is obviously younger than Baines and you've got John Joe Kenny. I think that's just where you want it. That's just how you want it. John Joe, again, he played on Saturday. He's not anywhere near the final product, but he looks at, he can look at Seamus now in his peak and say, they're the things I want. With his LL, I was Robinson and I was looking at Baines. You're not looking at Baines at his best. You're looking at Baines two, three, four years past his best. So although he's training, you'll be able to pass on all that experience. He's not necessarily not watching him deliver. Yeah, you're not watching him deliver. Whereas for John Joe, he's watching Seamus and he's going, that's what I need to do. That's what I need. Those are the ones I need to make if I get an opportunity in this team. So that I think be the perfect scenario because I think Robinson's, I think he's got something. I think he's in the American team as well. You know me, I'm always looking for a route to get to America or for American fans to come and watch Evan. So that's good as well. So I think he's definitely got potential. I wouldn't write them off and I think you might just need that extra loan. But yeah, I mean, obviously there's others that like to corner me. He did all right, I thought. I think he's good. Again, he's another one. I think I probably think with other players about he might need a loan, another loan. But yeah, we'll wait and see. It's exciting though, isn't it? That we've got so many potential bud in young talents that we just kind of got to figure out what's the best thing to do with them. I think I just worried that there's not there's not one really banging down the door. Rooney or something. Well, I don't think I think Rooney's not going to come around it. But I just think I don't know. Maybe maybe they're not banging on the door because they're already there, if that makes sense. So which we saw on Saturday night. Obviously Saturday was a lot more of a first team, although, you know, it was still missing Theo Wolcott. It was still missing Garn. It was missing Sigarton. It was missing Pickford. And it was missing somebody who can play on the left-hand side and his name is not Kevin Morales. So, so now if we get nuked, there's going to be cockroaches and Kevin Morales left. Honestly, just just just kind of get rid of them. Can you? Oh, my words. But do you know what? I said this before, fair play to him. His attitude has been spot on in pre-season, you know, and he's looked okay, but yeah. If you pay, that's why you pay 50 million for a new left-hand side player. So we, there's still plenty of room in there. And I still think there's I think there's room in other places, but I like to doubt and I like to doubt an interest on one because I think we just talked about people knocking on the door. He seems to be the young player who is knocking on the door. He seems to be. He's played pre-season almost as a Sigarton light. You know, he's there. No, no one else has been really used in that position apart from him. So that's interesting that he sees him as almost second to Sigarton. So it'd be interesting to see whether that carries on because that kid's got loads of potential. But as we've said loads of times on the show me bars, he just misses that key ingredients, which is the again that weird intensity, the intensity that you need to play at to be a regular in the Premier League. But when he steps up and when he does nice things, it's great. It's just doing that a little bit more often. Yeah, I completely agree. It's that consistency with him. And yeah, it seems like he's a bit nonchalant sometimes in his performances. And that's a concern because you would think that this would be the time where he'd really go right. We know that Marco Silva as well is a high. He likes football at high intensity and now is his real time to shine. Sigarton late coming back from the World Cup and everything like that. So he's he's had a lot of minutes and he's had his chance to kind of show what you can do. And I don't think he's done badly, but he's not blown my socks off either. And I was kind of hoping that he would. He was what was really looking forward to watching. I think I think he had moments in this game, but I think that typifies him as a player. Again, it's that it's that what they do next with him. It's whether the I probably wouldn't send them out on loan if we don't buy another midfield that I would because I think as a creator force, I think I think playing in the Premier League might help him. It might almost like open his eyes. At the end of the day, it's still preseason. Yeah, it's it's not about maybe the things people think. Sees, you've got players like let's say Mo Bessard. You really did play with an intensity because he knows it's his last chance. He wants to be in heaven. He knows that if he goes anywhere, it's going to be a step down. So he wants to stay in heaven. He wants to be part of this. Keelyn Dahl probably looks at and goes, I'll be all right. And he's probably been told, you know, play a certain way. You know, we want to see this when you want to see that from you. Don't be legging round all over the pitch. Just play your role. So it'll be interesting to see if he stays at heaven and doesn't go on loan. What he'd be like put dropped into a Premier League setting where suddenly, wow, it's 100 miles an hour. I've got to step up. I've got to do these things. I think a forest last season, I think there were times in the season where he was he was well on it.  I think see this is where I think when people look at people like Tom plays at Tom Davis and they go, why is he playing and why isn't he playing? Why is Tom playing and why isn't classing playing? You know, why is Tom playing and what Keelyn Dahl could have done that? It's because Tom understands no matter how good you think he is. Tom understands the intensity of the Premier League. You understand how fast it is. He knows when someone's going to do something and he'll win a file. All right, he makes a little mistake. See his passing can be a ratter. He plays sometimes like he's playing on the ball. See those mates and love that. So he's. Sometimes you need a little you just think he doesn't need a little jolt and need to be woken up a little bit and hopefully that will come out of him. But that's the difference. Tom knows what it's like to play in the Premier League. He's understood literally from the first minute you got to go in the Premier League. He was like, I'm on it. I understand the pace and that's what Keelyn Dahl for me. He's got to do. He's got to be dropped in and to understand the pace of it. And only when he gets in and gets a game and goes, now this is this is under mines and I'll stuff this. I've got to adapt to this that we'll actually know if he's good enough. Yeah. So you're saying that and I think I definitely keep him. Yeah. And you know who knows because you spoke about him at Forest there as well and to completely contradicts in sides to the season. You know, he was the first half of the season. I watched a fair bit of him and he just was unbelievable. I thought, what a player. Why have we let him go? We could really do with him ever and now. So, yeah, he's not necessarily blowing my socks off, but there's still a few more games. And like you said, I'd still be happy to see him say if he was starting against Wolves on the opening day, I wouldn't be concerned.  I think he's got a quite a laid back style about the way he plays, but that's fine. It's long as when you are on the ball, you do something with it. Football's always had laid back people. In fact, it's that thing when people say, oh, he makes his own time on the ball. Feel yn dal feels like a player like that to me. That when he gets on the ball, he knows straight away he's got a picture in his head of what's going on around him. It's just that he's got to understand that. He won't get on the ball as much as he wants to, unless he puts himself in the right area.  It moves him away from the player marking him, which is something that you don't see a lot of young players do. His range of passings go to his left pegs is brilliant. It's just that he's got to make sure that he doesn't become a bystander, because that's when you become a classing. That's when you become someone who's just running around, but there's no purpose to your game. So I think he has to, I'd like to see him in the squad and getting opportunities. And then we'll just see where the line lies, because I think he can be a game changer in the team. And he's still young enough that he'll surpass players that are at the club now in the long term. So he's an excellent footballer just about bringing that out. Definitely. And he's, like you said, about his left foot there as well and changing games. He's got that in his locker as well here that it could be games tied up. If there's 20 minutes to go, you bring Ciaran Daol on him, he could just score an absolute screamer. And that's the kind of thing that he can do that you go, wow. But yeah, he has got that more laid back style to his play. And it'd be interesting to see what the step up is like for him next season, because I should imagine that it will be gilfee, but that he'll very much be a part of the squad. Well, he can play off the left, and he can play off the right as well. And he can play as a number 10, so he gives the manager options straight away. A rotation maybe? I mean, the game itself, I thought the first half, I thought we were brilliant. I thought the intensity was so much higher, but it was a Christmas, so our passing. I thought every time they had it, we tended to win it back. But I thought for that first half, we were right at it. Again, Cenk Daol from very unlucky. I mean, that would have been a fantastic goal if he'd scored the way he brought it down and manipulated the play, hitting the post. I thought we were right on it and, you know, set pieces we looked dangerous from. Sandro looked okay, playing on that right hand side. So I thought we looked really good in that first half. The first half was dead exciting, I thought, to be honest. I know there's still players that are coming in and hopefully there'll be a few more added as well. But yeah, I thought this was it. This was a real glimpse of this is what Marco Silva wants. This is the style that he wants to implement. This is the way we're going to play high pressing, high intensity attacking football. And we were working well as a unit as well. I thought it was the first time we actually looked like a team. There's not people looking in different directions and running away from the ball. And yeah, Cenk Towson, very unlucky. What a goal that would have been, as you say, and he's someone as well who I just am dying for him to get some more goals in the coming three season games. But I'm so excited to see what he can do next season if we can get somebody in as well and get him the right service. Yeah, that's all of the service for them. This is it, isn't it? This is what we need. We don't want them. I mean, it's nice that he's getting involved in the play, dropping in and getting back. That's great. But we need to get... It's basically about getting those wide players having pace because if we've got pace and we suddenly stretch put teams and Cenk can get on the shoulder of that last player and get the ball into him, we've seen this finishing is brilliant. But at the moment, the problem is, is that because we're still a slow team, because we haven't got those fast players, everything's slow up through. That means that defenders can get around them because they're not getting dragged out and ultimately he's not getting the chances. But I thought what was good was I think on Wednesday and to Betty, we were like that for the first 20 minutes. We were really at them, really, really at them.  It was for the first 45 minutes. And then after the break, the pace just dropped a little bit. And they had a couple of chances, but it was that one chance that he had when obviously he scored from it. And I mean, I still think we need to massively improve. And that's where obviously a left back comes in. Keane and Jags, a worry me. Keane particularly just frightens the life on me whenever he plays. Went down to watch him play burry earlier in the week and last week, sorry. And I just thought, this is, this is Barry. And he just looked lost. He didn't want the ball. There was, there was a time where, where he had the ball at the back and you've got Jags there and there's the ball running towards him. And he's like, I just pass it to Jack. Just pass it. Just but he's thrown into there. Yeah, but that then spreads throughout the whole side. You can see it, you know. And I mean, I just love to see Jordan Pickford like laying into him next season, but I'd prefer not to actually. I'd prefer to see a different pairing in for me. I don't want to see him starting forever to me. I'm starting to think he's. I think the problem is, I think the problem is is that with Jags next to him, Jags being of, of, you know, of an age now. I say that and he's obviously younger than me. He's of an age now where he's coming to the end and I suppose Jags wants someone next to him that is going to do that running for him. And probably Jags is probably like, this fella can't do the running for me. You know, you want, you want to help, but you almost want it like a whole gate in there who's got the pace who might have a mistaken him, but he's got the pace to get him off the trouble and Jags can almost go, well, this is what you need to do. And then keep, but then Keane probably looks and goes, well, I need someone next to me who can offer a little bit more than. And that's the problem, I think, because Keane will never be a leader. Yeah, I've said this so many times as a defensive unit, you need an alpha. You always need an alpha. You need someone who's going to tell your defenders to step up and move and all the rest of it. And I think that's what Jags is because of his age. So we need to, we need to go and buy an alpha. We really do. Someone with a bit of pace and someone who will organise the back line. Sometimes you don't always get that pair together. Sometimes you get your alpha who's like Jags and then you have a distance who's got the pace and they complement each other so well. So we need to because I look at our four centre backs and pretty much terrified by a little bit of everything. You know what I mean? Like Ashley Williams just terrifies me. Keane, I just, that goal tripled that what he's like. And there was another one with Ailey on in the game when they played the ball first half. They played the ball left from the left into the box and the lad ghosted in and just got a little touch on it and Stechelmaid got it, but Keane didn't know the lad was in the same postcode as him. This is the thing. You constantly watching his game and you thinking where is he looking here? What is he doing? He's a centre back. He's a professional Premier League footballer. How doesn't he know how to do the basics of defending?  This seems to happen every single game that he plays. Every game I've seen Keane play in the past sort of six months or however long it's been. There's been so many head in my hands moments and that is not what you need from your centre backs. That's really. Don't think he smells danger? No, he doesn't. But I don't know if he's again another one who's if it's a combination of him made of being a little bit too laid back with stuff as well. Confidence issues. He's visibly a very, very nervous human being and footballer. And for me, he's just not going to cut it. As you said them for Jags, Holgate, Keane and Williams. That's very worrying for me. The best one out of them is by far Holgate. But as you said, he's still young. He's still got a stake in it. But he's young and I think he's had an injury. So it's the manager maybe hasn't put him in for that reason. But he's young and he again is another one who needs someone next to him who's going to show him the ropes. Yeah. Because at the moment you're looking at anything and Jags has got to start in the first game of the Premier League. And you think, yeah, that's not the position we want to be. Because the more fact is, if everyone want to play the style they want to play, they need pace at the back, they need to push up, they need the hat. We can't play a high line the way it is. If we don't play a high line, then the midfield is going to drop. And the midfield is going to drop. How do you press? You can't press like that. So, you know, that needs to be rectified. I'm sure it will. But then on the flip side of that. You know, in the three games we've seen this week, OK, we've hit the post 47 times, I don't know what it is. That was just do more. But we're not scoring enough goals either. We need, we're not even scoring enough goals. I don't think we're creating the chances at the moment. So, I mean, that all comes from the style of playing. That'll all be developed. But I think, but listen, that was the second half. That's when that was when the energy was starting to be set. They made a lot of changes as well. We, our players were getting pushed for, you know, 70, 75 minutes, just more than any of them have played. So, there's always going to be that drop off. And, you know, there was second half and you can see it. So, I'm just glad that they've added an extra pre-season game. They've added the game against Wren next week. I think that's really important again. You know, we'll play Thursday, Saturday. I think that's really important. And then we'll have a week play Valencia and then have another weekend. Hopefully we can get players in because of the deaths before them. I just thought for that 45 minutes against Porto and being the first team, I just thought the shape, I think everyone watching was very positive of the hard time, what they'd seen.  But I think for that 45 minutes, I think there was definitely a progression and just a bit more added on. I loved watching that first half. I really enjoyed watching that first half. As I said, I thought we played some really nice football and more than anything, as we both said, it is about exactly that, showing that we've got that style and this is the model and you can see that brand and that silver influence. It's just now a matter of, still, we're still in the same boat where we need to ship off the deadwood and sign some players. But I know it's frustrating, you know, after the World Cup, it's very frustrating and my nails are shorter than they've been at the moment for a while, I've been nervous. But I do have faith that the board and the manager will bring players in. You know, and I think once that they do, we all start to feel a lot better. If you bring in like two or three before the game this season and we've got Wolcott back and we get Sigurdtson back and we get Ghana back. Pickford as well. Then suddenly the team looks very, looks a lot different. And hopefully that'll start this week on, you know, Thursday we'll start to see Sigurdtson and Ghana and hopefully Wolcott as well. Because, you know, I don't like the fact that he's injured. I don't like the fact that he's missing pre-season. Whether he's missing actual trainer or whether he's missing just games, I don't like the fact that he's missing games because he's such a big important player to the way we're playing. I think the way we're playing on the map of silver that you want him in the side as well. Then obviously on that left-hand side, whether it be a new player, whether it be, you know, I don't know. But I imagine that left-hand side won't be Kevin Morales. So you've got a lot of, you've got half your team there still to come back. So, you know, it's all this doom and gloom. It's not doom and gloom. I actually think once a signing's coming and a few more go, I think everyone starts to feel a lot more positive. Good times ahead. I've been saying that for, I don't even know why I'm looking at me watching. Not like some kind of time machine. I've got to count down on me watching the last time you had good times at Everton. Well, no. Anyway, let us know your thoughts in the comments on the two games over the weekend, the Algarve Cup. Big thanks to Sarah for coming in and doing her instant reaction on Friday night as well for the game. So let us know your thoughts in the comments and we'll see you later on top of you.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jasper's Case Breaks.com. We are starting off our Saturday with 2019-2020 Panini Select Basketball Team All Edition. That was a China exclusive. We got it. It has the special red parallels and gold parallels Pretty nice stuff. This is random team break number seven. There was also an early bird special So let's flip to this list right here. If you were one of the first 15, right? Yeah, if you were one of the first 15 You have a chance at an extra spot a bonus spot the early bird catches the worm So in a different dice roll, let's roll it. Let's randomize it four times Four after four times Tim Tyler. Did I get that right for? It's four right there. Yes, Tim Tyler congrats to you. You are the early bird There you are right there. You are the early bird that catches the worm So you get an extra spot in this break now Let's grab everybody's names and do the random team assignments with the new dice roll Let's roll it and randomize it six and a three nine times for names and teams and Ninth and final time Brian down to Kenny. All right nine times for the teams and Ninth and final time So nice Grizzlies on top and the trailblazers on bottom after nine same checklist as as regular select But just with with the Asia exclusive China exclusive parallels Only sold to that market through through team all which is I guess Sort of like Alibaba like a big e-commerce website All right, Brian with the Grizz Jake with the Pells nice got the two big teams are out up on top Tim with the Bucks Juan with the Suns Brian with the Cavs Zach with the Nuggets Matthew with the Raptors Nancy with the Thunder Juan with my Lakers Daniel with the Magic Joe with the Pacer Sanyin with the Pistons Matthew with the Jazz Oliver with the Spurs Matthew with the Wizards John with the Sixers Excuse me choking on my own spit. Yeah with the Mavs My throat dried out. Sorry about that. Excuse me Derrick with the Hornets EA with the Bulls I'm not gonna make it through this day Ryan with the Celtics Jacob with the Nets Jacob Ryan with the Warriors There's the rest of the list right there Here are the two boxes right there as it says in the description I think from here on out. We're just grabbing Maybe it doesn't but we're just we're just grabbing a no, yeah These boxes are from a case that's been open already. There it is right there. So we're just we're just grabbing Random boxes. I don't think we have too much more of this team all stuff after this ladies and gentlemen So just keep that in mind And Tim got the heat with the early bird spot. That's not too shabby. Let's put this all on one screen right here Let's sort by column B or any trades trades no Yes, maybe Everyone everyone watching live. I hope. Oh Jeremy Anderson. Hi. I miss Jeremy Anderson. Hello. Well, let's close it up. We've got other breaks due today Already booked for a little bit trade window closed TWC. That's what that means. Let's print. Let's rip There we go. Oh be one. What's going on? How are you? So these are the exclusives right there All card ship in select right and here are all of the The official printout again right here Jim gray. What's going on Jim? How are things Hopefully you are Doing well in these in these strange pandemic times And I'll rip both boxes all at once too. There's already a drama rant right there stuck at home like everybody else. Yeah Us too. It's just home to work work to home and the shop's been closed forever and We're making we're making do though. Luckily Luckily, we're able to Still operate as an online business. So We've lucked out there Everyone's healthy No covid for us yet So far so good Let's get the second box open They finally got the Dodgers television network on direct TV. We've got direct TV here. So I took joy enjoy a little bit of Dodgers programming They already had the Lakers Network It's funny. I think I think New York and Boston red talks and Yankees have had their own like team specific television network for for a while And la got finally got into that game too Originally, I was just like can I really watch 24 hour Dodgers Lakers programming? I was a little skeptical But they did a good job with the programming and turns out I can watch a lot of Dodgers Lakers programming There's Naz read silver rookie silver Casey O'palla There's the special red wave right there All right, there's a RJ Barrett rookie. Nice. I think I see a Zion coming up Darius basely red wave Darius basely red wave special to this set goes to Nancy RJ Barrett, of course goes to the Knicks and who's got the pelicans again, Jacob There you go. Just a base Zion But it's pretty good Dodgers Network is called Spectrum Sportsnet LA. It's kind of a bad name Which is very confusing because the Lakers Network is Spectrum Sportsnet And then they I don't know. It's kind of a cumbersome name. There's Brandon Clark red wave Brooke Lopez red wave So Brooke goes to the Bucks that'll be for Tim And Brandon Clark will go to the Gris that'll be for Brian Jalen LeCue rookie silver for the Suns LeBron James, Dennis Smith Jr. Red Wave Browning Towns and Luca Donchich My second year Luca going to EA Concourse parallel, but those second year ones still do okay Dennis Smith Jr. Will go to Josh And the Knicks LeBron James will go to Juan and the Lakers and always gotta These silver rookies you never know You know, they could be late bloomers and all of a sudden everyone's going to be asking You know Juan with the Suns You know, do you still have that? Oh nice. You still have that uh, Silver Jalen LeCue from select Here's a nice silver Donchich There you go That's EA and the Mavs Even these second year Donchich cards have been doing well You got Trey Young, Red Wave, and I think that's Quartzide. That might be the shorter Shortest of prints of the three different tiers and select Matt Hedges with the Hawks Quartzide right up there, Red Wave Cam Reddish rookie silver nice Another hawk from Matt and box two Nice Zion Is that the yeah, that must be Zion premier level And we've got Zach Norvell jr. Rookie silver for the Lakers Another Zion a Carson Edwards rookie red wave All sorts of fun stuff in here Carson Edwards going to go to Ryan Shackleton and the Celtics There's Zion it's another one for um, Jacob and the pals That Isaiah Thomas red wave For Matthew Shearer and the Wizards Another Luca Donchich Admiral Schofield Quartzide red wave For Matthew Shearer and the Wizards Knox in the box Kevin Knox for the Knicks And another silver Luca Donchich for EA I think that's the same concourse edition which is The more common of the three tiers, but Luca Donchich silver It's pretty nice That on the top. Oh, that's on the little smudge on the top load or not on the card And the Kevin Knox goes to Josh Melton and the Knicks. That's a Quartzide edition. Where's that John Marant that I saw there? JJ reddit red wave Pelicans that'll be for Jacob another Kevin Knox red wave For the Knicks Josh Oh nice silver Rui Hachimura for Matthew Shearer This guy definitely has a big ceiling here nice Marcus Saul silver There's the John Marant Another silver Jalen LeCue for the Suns. Oh, no There's RJ Barrett RJ Barrett for Josh nice nice break Juan with the Suns So now we're all rooting for Jalen LeCue Juan and then there's the John Marant That goes to Brian S and the Grizzlies or an Espanol ha Marant Jaja, jaja, jaja. All right, there you go ladies and gentlemen, that's it Joe for jaskiescasebreaks.com. I'll see you for the next break. Bye


Methane, CH4, is the second most significant contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide, CO2. Satellite measurements show that levels of this gas have increased by around 85 parts per billion over the last 18 years. This represents a 4.8% increase in concentration. The study also showed that the rate of increase has become more pronounced since 2014 when it began to match ground-based measurements. Furthermore, the study revealed that the seasonal cycle of methane in the atmosphere differs between the northern hemisphere's middle and higher latitudes due to the presence of stratospheric methane. This finding provides insight into the global budget of atmospheric composition and the sensitivity of satellite measurements to methane. This article was authored by Li Hongzhou, Jiuying Warner, Nicholas Arnalli, and others.