My name is Linda Callum, I'm the organizer of the help of the accidental government information librarian webinar series for the NCLA. Hannah is the geospatial and earth sciences librarian at the University of New Hampshire. She received her MIS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the current president of the Geoscience Information Society. She is an advocate for data visualization, science communication, geoscience education and developing critical thinkers using information literacy. Her research interests include using remote sensing and geospatial technologies to solve problems in the natural world. And we're very excited to have you with us today. Linda, that was a great introduction. Hopefully you guys are all excited about this topic as much as I am. I love talking about geology, geological materials and really anything that has to do with maps, which if you are in that case and you feel similar than I do, then you probably have a career ahead of you in being a map maker or a map librarian somewhere like that. Linda asked me to talk a little bit about finding geological materials through the USGS. And I was quite fortunate because I've recently done a lot of some research for a faculty member for their class on this very same topic. So I was able to bring it to life a little bit for you. So we're going to be talking about a lot of different resources and luckily this is recorded. So everything you hear you'll be able to see later and there's also a link at the very end of the presentation for you to go over. So don't worry if you get overwhelmed. Some of the resources we'll be talking about are the National Map Viewer, the USGS National Geologic Maps Catalog Search, USGS Topoview and MapView, and the USGS Publications Warehouse. So the question that I had last fall was from one of my faculty members who asked me if students were doing a research project for their Introduction to Field Methods class. They wanted to use government documents to specifically USGS materials to find information about their hometowns. And that included they wanted to find maps, they wanted to find the elevation of where their hometown was, they wanted to find out the land cover, what the watershed looked like, the watershed boundaries, any certain water features. If there was mining in that area where the nearest mines might be and what type of minerals are from that area. They wanted to find some old and some new topographic maps and also recent publications from the USGS that had to do with that area. So this is a great way to transition into why we are looking at USGS materials, so many of them to answer just one question. Find information about your hometown. So we're going to step through what I did in this class. So one of the first resources that we looked at was the National Map Viewer. Also something similar to it is also called the National Map Viewer Screamer. The National Map of the US Geological Survey is public available resource accessing geospatial base map data for all of the geological community from a certain location. And the National Map is great because you can find a whole series of information from eight primary themes. All these data include things like elevation, geographic names, boundaries, land cover. And you can also use the National Map Viewer to look for USTOPOs and historical topographic map products. And I'll get a little bit to that in a moment. So this is just an illustration again of very many different resources that you can find in the National Map Viewer. Boundaries, elevation, land cover, these are all different layer sets that the USGS uses. If you go to viewer.nationalmap.gov, there's a lot going on on this page, but it should be pretty easy to find on the right-hand side. You can see where it says Find Data. You can zoom right in to get into the National Map Viewer. You can also, if you click on the left-hand side, it says TNM Download Client. This is one of the resources that we'll be using today. It's pretty easy. It's interactive. So this is what it looks like when you first get in. Viewer.nationalmap.gov slash basic. The Download Client is built on modern web technologies. It's interactive. You can do a very simple approach of downloading content from the National Map product. There's a lot of different data sets you can see towards the very top. It says USTOPO and historical topographic maps. Remember, I mentioned that there's a couple of ways to get those two resources, and this is one of them. And then a whole list of different sets of data. Let me zoom in a little bit closer so you see some of the data sets. So the answer to that reference question is embedded in a lot of these different types of data. You can see that the data sets are selected with different product extents and formats. Some of them are by a foot or a meter imagery. There are a lot of different types that are coming from different products that the USGS has. You can see the geographic names information systems, which allows you to look up geographic names if you're not quite sure the actual variation. There's also topographic maps and structures. Structures could be anything from a graveyard to knowing where an airport is. So I'm just going to go over two particular data sets to answer this question. One that is used often in the National Map viewer. It's a National Hydrographic Data Set. It's a really fun resource to use. You can actually get the right end zoom and pan into the map, draw a box area, and get to know the area or water features. There's a comprehensive surface water feature area for items on a topographic map, for example, lakes and ponds and dams and stream gauges. You can trace the flow lines of what's going on. And you can also look at the boundaries. The boundaries are not just for a state area or a country area, but it would be environmentally mentally focused, say, for example, a watershed. Here we are back at that National Map viewer. And you can click on the left-hand side, click on the hydrography, and zoom right into an area. In this case, we're going to look at the Oroville Dam area. I don't know if many of you have heard about what's going on at Oroville Dam. It's probably permanently closed right now. In February, there is a main emergency spillway that happened in California, and over 1,800 people living there had to be located. So we're just going to use this as an example. We can go zoom into it, find that data set, click on, look at the metadata, and actually download that data set. Also, we have the National Land Cover data set. This is also something you can find in the National Map viewer. It serves as a definitive land-based 30-meter resolution land cover database for the nation. In fact, this little image right here that you're seeing of the United States may not be familiar to you because it's coming right from the USGS. It provides a spatial reference and descriptive data for characteristics of land surface, such as thematic class. So areas for urban development, agriculture, forests, canopy cover. You can also find out the percentage of change that has happened over time. And this is used to determine ecosystem health, understand the effects of climate change, and develop land management policy. So you can also see the change now and then from different time periods. So some of the land cover goes back to 1992. The most recent is 2011, and it's now on a five-year product cycle. So this is what it looks like when you're in the National Map viewer. You can zoom into a certain area. This is California. I'm clicking on products at the very top of the page, and you can see the list of products that come up. And click on the shopping cart to be able to view that cart. It goes into your cart, and now you have entire National Land Cover database preview of California, and you can download that material. And it looks a little bit like this. This is the summary and the metadata that's associated with it. That looks a lot like California to me. Then there's also the National Map streamer. Really great resources. It's kind of fun and interactive if you're interested in kayaking, canoeing, things like that. You can trace the rivers and the streams in the U.S. to see where they go. That includes weather data, stream flow, and some really great base maps for you to understand the watershed area. So here's the streamer slide. See lots of high-profile rivers right here. And if you see the very top, I've clicked on the – started typing in the word orville. And this is for me to find out more information about the orville dam area. I can also trace downstream to see the effects of where that river is when the dam being affected. So let's look. I've clicked on orville. And now I've got a – I've hovered over that trace report button to display a menu with the principal trace report options here. And you can choose the new web pages on the very top side of this trace report. There's a couple of different things you can do is by clicking on the trace upstream, you can see how the river is traced in that way. Moving on to topographic maps, I think probably everybody here knows about topographic maps and what we have available through the USGS. They are probably the central resource the USGS has. And probably one of the ones that you have all come here today to learn about. There are at least four different ways to find topographic maps. And I'll remember that you can find them through the national map viewer that we were just looking at. But there's several other resources that you can use. There's a map locator, which you can use through the USGS map store. If you haven't been there, you can try it out. You can do a query application that's through Techspace through a product called TU Name. And then you can also use something called Topoview and the historical topographic map collection. So I'm just going to dive into those. If you're really interested in that overview that I was telling about the four or five different ways of finding topos, there's some really fun interactive story maps that USGS just did through Esri. This entire presentation could be a part of that. It's a fun little interactive slide and you can go through and see a little bit of the history of the story map. So here's Topoview. For those of you who've never heard of Topoview, it's okay. It's fairly new. It's a really exciting way of enabling a historical exploration of all the USGS historical topographic map products. So in the 1800s, the USGS began to map the nation's topography. And now they have all these different data sets and maps from different levels of detail. And finding them for a certain area is very difficult. So they have compiled all these resources into one place. And you can use it to look for different land use purposes, see how cities have changed over time, or what boundaries have changed over time. It's an online tool. You can access and download all these maps for free. It's about 178,000 topographic maps dating back to 1880. There's a lot of different formats you can also download the maps from, including PDF and Geotip. JTAG is very popular. And also KMZ, for those of you that don't use it as often, it's a type of format used to import data into Google Earth. This is what Topoview looks like. This is just the overall page when you first get to it. You can actually start by entering a location in the search box. So if you look at the very top right-hand side, it says enter a location. And the map will guide you to that place. You can pan, enable, and actually zoom around with your mouse to different areas. And I could be doing this live, but I've got a limited time. And if we have time towards the end, I'll try to show you. For each map, there's a variety of different file formats that you can use and tap on. You can also see the default map scale right on the far right-hand side. And it allows you to easily change the map scale that you're looking for as well as the year, the very top, from 1880 to 2010. So just diving in a little bit closer, this is San Francisco area. You can see that there are eight maps that came up for that specific area over the time period. I'm looking at a map from 1964. When you click on the map, the map counter shows the number of maps that were published. And that is helpful if you're looking for a certain year. And you can change that slider as you like to. If you want to get more information on the maps, you can view the maps in a map record table. And it looks like that. It's a nice little table of all the maps from that certain area. And you can use the map locator icon to zoom in also if you are looking for a certain area. And it's nice that you can actually get a just download. It says there's four different file formats. You can either just click on that and get the file format that you're interested in. In this case, if I wanted a JPEG of the area, I could just click on it, download it, and it would come right up. There's also this historical topographic map explorer resource. And though there's several access points from the USGS online database to find and use USGS topographic maps, this is my absolute favorite. If you've never used it, I say take a note right now and make sure to play with this when you're done watching this presentation. It's a fun resource, and I'll be honest, not a month goes by that I don't point somebody to this resource. It is a fun way to really see how an area has changed over time. It has a least amount of navigation clicks. It's user-friendly. It has a lot of sliders. It's fun and interactive. Going into it, if you type in an area, in this case I typed in Palo Alto, you can actually search to find a place and you type in your search and you view the topographic maps in an area. And if I have a moment, let me see if I can bring it up live. We're going to try Greensboro, North Carolina because that's where Linda is. I know many of you from North Carolina area zoomed right into Greensboro. If I just click on an area, you'll see at the very bottom all these different topographic maps are going to click on, and you can actually scroll around and see the opacity change. And I can choose another one. It will overlay on top. Again, I can scroll and change. It's a really great resource. And you can go and actually just download the map, click, and it will pop up. We won't do that today. So let's look at also what you're probably here for is actually finding geological resources. It's really, really imperative as a librarian or government documents person to really be able to help people find USGS materials that have geologic features. Some of these resources are really, really exciting. You can access these from a lot of different places. There's a National Geologic Map Database Project and also some mineral resources that you may be asked to learn about. So some of the reasons why you might be asked about geologic resources may be just something as simple as somebody wanting to do bedrock analysis if they're doing earthquake data. Looking at mineral resources, wanting to know more about mining mines in the area or what resources are available in the natural environment. Geologic hazards are big, avalanches, tsunamis, earthquakes, et cetera. And their impact also on climate change. And if somebody is looking for USGS materials, they may be specifically looking for reports that have come out. And this is the next way to find it by geography. Resource development, but also shoreline change. You can see a lot of changes in shoreline. And this is a great geological resource, both the map view we'll get to, the total view, and the catalog to look at some of these publications that are coming out. So here we are at the National Geological Map Database. You can see the URL is ngmdb.usgs.gov. Kind of a fun place to really start off. This is the main page, but you'll actually see there's actually four different resources that are part of that product. There's something called the Tobovil, which is a really nice way of looking for materials that are historical. There's the map catalog search, which I'll show you in just a moment. This map view, which is probably the most fun, interactive type of product that I've seen come out of the USGS in a long time. And that's that colorful map that's on the top side. And then something called the lexicon. It's also known as the Geolex. It's a national compilation of names and descriptions of geological units. So these four different products are all coming under one. So here's the National Geological Map Database. Hopefully you can see there's a lot going on here. You can search by keyword, also by themes. There's this nice locator bounding box image. And you'll see this consistent in a lot of USGS materials where you can scroll in by a certain area and search by these different bounding coordinates. And search by publisher, publication date, and map scale. I use this resource fairly often when somebody is looking for a certain hazard material. I want to know more about data from certain areas by working for resources in the geochemical area. You can use these different themes to search. The National Geological Map Database has this Geolex too. So if you're a geologist and you're looking for certain information by type that is by unit name, you can search by that. So that's the age range, stratigraphy, for example, or also other metadata that might be a formation type. So they give an example of Dakota, for example. You can search for all the different types of Mexican that has to do with the Dakotas. This is probably another resource that you're probably excited to see. This is the map view. It's now part of this map cataloger. So it's maybe easier if the users can more easily find and view high-resolution map images. And I'll try to do a live presentation if I can in a second here. You can do a lot of different searches here. You can look for bedrock and for superficial resources. You can use the slide scaler to search for different areas and understand the opacity for an area. You can type in a certain area you're searching for and come up with a queryable result about that area. Just giving indications that this is us searching again for Oroville. And this is in California. It zooms right to that area. It's a really pretty kind of overlay of the geological area. And then from there you can click on the, there's a button on the far right hand side that allows you to look at all the publications in that view. These are geological publications that are from that database. And this will be a list of them. Real quick, let me show you what that looks like live. And here's that queryable side. Go to location. I'm just going to type in Greensboro again. So zoomed right on in so we can filter by scale at the very top. We've got a filtering range so we can look from different periods of scale. Then go to the actual catalog. I was able to create a bounding box more or less around Greensboro and North Carolina. Let me try that again. And I went to the catalog. And here's a list of publications for that area. And if you see, some of them have to do with say North Carolina, North Carolina. And this, for example, let's talk about geological and mineral resources in Guilford County, which is where Greensboro and North Carolina is. It shows the bounding box and the availability of how you can download those resources. So USGS mineral resources, if you're really interested in finding about mines, mining, any sort of commodity that has to do with it, you'll want to dive into those. The National Minerals Group, they put together over 700 publications annually. And they have several different mapping tools that you can use to search by country, state, and commodity in this data portal. They also have some resources where you can search for mines, metallic non-mineral resources, deposit names, commodities, deposit descriptions, production, resources, and other references. So you can Google for mineral resources online, but that will just show you you want to click on where it says mineral resources. And it will bring you up to this resource. And this is the mineral resources data system. It's an online resource for finding all those deposit information. And you can also use this to find out where all the local mines are. It's also another resource that allows you to search by state, by country, and also by commodity. So this is the National Minerals Information Center website. It's a primary agency for collecting and analyzing non-fuel mineral information. This is also the same group that puts out the annual mineral commodity summary publication, which you may be familiar with. So this database, for example, looks at 85 commodities essential to the U.S. economy. So in this case, I did a quick search for the word aluminum, and came up with a bunch of different aluminum resources, the statistics annually. And they have it recently up through 2017. But you can search by commodity if you like. You can also go by state to state specific. Again, this is a way for you to subscribe to certain mineral information. If you're specifically interested in aluminum, you can subscribe to any new publications about that. Here is also the same database, but it allows you to look by country. And so if you're interested in, say, China and the minerals that are coming out there, you can use this resource to do that. I just mentioned the mineral commodity summary. This is a very popular resource that's coming out of this group. It's data sheets that come out in a five-year statistical method, and they have over 90 individual minerals and materials listed. I have people asking for this fairly often, and I'm pretty sure you probably have a copy of this in your library. It's also available online through the USGS Publications Warehouse, which we'll get to in just a moment. It's just a nice overview too, and if you're interested in what's going on in your neighborhood, you may want to take a peek at this. So here's some information about the USGS Science Data Catalog, which is data.usgs.gov. This is mostly open source data that is available through the website. These are data sets again, so it's not the same type of geological information you may be as familiar with searching, or maybe you use this all the time. These are raw data sets that you can download, often in text file or other formats. You can see that there is a listing of some of the most frequently accessed data. The site includes a national map, which we just talked about, but all these other different data sets from a variety of different resources and places. When I'm in here, you can see that just doing an overall search, thousands of places for you to search for scientific and geological data. The first data set that comes up is the USGS Survey Gap Analysis. So this is a data set that also has a fun online map. I'm not going to talk about that today, but there is an interactive map that you can search for this data to look for species, as they're going extinct to see what's on the endangered list or has some sort of reason for being concerned for the environment. You can search by different keywords and also look at the cataloging holdings for certain states or countries or even the oceans. So doing a quick search for that Orville Dam area, we can search for it by geographic area. So all I did was I panned in and clicked a bounding box around the dam and found 864 resources that have data sets from that area. Clearly, marine data sets aren't going to be part of it. It's going to be more landlocked, but you can see a long list. Now on the far left-hand side, there's a filter by keywords area. You can see that there are ways to filter by these different material types. So here's another example. I just searched for all the geophysical surveys just from that area. And only a few came up, about five. Nothing that was specifically about, say, the dam breaking because these were older resources. One of the first ones that came up was from 1980. You can see it's about Fairborn Geophysical Survey. All right. We're on number five. This is going to be a fun thing to talk about. You probably have heard of the USGS Publications Warehouse. It's probably one of the go-to resources for finding USGS materials. Over 130,000 publications that were written by USGS scientists. The history of the USGS are ingested in the USGS Publications Warehouse. The resource itself used to be a little conky to use, and there wasn't always a great way of searching for some of these resources. Now it acts as a curation tool, also as a citation system, managing the links and managing the scientist profiles about who's published what and actually linking out their publications. So it provides an index to all official USGS authored publications. And this is a list of some of the current resources that are coming out of the Publications Warehouse. Some include data sheets and fact sheets and also open file reports. For those of you looking for that, that's one of the questions that I get often, is how do you find these type of resources? There's also popular map series that can be found. For example, geophysical investigations or mineral investigations. Some of these map series can be easily searched through the advanced search. The basic search is pretty easy, and you can just search right on the front page where it says search for publication. This is just a string term, something like you would use in Google just type what you're searching for. Sometimes I ask what is the most popular resource that is in the USGS Publications Warehouse? It's actually a resource from 1987. It's called Map Productions of Working Manual, and it's one of the seminal resources in map production work. It actually linked to it if you're interested in later. But if we're actually searching for it, map productions, typing that in the search bar, you can see the paper will come up by the author. You can see the full text document is available by PDF. Some plates that are involved as well as abstract and some other information. So that was all in the advanced search, the beginning search. But if you want to do advanced search, you can do a search for a few interesting things. Beginning search allows you to search for title, year, publication name, series name, or report number. Very easy things if you already have a citation available. But let's say you're looking for something a little bit more. You can use the advanced search to search for a few other resources. So here's what it looks like when you're in advanced search. If you see the very top, it says search for publication. These are most of the search terms. There are a few other things you can search for. Let's go and look at them over. Contributing office. This is interesting if you're specifically looking for a certain department or office. And you can click on the contributing office and search by that. If you're in a certain geographical area, you want to know what your researchers or colleagues are working on. I would choose this. Just like many other USGS materials, you can do an area of interest. Do a geographic bounding box around an area. I can't tell you how happy this makes me for searching USGS materials. Just like it's one of the easiest things to do. So here we are. Just do a creative bounding box around one specific area of interest. This is San Francisco. There's almost 2,500 results that come up just from that geographic area. These, of course, are USGS-funded resources, not everything out there. But for looking for these type of government documents, it makes it easy. And then in the advanced search, you're able to search for author or by ORCID ID. Now ORCID, if you're familiar with it, it allows you to search for those that have an open researcher and contributor ID. It's an alphanumeric number that is associated with certain authors. And it's now required by the USGS as of October 2016. Emily Wilde, who is the USGS librarian in Denver. She has a pretty active account. This is her ORCID ID. You can actually look it up online. You can look to see other USGS author or funded publications through these. So I just pulled her ORCID ID. And in the search box, the event search, I searched by her ORCID ID. I could also search by her name, but it wouldn't be as thorough. So this is just a very fuzzy list of publications of 25 different resources that she has written. You'll be able to download each one of them. Some other tips. I did promise some tips and tricks about using the USGS Publications Warehouse, since you're probably going to use this resource more frequently than others. Wildcards, to find all a part of the word are not needed. It's crawlable by the Google, so it doesn't do that same kind of wildcard search that you were probably familiar with in other databases. Also, unfortunately, you can't do exact phrases. You can't do a quotation around certain phrases like climate change or carbon dioxide. However, there's a nice trick since all this content is indexed by Google. You can actually search Google for that content. So if you're not familiar with how to do that, you can just type in the phrase that you're looking for and type in site S-I-T-E colon and then the URL for the Publications Warehouse. And this works for all Google truncation, so you could also just search for all of just USGS.gov too as well.  And also, you can try their RSS feed. They have this really great setup, so you can search by certain topics and set up a feed reader. So if you're really interested in what a certain author is doing or what a geographical area, you can stay up to date with the publications. I use feedly. That's my personal preference, but it's a nice way of aggregating all those resources so you'll get an alert whenever a new resource comes up. Second to last wouldn't be a proper librarian if I didn't talk about the library catalog. For some materials that are not in the USGS Publications Warehouse, you can search the catalog to see them. They're probably available in print. There are also some key government documents you can find on them. Now the USGS library has holdings of over 1.5 million books, maps, other paper records, even fossils and different things. If you ever have a chance, there's several different USGS libraries. One of them, one of the largest being in Denver. There's another one in Reston, Virginia. You can visit. You are able to visit. You have to have kind of a pass. You'll have to request a visit. This is what their catalog looks like. So again, that one resource map projection is a working manual that is one of the most popular resources. You can see there's a lot of different copies that they have of it all online. Now these are the paper physical copies that are available. And you can find access to this library catalog through library.usgs.gov. Nearly lastly, before I wrap up, one of the last things I want to talk about was just USGS social media. And now we're talking about finding geological materials through the USGS. But I use social media for some of the most up-to-date ways to find recently released USGS news releases and other things. One of my favorite ways of doing it is mostly through Twitter. For those of you that are interested, you don't necessarily need to have an account because you can just go online and look to see what they're having. But they do do releases of memos and other funding projects, papers, reports, and the big ones they will release on Twitter and do a big announcement. This is all stuff that they, you know, it's another way for them to get the news out. There's also ways to do publication sign-ups for listeners and other things. I wanted to talk about that final presentation question. At the very beginning, we talked about what happened when some students were asked to find information about their hometown. That is elevation, land cover, mining, watershed, and water features. And the oldest and newest typographic maps that are available, as well as recent publications. If you're intrigued about finding where you're from and you want to find more information, all of the resources I talked about today, you can find the answer to that question. So just for fun, I wanted to show you about my hometown around Portland, Maine. And my mom happens to live right on the water on a river going into the ocean. So it's a great example of looking for watershed analysis. So here's what I found in doing this presentation, Portland, Maine area, where my mom is. She lives somewhere in that land cover database map. Her house is at 16 feet above sea level. Yes, I'm worried that it may flood. It does flood occasionally. The nearest mine is actually from the West Book Bari, which is part of Pike Industries. I found that information also through all these resources. And I found an article about her area and the land flow of resources going into the Gulf of Maine. I found that information through the publication warehouse. I also used the historical topographic map explorer to find several different maps of the area. I just took a screenshot instead of downloading them today. But I wanted to show that the screenshot showed the before and after. And in one case, the airport exists. And in the other case, the airport doesn't exist. And you can also see the islands off the coast of Maine and how they've changed inside a little bit smaller now. And then downloaded some materials from the USS Topoville and downloaded an actual real topo map so I could show her how things used to look. And then finally, I used the National Hydrography Dataset and USGS Streamer to do an analysis of some of the streams in my mom's house. On the far right-hand side, you can see a little red line. That is the river my mom lives on at Stroudrotter River and is 12 miles long and goes right into the Atlantic Ocean. And now I can go back and tell with great confidence her some more information about her area. So all the resources we talked about today are listed here. I very much recommend the map view, the topo view, playing with the National Geographic map database. I think we'll spend some time maybe looking at your hometown and learning more about it. And if you're interested in learning more about each one of these individual resources, you'll probably take very long online tutorials. Here's a snippet of a few more. I'm rounding up towards the end of my time here. So if you have any questions, I'm going to stand by for the next little while on chat and you can ask me them. Thank you very much, Hannah. That was great. I was having quite a bit of fun with the historical topographic map explorer. Yeah, yeah. It's really cool. Yeah. It's just a fun kind of slider for students to use. Most of the reasons why historically people have come to a map collection, or at least mine here at UNH, is that the students are looking for a topographic map and what a joy they seem to have when I tell them, oh, I can show you the topographic map collection that we have, or we can sit down and I can show you the map explorer and we can do a little bit of a search for your area and see what happens. And I didn't really go into this way too much, but it is really nice to be able just to do an overlay and show the panning and the viewing of everything. So any other questions or comments? What's your favorite? There's a question about have we lost access to any map data. We have EPA and agricultural departments. Good question. I do not know that we have, and I've been keeping a pretty good year to the ground asking around anticipation for this presentation as well as from Curiosity. I do not know that we have from maps. However, there is concern that future GIS data will be lost. There are some bills that have been proposed that would no longer mandate geospatial data to be collected for head-off economic data, for example, but not maps. Great. Okay. Well, if anybody has any questions, I would just like to thank Diana very much for doing this. It was wonderful and definitely learned a lot of new resources that I can show my people today. If you have any questions, I'm sure, and I would love to talk on email. All right, guys. Well, unless you have any questions, thank you very much everybody for coming and hope you all have a great week.


The Wadena County Sheriff's Office says that a level 3 predatory offender has moved back to the Wadena area. 33-year-old Chad Allen Miskiska moved to the community on Wednesday, August 15th. Local law enforcement currently tracks and monitors the activities of approximately 66 registered sex offenders in Wadena County. Law enforcement releases community notifications of the movements of registered sex offenders to furnish information and enhance public safety and awareness. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Hello and welcome to this session. This is Professor Farhad in which we will discuss emphasis of matter or matters and other matters paragraph those paragraph could be listed as part of the auditor's report as Auditing students as CPA students. We need to understand what each one is and be able to list some examples in case you are giving Multiple choice questions on the exam able to answer. What is emphasis of a matter? What's other matters paragraph starting with emphasis of matters? I'm going to abbreviate is EOM. What is EOM? This paragraph is used when the auditor wants to emphasize They want to raise attention to specific matter regarding. Please notice. I highlighted the financial statements and the notes. I highlighted this in yellow on purpose to Raise your attention that emphasis of a matter is for kind of gets an irony It's to raise attention and this is why I highlighted this in yellow When we have something emphasis of a matter it deals with something on the financial statements and on the notes Simply put it's additional communication when considered necessary Now when considered necessary, maybe the auditor's discretion or professional judgment believe That emphasis is necessary. That could be one case where it's kind of an equal optional But the auditor thinks it's required and under certain circumstances Emphasis of matters is required So I'm gonna have to show you some examples when it's basically I'm gonna put in quote optional Optional means based on the auditor's judgment based on the other auditors discretion And we will discuss cases where it's necessary. It's required It's a must to have an emphasis of matter paragraph Simply put either or the purpose of this paragraph is to draw the user's attention to matters or matters Presented again. Notice. I am I am drawing your attention that though that information that we talk about in the EOM It's already presented or disclosed in the notes of the financial statements and it's necessary To fundamentally not necessarily to fundamentally understand the financial statements and simply what are the financial statements? We are looking at the basic financial statements balance sheet income statement cash flow statements of stockholders equity and the notes So anything when we say EOM EOM deals with stuff either in the notes disclosure or Stuff issues on the financial statements simply put we are highlighting notice. I'm highlighting in yellow I'm waving my hands here Basically, we're highlighting what we need to highlight in that EOM But that highlight refers back to something in the financial statements or in the notes You might be asking why does he keep repeating himself? You're gonna see why because I need to differentiate EOM from simply OM other matters Okay, now bear in mind EOM emphasis of matter is not the key orating matters. Those are not the camps Also cannot be used We we can't have an EOM if the opinion is something other than modified means clean opinion So EOM emphasis of matter is used when we have a clean opinion So that does not change. We are still giving a clean opinion. We don't change our opinion We could have an unqualified. I'm sorry unmodified since we are discussing a ICPA report unmodified clean opinion and add that emphasis of a matter It's not part of the opinion because the opinion still clean and it's a separate paragraph after the opinion titled Emphasis of matter. So this is the background information that you need to know what is emphasis of a matter is now We're gonna talk about other matters other matters. It's pretty straightforward Refer to matters notice now I am drawing your attention not presented or disclosed in the financial statements and the notes and now you understand Why I kept highlighting Presented or disclosed in the financial statements Presented and disclosed in the financial statements because when I got to other matters when you have a paragraph called other matters When you read it that other matters don't deal with anything that's on the notes or the financial statements So what are we discussing here? It deals with auditors responsibilities related to laws and regulation. So something other than Dealing with financial statements and notes of the financial statements an example will be the auditors responsibility What are the auditors responsibility? That's not in the financial statements. That's not in the notes of the financial statements The best way to illustrate this concept is to actually look at some examples of EOM Before we look at examples of EOM, I would like to share public opinion about my company farhat-lectures.com Farhat Accounting Lectures is a supplemental educational tool That's gonna help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions as well as exercises Go ahead start your free trial today. No obligation. No credit card required I'm gonna start by looking at emphasis of matters that are considered optional Again, what I mean by optional is that it's based on the auditor's discretion The auditor thinks we should emphasize this point and the emphasis of matter paragraph One is related party transaction. Now, when we have related party transaction We're gonna have a note for example note 13 and under note 13 We're gonna have related party transaction and we're gonna talk about our related party transactions and when you see the notes Lecture, you will see what I mean by this. Simply put we talk for example 60% of our sales is to a related party 30% of our customers are related party so on and so forth. That's fine. It's in the notes Although it's in the notes. We think it's important to emphasize this matter in the report Therefore under emphasis of a matter paragraph. We talk about related party transaction To material or important event occurring after the balance sheet date We could have a major fire a natural disaster major funding event affecting the financial statements. Well, guess what? They're not they are affecting something in the financial statements. Therefore what we do we want to emphasize We want to emphasize those events. We put them in that paragraph It could be a major catastrophe that has occurred or continue to have a significant influence on the entity's financial numbers We discussed that as well any pending or regulatory action or litigation We also we can emphasize this. This could be in the notes Although it's in the notes. We still emphasize it because we believe it's important I want to emphasize one more topic that's optional and that's substantial doubt So we need to understand how substantial doubt is an optional disclosure as an EOM if there was or there is a substantial doubt about the company as a going concern and The management have a plan to address and alleviate the issue simply put There is a going concern but based on the evidence collected by the auditor the auditor believes The company has a plan in place to take care of the substantial doubt under those circumstances The auditor may emphasize the relate the related disclosure and an EOM now Remember if there's a substantial doubt that will be a disclosure in the notes Discussing the substantial doubt if the auditor believe the substantial doubt is Addressing the issue they may emphasize this point in an EOM now bear in mind This is different than the substantial doubt about the entity's ability to continue as a going concern which is required under a separate paragraph when that Substantial doubt exists. So this could be an optional if the auditor believes based on the evidence collected The management has a plan in place to alleviate that issue Could be other matters as well anything that's in the notes or the financial statements And we would like to emphasize for its importance highlight. We can put in that paragraph now. We have required Emphasis of matters. What are some required? Well, let's talk about the required part We might have to have an additional explanatory paragraph or Explanation of matters affecting the consistency. What do we mean by consistency? Consistency means using the same accounting Method from period to period to conserve Comparability so if you are using a different method from the prior year if you're using FIFO versus LIFO or Completed contract versus Percentage of completion method. Those are different accounting method if that's the case you are not being consistent You're violating comparability in a sense that the financial statements are not comparable under those circumstances Let me show you some examples. For example, if you have a change in accounting principle You change from FIFO to LIFO not an estimates bear in mind not an estimate. That's consistency changes an accounting principle Error correction involving accounting principle. You made a mistake not the mathematical mistake a mistake in applying accounting principle And now you're changing that's gonna violate consistency Change in reporting entities before you are not consolidating certain entities. Now you are consolidating entities Now this is not a change in company strategy like you have a new research and development project or new product line When you have those changes, especially what we're emphasizing here is changing an accounting principle and changing in reporting entities under those circumstances The auditor is required in a sense to emphasize why because it's important because if you are using a different method last year Let's assume year one. You were using FIFO and year two you move to LIFO. Well Basically, you are not consistent and the financial statements are not really comparable Tell the users that tell the users just I want to draw your attention that that's the case. So this is what we mean by Changes in accounting principle or errors involving accounting principle under those circumstances you will explain Also, if you have a just a justified departure from gap Remember if you just if you depart from gap, you have two options either you qualify or you could you give an adverse opinion Guess what? You could have it. You could have a justified departure. You're just fine from gap, but the auditor thinks it's okay It's acceptable. We're not even gonna give you a qualified opinion. We're gonna give you unqualified opinion However, we're gonna explain an emphasis of matter that that situation existed that deviation exist We want you to be aware of it. Never the last we are still giving you an unqualified opinion So if you are departing from gap Guess what? We have to explain that departure unqualified opinion Still apply. We're not gonna give you an adverse We're not gonna give you a qualified, but we have to explain so under those circumstances EOM is required if you are if we are using if we are preparing financial statements using special purpose framework We have to emphasize this because we want to let the users that we're not for example We're not using up or using something other than gap So we want you to be aware of this also what is required EOM is change an opinion from the preceding year What does that mean? Let's assume in the prior year you had a different opinion unmodified opinion And for some reason you change now the opinion to unmodified under those circumstances you have to explain Think about it for comparability purposes if you're looking at the report and you're saying the prior year now is unmodified And if somebody looked actually at the prior year and they saw something else. Well, they're gonna be confused So under those circumstances you are required to explain The difference between the two years you maybe have other what other ones But those are usually the major one that are covered on the CPA exam as well as your and in your auditing course As discuss and note whatever note the financial statements And the financial to the financial statements the company has elected to change its policy for determining cash equivalent in 20 x 8 So simply put the company change the way they account for cash equivalent and We're telling you this because we believe it's important that you know our opinion is not modified with respect to that matter So remember EOM you are still giving a clean in unmodified Opinion at the end of this recording I'm gonna tell you to do what now go to far hot lectures and work MCQs through false That's gonna help you understand this topic better. Good luck study hard Invest in yourself and stay safe


Hi, I'm Dr. Magnus Jaraj Mansard, Consultant Liver Transplant Surgeon for the Manipal Group of Hospitals. Liver transplantation is the best treatment for liver cancer. There are instances where the liver cancer is too big for liver transplantation. In those cases, there are now upcoming pioneering technologies available to treat such kind of cancers, to downstage that is to reduce the size of the cancer so that the ultimate transplantation can be done. So there are trans-artificial therapies available that is material to treat liver cancer. Either a chemotherapy particle or a radiotherapy particle can be passed into the artery which is supplying the liver cancer so that the liver cancer size comes under control. It shrinks and ultimately the patient can undergo liver transplantation.


Greetings! NJRoot22.com here for our in-between Christmas and New Year's supermarket round up. I hope everybody had a good Christmas and we're going to talk, we're going to go straight from the top here. Kings, we normally never talk about them too much because they're extremely expensive. However, if you pay attention you can find some good things in here. We don't need a lot of junk food and breads and stuff, but they do have a pretty good deal on some meat products this week, I think. The Bell and Evans breaded chicken tenders are not available at shop right, and they're pretty good. We like them for the kids. Buy one, get one free, that's the best deal going. This USD Angus Slider, 6 bucks a pound, it's a little bit higher than I normally like to pay, but it's Angus so it's probably worth it. I'll try them. And they got some sweet Italian or hot Italian sausages for buy one, get one free. Sausages are a great thing to eat, I think. Well so they got the avocados at pretty much going price these days, I mean I wouldn't pay more than that, especially when you know you can get them for 50 cents at Aldi sometimes. And interesting here, I don't eat cake, I mean I used to love eating cake, but this looks really good. If you want to have a little New Year's party and get like a three pound triple layer carrot cake, it's normally like 20 bucks, 18.99, it's only 10 bucks. I think your guests would like that. So even though you're not doing them any favors by giving them junk food. Bishops IGA and Pennington Market also, we shop here just periodically just for the sake of supporting them, even if it doesn't mean we get the best deal. But I like hot dogs, sodium nitrate and all, I like these Nathan hot dogs.  They don't hurt your blood sugar, you won't gain weight, I mean they may not be the healthiest for you, but with other factors. But I like my hot dogs, they're just such a go-to meal, three or four with no bun. Anyway, we're not talking about stop and shop ever again.  I went there a week or two ago and it was just a disaster. And Job Lot, one of my favorite stores to shop at to save money, it's a fun game too, because when you buy things that you can use and you get a free gift card, it's really like getting stuff for free. And this week they have an ongoing thing, if you can find the AA batteries, but you get 24 batteries for 16 bucks, that's not really the greatest deal, but you get them for free because you have $16 to spend another time.  I went to write aid last night and got all their toys are 50% off and we got some really good Disney stuff, even though I don't like Disney. But half off, and that's cheaper, if you could find a hundred of them, you could flip them on eBay and make yourself an extra five or 600 bucks cash for all the work. I didn't like this mayo, by the way, this wood stock, it's all expired anyway. Something was wrong with it, I got my money back, I didn't do it. And there was nothing really else going on it a lot. And we're down to shop right. It's their annual or periodic can-can sale here. I call it the pack, let's get rid of the package and can food off our shelves so we can rotate inventory sale. It's not a bad idea to have some non-perishable foods in your basement or stock pile, just in case. But it's not like we're living out in the middle of the wilderness. And you need stuff to survive, there's always food around.  They're not sea salt, they're preserved. And you gotta watch out for that, I wouldn't recommend a regular diet of canned foods loaded with bad salt. And this is interesting too, I used to like progressive soup as a kid. But they have you buy ten for nine bucks, excluding organic. It's always excluding the good stuff. Oscar Mayer bacon, I found an Oscar Mayer bacon that I like. It's the 12 ounce package though, the uncured, nitrate-free bacon. It's good, it's really good bacon. And the funny thing is with this can-can sale, the meat at shop right is normally like page two. It's all meat here, and this is where you look for your core nutrients. But they have it laid out differently this week because of the can-can sale.  And I can't even talk about it, because we don't think it's good for you. And why would I promote something that I don't stand behind? Anyway, I mean, there's a couple of good things here and there. If you really look, I didn't really want to go too nuts, you know, like organic coconut oil down here. This is a good deal. They re-listed it on this page here. Look, I picked up on the fact that they listed stuff multiple times. I guess that's not a bad idea, because not everybody reads it line for line. Then they move the meat to the middle section. I didn't really see anything worth mentioning. I'll tell you this much, just avoid this stuff. I'm going to point it out to you right here. See this right here? Chef Curtis Stone created seasoned ground beef. Don't allow other people to season your food. I looked at it, it was filled with junk seasonings. Do not do it, it's so bad for you. Season your own plain meat, your own way, with your own chosen ingredients. When you allow other people to season it for you, it's totally what's the word I'm looking for. Add to your control at that point. There was something else I wanted to point out about earth-bound farms. I'll find it somewhere. I think it's the next page. Earthbound Farms is an organic salad company, or vegetable company. I'll keep going, but the shop-right cheese is always a Dutch farm. I'm going to try that this week. I'm just curious to see how they taste. The shop-right chunk cheese, I don't care how bad it is. Cheese is minimally problematic for most people, unless you have a lactose problem, which is probably your fault for eating other junk. I'm just going to try out that cheese. Hold on, I'm going to get back to this. Earthbound Farms here. This is a company, Earthbound Farm. It's an organic company in California. They ship their lettuces all over the country. That can't be that good for you, but apparently they were a very profitable company and they sold for $30 million in 2013 to Danin Danone, or Danone is a French company. They bought the Earthbound Farms for, I think, $12.5 billion. But now they're having trouble, and Danin is trying to sell this company, so I don't think Earthbound Farms is going to be around for much longer. I think they're doomed. Try local veggies if you can, and it's not easy in the winter around here, but that's that. And I think that's it. I didn't have a very exciting, it's a never really exciting shop right round up or a supermarket round up. But just avoid processed food, try to eat mostly meats, that's how we've maintained our health. And avoid the junk, it's addictive and just bad for you, being the doctor taking pills. Enjoy your new year. I'll see you in 29.


Hi I'm Jeff Watts and welcome to another of my top 10 tips videos. This video is all about the subject of conflict management. Yes welcome back and I've had a few people ask me about conflict and not the least because in one of my previous videos I talked about a retrospective tip being to encourage healthy conflict and Igor Kachinov specifically asked me to do a video about this so here we go Igor this one's for you. Conflict is a big topic it's a big touchy subject a lot of people are scared of conflict and will sort of put themselves down label themselves as somebody who avoids conflict. It's uncomfortable but it's inevitable and actually in many many cases it's a source of team growth. If you can get through conflict and be able to learn to manage it in a healthy way then you can use conflict to get better decisions to get stronger teamwork, a greater sense of trust, risk management, there are all sorts of benefits to being able to for a team to be able to actually challenge itself and challenge each other rather than just go along and keep everything nice and calm and smooth. So there are a number of things that you can do that will help a team get through conflict in a healthier way. So here they are 10 to 1. Well at 10 now in many ways this could well be my number one tip but it's so fundamental that without it the rest of the tips that I'm going to go through are kind of irrelevant so I'm putting it at 10 because it's one of the first things you need to do and that is to seek permission to be the conflict facilitator. If you're going to get people to open up to open up their minds and new possibilities to resolve differences and feel safe enough to air their concerns then you having permission to to facilitate that discussion and the resolution is paramount and part of that being an effective facilitator is being respected by all parties and perceived to be neutral and fair and impartial. Now I do know some people that will actually deliberately facilitate a tricky situation badly in order to effectively create a common enemy for all the conflicting parties. So if everybody dislikes your facilitation then they've got something in common and they're starting to bond. I can see the logic in that and there's some truth to it but it's a relatively risky strategy and one that I wouldn't recommend unless you were say desperate. So first of all just get permission that these people would like to see the conflict resolved and that they will accept you as a party to help them resolve that. Tip nine is to agree some ground rules. Now it doesn't really matter what those ground rules are as long as everyone involved is happy with them. So facilitating the discussion about what kind of ground rules we want for this discussion whether it's the type of language that we will and won't find acceptable, whether it's a certain amount of time that people will have to speak without being interrupted, whether there's a kind of format and agenda to this. Whatever it is, agree some ground rules so that people are all comfortable and they know how this is going to play out and where the lines are, where the boundaries are. Perhaps some training in nonviolent communication for example could be a good way to start off a more respectful dialogue and if you're interested I can do another video specifically on nonviolent communication if you like. Let me know in the comments. Tip eight, tone and pace. Now a lot of people will underestimate and find it hard to believe how influential your tone and pace can be for other people. So the quicker you talk, the quicker other people will talk, the more stressed you seem, the more stressed they will become. But equally the slower and calmer you talk, the slower and calmer everybody else will talk. It's kind of a human instinct to fit in and be like everybody else, to not stand down and it's not a it's not a malevolent manipulation. Simply a tactic to keep everything calm because when everybody's calm we're more likely to achieve a resolution. Tip seven, acknowledge perspectives. Being able to acknowledge somebody else's perspective even if you don't agree with it is a huge sign of respect and nobody's going to agree to any kind of reconciliation or compromise or any agreement really if they don't feel that their perspective has been acknowledged. So it's critical that everybody has the opportunity to put that perspective forward. Whether we and the other parties agree with that perspective is not necessarily the point here. The point is that everybody has their perspective. There's always more than one view and how a situation can be interpreted. We're going to get those out there, we're going to acknowledge them and then we can move forward. Now my next two tips are actually techniques. There are actually things that you could do exercises that you could run with a team or with a couple of aggrieved parties. So use them if you think they will be useful but be careful with them. Tip six is a technique called the high school debate and not a particularly mysterious title. It is what it is. Generally getting the group into two teams where they will argue either for or against a particular statement. So for example the statement could be this team believes that test room development would be a good thing to do. One team would then have to argue in favour of that statement and one team would have to argue against that statement. Regardless of their personal opinions they would have to debate for their side. Then depending again on how well you think this team will cope with it you could involve a round of cross-examination. Just to explore the the depths of it. Tip five now this is only really going to be useful if the level of trust is quite high. It is a technique called ritual descent and it was devised by Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge and I'm going to put a link underneath here so you can actually read a little bit more about it in depth in your own time. But the general gist of it is somebody who puts a proposal forward somebody puts an argument forward and goes to another group where that group will listen without interrupting without questioning. And then the person who went to that group would then turn around so they have their back to the people who are going to discuss the idea the suggestion the proposal and they will rip that idea to shreds. They will come up with all reasons why it's the worst idea in the world it'll never work while the person who suggests the word sits there and makes notes if they want to and they will go back to their group and and feedback what they heard. They can then choose to incorporate some all or none of that feedback and iterate on their idea and go back perhaps to another group if we've got more than two groups involved. It's a way of providing feedback in a structure that is deliberately negative so that we depersonalize it and it's almost funny. It's a game almost to be as unhelpful and as unproductive and as critical as possible which makes it gives it a different dynamic but like I said requires a lot of trust requires a lot of safety in the team. Tip four is to remember that you are a part of this. Now you as a neutral facilitator you might think you're outside of this debate you don't really have strong opinions either way you're neutral you're impartial but you're still affected by this. Anybody in the situation of conflict is going to have it's going to have an impact on them so make sure that your needs are being taken account of that you're looking after yourself as they say on the aeroplane fit your oxygen mask before fitting other peoples. You're not going to be of any use as a facilitator if this situation is affecting you too much so take care of yourself. Tip three is to create a mutual goal so if we've got two parties that are disagreeing about something they've got conflict about something is there something perhaps at a higher level that they can agree on. Now it might be that we would like ideally to create a situation where we are a harmonious team and we would all like to be part of that harmonious team if we can agree on that we've got a mutual goal to aim for and that this disagreement this conflict is just one obstacle that's in our way of getting there we can agree that we're aiming for that and we're a team working towards that to get past this obstacle in the way. Tip two is look to the future as much as possible now I'm not saying what's happened in the past is irrelevant it's not irrelevant that's a source of a lot of angst anxiety frustration anger perhaps and and looking at that and resolving it is a good thing if we can however it's gone okay we can't do anything about it now what we can affect really is the future so if we can as much as possible as facilitator bring people back to looking forward rather than continuously looking back looking to the future rather than continuously going back to the past that's going to increase the chances of a positive and healthy result and tip one is to make agreements as many agreements as you can whenever there is any hint of something that the the conflicting parties do agree on capture it write it on a post-it note write it on the white board whatever capture these are the things that create a list of all the things that we do have agreement on because at the moment those parties are focused only on what they disagree on all right and that's how they're defining their relationship but if we can switch that perception of the relationship we can start creating and capturing lots of data points that re-emphasize what we what we do agree on and actually make visible how much we do agree on then we're starting to change the perception of the dynamic of our relationship into we agree on a lot but we disagree on one thing now can we use the fact that we do agree on a lot and we do have a lot in common to help us get past this one part of disagreement so a quick recap seek permission to resolve the conflict agree some ground rules monitor your tone and pace acknowledge perspectives perhaps try a high school debate or ritual descent remember to take care of you create a mutual goal look to the future as much as possible and make agreements wherever you can now if we take the two techniques that i gave you out of the tips then we can pull together a helpful acronym stay calm if you can stay calm and everybody can stay calm in a conflict we're much more likely to see it resolve it in a helpful and healthy way so even though we might not be able to get to a point where a team can can look forward to or embrace conflict that might be a little bit weird at least we can if we can stay calm and follow some of these tips and these principles we might get to a point where teams can actually use conflict to get better and grow and develop and that's got to be a good thing if you've got any other tips for encouraging healthy conflict or helping to resolve conflict in a healthy and helpful and constructive way i'd love to hear them in the comments and if the place is the same old thing like and subscribe like the video and subscribe to the channel that'd be fantastic and and if you've got anything that you would like some tips on in the future again add it to the comments and you never know the next video could be looking at a problem with yours until then take care i'll see you soon


what's going on guys welcome to the channel my name is Jordan this is modern day muscle and in this video I'm going to change out my license plate for a custom one so this is my current one right here and man I am so excited it took a month to get here but I'm so excited ready for it this is my custom one let you guys soak it in a little bit let me know what you think in the comments whether you hate it or you love it or you just like it but I'm really excited for it I think it's gonna catch some attention when I pass people on the highway and on the streets but uh yeah I'm gonna show you the install real quick there it is guys oh man it looks so good on the car looks really good hey guys real quick I'm sponsored by American Motor Sports it's for these intake rings or this shirt that I'm wearing but you know any product that's on their site you'll be able to use my $5 discount code I'll pop it up in the video and also put it down in the description alright guys this is the end of this video my name is Jordan this is modern day muscle this is your first time to the channel please subscribe and hit the bell icon I'll catch you in the next video


Hello everyone, good afternoon, good evening, good morning wherever you may be in the world. My name is Zach Khan and I'm here to talk to you about customer obsession and what does it mean. So just a little bit about me before we get started. I'm currently a senior product manager at Lyme based in San Francisco. I joined Lyme about two and a half years ago in our product operations group then transitioned internally to product manager just over a year and a half ago now. Before Lyme I worked at Facebook for over two years where I was in the operations group. And before that I was doing my MBA at Wharton, and then way back when earlier in my career I started off in nonprofit consulting I did strategy work at Groupon, and then also did work for Kiva.org and microfinance in both South America and the United States. So that's a quick bit about me. Let's dive into the content. The agenda for today in this talk is as follows, number one defining customer obsession. Second, the qualities of a customer test PM. What are these, what should we look out for what should we develop. And then the third tactics for building the customer obsession muscle. I'll talk more about that towards the end. Two takeaways I want you all to have from this talk is the following flexible definition customer obsession can mean a lot of different things to different pms to different companies there's no right answer. Number two, there's not a single quality that defines a product manager who is customer obsessed pms can exhibit multiple behaviors multiple skills to demonstrate their hyper focus on the customer. Customer obsession is a muscle that you build over time. It's not something you either have or you don't have it's something you can learn something you can practice. There are many tactics to be done to develop this mindset. So customer session what does it mean well. There's a lot of ways you could frame customer obsession. If you just Google it you'll get a lot of hits a lot of different ideas, but I think it really all came into focus with Amazon's leadership principles and this is kind of what made the customer more well known. So, Amazon has their leadership principles customer obsession being one of them. This principle says leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. And although leaders pay attention to competitors they obsess over customers. So customer work backwards, make sense, working vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Trust is important. Trust plusting is bad. You need to have the trust your customers and not lose them, and then competitors are important obsess over customers. So at the end of the day what are we doing, we're obsessing over customers. That top article I found about customer obsession provided a little more clarity and nuance to what customer obsession is, and I like this a little better, but customer obsession describes organizations that continuously add value to the customer experience, these companies collect feedback regularly and prioritize customer needs in every business school, and they're more concerned with retaining and delighting existing customers than acquiring new ones. I definitely agree with the first two here. These are obvious qualities, but on the third, saying we're more concerned with retaining and delighting existing customers and acquiring new ones. That definitely depends on the stage of your business. At Lime, we are a hyper growth company retention and delight of existing customers extremely extremely important. In growth mode, we need to grow, we need to acquire new customers so you can't just focus on one thing such as retention. So, taking it together my quick high level thoughts. Customer obsession is not just about obsessing over the customer and product development. There are other folks in the organization who should be obsessing over the customers, a customer obsessed culture is very important at your company. I think that folks on the customer rely on feedback and really own the problems and be accountable to what goes well and what does not go well with your customer. After launching a product, what you do after is what really matters with customer obsession. You might take all the quantitative and qualitative feedback you have to fill out one of the greatest products ever, but after you launch it, something's going to go wrong, something's not going to be perfect. You're going to notice problems in the metrics, problems in the feedback, you're going to want to optimize, you're going to want to address it. So what you do after the launch is what really matters. And then customer obsession, yes, it does help keep and retain customers. If you are having bad experiences, if you are doing things that are not in the best interest of customer, you're going to lose customers, you're going to break their trust and I'll talk to you a little bit more about some of these examples later on. This is a customer obsessed product manager. We've all seen it, we've seen the LinkedIn headlines that say user obsessed product manager, customer obsessed product manager, hyper focused on the customer product manager. You know, you get the drift. All PMs are supposed to be customer obsessed, but customer assessment of being obsessed is just defining, it's just a summing up different things that we do as product managers and skills that we are supposed to have to be successful. So three key behaviors I like to say for the customer obsessed product manager. Number one, nail the details. The details matter when it comes to your product the details matter. Number two, seek customer feedback might seem like a no brainer, but it's not, you need to set aside time regularly to seek customer feedback, whether you're practically looking for it, or you know, maybe it's coming to you from other channels. Seeking customer feedback being proactive as a PM is essential. And then lastly, when in doubt, do what's best for the customer. There are going to be times in your business and in your product strategy, you have to assess the trade off of doing something that is going to be better for your business. You might be at like a tangible metric level with a cash flow of revenue, or whatever what having profit, but ultimately, you might really need to be doing what's best for the customer with the sacrifice some of those metrics, and that in the long run will help you by having this hyper focus on the customer, taking their best interest into account when making these trade off decisions. Now the details, what is an example of this this is something we talk about a lime all the time in our user experience and you know figuring out where there are problems how to make them better etc. So, this is an example of a screen, when you take a scooter ride with lime and you want to end your trip right so lime or non demand micro mobility rental service you print a scooter you rent a bike and rent a moped scanning a QR code. When you're done with your trip you press and ride, and then you used to see this UI. We can temporarily lock the vehicle while you grab a coffee you can keep your ride and resume later. So, if you want to pause your ride while you grab a coffee, you can resume it later. Great. This is free right wrong. This costs money we charge riders for the time they pause it. Well why don't we just say it. Well, this is a detail we missed, and we went back, we fixed it, we updated the UI to explicitly call out the pricing for the pause permitted rate, and we've seen seen less, less customer complaints about this confusion and pricing around pause. Things like this that matter. It's it's copy it's UI design, it's button placement it's all that good stuff but really, this is obvious copy needs to be clear copy needs to be transparent set appropriate expectations for your customer. The details matter. So, seeking feedback. If you want to proactively seek feedback from your customer. There's really easy ways to do this you have to dedicate time to preparing for it and also then speaking with your customer but I like to do these feedback sessions generally once a month once a quarter. I like to direct a random group of riders from Lyme who meet a certain criteria I'm looking to assess and just send a quick email introducing myself offering a really quick phone call in exchange for a nice quick reward. Obviously it costs money to advise your customers to speak with you sometimes and then offering up a calendar link might seem like a no brainer might seem basic but just to lay it out for you. Simple thing you can do to get sign up from your customers to speak with you. And then, when in doubt do what's best to your customer aka as a former Amazon product leader at my company said no trust busters cannot break the trust of our customers. If we do. That's it, we're done. So when in doubt do it's best for the customer well what is an example of this. So, at Lyme, we offer a feature called lime cash, you can preload funds into your lime cash wallet, then you can later use to take a ride with a line vehicle. Here's the UI for the lime cash see you can add different fund amount. We have a sort of reload feature to top up after a studio below a certain amount and then of course you tap that funds and funds. So, what do you notice different between these two screens. They're almost the same. Well, what was going on. So, in the left hand side screen auto reload was default on for new users. So, unless you opt it out, we would top up your balance when your balance hit zero. This is not good for the customer. When in doubt, we need to do it's best for them, which entailed making auto reload opt in not opt out. This is something we saw good results from, and really just get at the end of the day feel better about yourself as a company you're not trying to sneakily with dark UX patterns. You know, take more money from customers they want to give you. So now we're trying to do it line, just a general practice though just print. So, lastly, build the muscle. How do you build the customer obsession muscle and become a great product manager. Well, you start by working out. I just like this jiff of the banana and the broccoli, building their muscles, probably not customer obsession muscles but you get the point. So what are some simple tactics for improving your muscle building the muscle of customer obsession. Again might seem basic, but I just want to spell it out. So for a consumer app like lime. This means looking in the app store looking in the play store and doing this on a regular basis discussing with the team calling out issues etc. Number two, read and if possible respond to customer support tickets doesn't hurt to spend like, you know, even 10 minutes a day just sorting through the most recent tickets reading what's going on with the customers, seeing what's going on out there, or if your product is searching keywords in your customer support ticket related to that product. I'm reading a couple of those, seeing what's like spend some time in your customer shoes and get to understand their mindset. And then lastly, this is more of a mantra but I'll get into why it's a tactic at the end. Nothing is someone else's problem for a customer obsessed culture a company needs to adopt this mantra. Nothing is someone else's problem just because you don't own it. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try to get it fixed, because it's in the best interest of your business, do you fix the problems that customers are facing. So customer reviews, online, the product managers and the engineers we read them weekly. And we do actually even try to respond to them through, you know, customer support integration with Zendesk reading the customer user eye opening. Reading the five stars great it's a nice pat on your back but read the one star reviews. They can hurt doesn't feel good always reading them but it also to me it inspires me to want to do better to want to fix things and to want to always build a great experience for our writers. So, here's a fun one I read recently. Just first sentence says it all I don't know what 15 year old made this app but it's slow, not user friendly and sometimes doesn't work at all. So we're going to talk about some other things that we don't even think might be actionable but yet you know it's in our it's in our place to review and we just have to deal with it so you know we talk about this we talked about this in our weekly product and engineering planning meeting. And while it is, you know, facetious to read does highlight problems with like latency in our app, big problem. And then you're going to work to fix it so something that just validates our priorities for the quarter when we see these things in the reviews and what we've been prioritizing and then building a culture of customer obsession. I alluded to this, that second, you know, slide on definitions which was from HubSpot kind of alluded to this as well that is at the, you know, the company level overall it's about building the culture company wide. This is a mantra. I actually learned it at Facebook, where, you know, I work previously but it's generalized anywhere. Nothing is somebody else's problem. What does that mean. So, what does that mean it means if you see something off maybe some metrics, or a customer view or customer support ticket or read something in the news, and you might not be the product owner you're not the product manager for that feature or it's not even in the flag it find the right person whose area pertains to because maybe it's urgent maybe there's a problem that can be faced easily, and this and then the owner of whatever the issue is doesn't know about it. The person on the other side here your coworkers will appreciate this, because you are seeking to improve the business overall by just making sure the customer is always happy. I love to build this customer obsession culture so nothing is somebody else's problem. I really love this mantra. And I take it with me, you know, every day to work when I look at metrics and and read, you know, updates and things like that. Okay, so that's all I got. Just to sum up the key takeaways customer obsession. The definition is flexible. It means different things to different pms and companies. There is no single definition customer session just like there's no any of your reasons. Product managers who are customer obsessed don't exhibit a single quality. There's multiple behaviors multiple behaviors to demonstrate your hyper focus on the customer, you know, and then lastly, it's a muscle you build over time. There's skills you use tactics you use to get better and better, developing that customer obsession mindset and becoming an all star product manager to build delightful products for all of your customers. Anyways, that is all I got. If you want to contact me ask me more questions you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, but yeah, it's been really great talking with you thank you product school. Thanks for listening and, you know, have a great day have a great week. Thank you.