Hello, I'm Gerd Leonhard, futurist. My new book is called Technology vs. Humanity. Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years.  But now what's happening is that technology is truly turning science fiction into science fact. We're achieving so many scientific breakthroughs in nanotechnology, in genome editing, in artificial intelligence. But it seems like all that stuff is happening at the same time now. And this is the takeoff point. And so it's quite clear now that technology can pretty much do anything that we had imagined. Man and machine are converging. Man and machine are basically creating a sort of symbiosis. And the question for me will be ultimately where are we going with this? Are we becoming like machines or machines becoming like us? Many things that we're seeing around us, they're very gradual. We don't see very much like see the paperless office or cloud computing. And then all of a sudden it goes boom and it just either dies or it explodes. It's exponential gradually then suddenly. So we shouldn't make a mistake and look at those things that we have today like artificial intelligence or genome editing as being that far away. We're literally on the way to an exponential explosion there. And that will redefine us as humans. It's quite clear that we're approaching the point of what's called the singularity where one computer has a capacity of the human brain. And roughly in 2050 many experts and other speakers are saying one computer will have the capacity of all human brains. And that may sound very scary to us and it probably could be. But the question really is how do we control technology at that point when a computer has an IQ of 50,000. But essentially one key driver of this development is artificial intelligence. This is the major thing in technology, machines that can think. And some people call that cognitive computing or even conversational computing. All the terms that we're seeing around this and deep learning and neural networking. Huge topic of course these days. That is a major driver of change. We may find ourselves in a situation where we don't really know the difference between an intelligent machine and an intelligent human in the same way that we do today. We may indeed be the last generation of humans that live without being altered. Without being augmented. And augmented is already of course using a mobile phone but this is a trivial thing compared to using visor side or augmented reality or transplants on your high-risk or cochlear implants for data, a Wikipedia implant. And this is all becoming possible by connecting our thinking to the Internet as some people are saying uploading our brains to the Internet or to computers is our future. The question really is why? And what is the purpose? Is the purpose human flourishing or is the purpose technology in itself? Does technology become the purpose of our lives? Automation is raging everywhere and probably eating 50 to 70% of our jobs even though there may be another 60 or 70% of jobs that we don't even know that are going to unfold. But automation is a big deal. What should we automate and what should we not automate? Responsible automation will deploy technology for humans not despite of humans. It's very important to realize that we cannot automate to be a human. We cannot automate happiness. We cannot automate satisfaction or contentment. Those are things that we need to create as humans and there's no wormhole for being happy. And we cannot when we should not employ technology to create fake happiness. In the book I talk about the need for a kind of protection agency for humans and I sometimes joke about this being the environmental protection agency, the EPA, for humanity. A place where we can say, you know, we can do this but maybe we shouldn't because we need to protect this. You know, it's a nature reserve, so to speak. But we also have to have some precaution. We shouldn't invent or do things that we cannot undo that have existential risk. We need to think about the non-proliferation of artificial intelligence or the proliferation in a controlled way. And the same goes for genome editing and for nanotechnology. Who is mission control for humanity? This is a very important question. We can't allow technology and by extension of course the military and investors and stock markets to control what we do with our humanity. What our ethics should be. What we are allowed to do in the future. That is a key question. Are you on Team Robot or are you on Team Human? We should embrace technology but not become it.


Hello everyone and welcome to our panel discussion around creation of the cross-functional team and collaboration. I'm going to be today as a moderator. My name is Anastasia. I'm a senior product manager at TechOut responsible for alternative payment methods. So what does it mean? It's literally everything which is all the payment methods besides car schema processing. And today we have a few panelists who will help me hear and share the experience. We will start with a short intro session. Margarita, would you like to start first? Definitely. So my name is Margarita. I currently work at Amazon as a senior product manager. I've been a product manager for a few years now. Right now I'm focusing mostly on what we call the core shopping experience. So everything that improves the customer journey from finding the products on Amazon to the actual checkout process. Nice to meet you. Awesome. Thank you. Eitan, how about you? Hi everyone. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. I'm Eitan. I was a PM at Google for just over 15 years. Came in through DoubleClick. I worked as a PM in ads for about a decade. Built Google's interest-based ads products, then had a number of other roles, led a variety of solutions across internal systems for HR tech, legal tech, marketing tech, and a variety of ML solutions and so forth. I loved not just working with product and edge, but working closely with sales, services, marketing, bringing products to market, growing the business around it and so on. Thank you for having me here. Great. Thank you. And Ed, who wants to vote you? Yes. My name is Ed Summers. I was most recently a product manager at Lyft, focusing on the software that runs their rideshare rental operations. And in addition to kind of the core business, they own vehicles that could rent out to drivers through the ExpressDrive program. And my team managed the software that ran that and ensured the fleet was running at high efficiency. The vehicles were getting repaired on time and our drivers were getting the most out of that program. Prior to that, I was in logistics and transportation, working on software primarily for logistics shippers, and then before that, free printing and manufacturing as well. So I have a lot of experience working with different cross-functional teams from operation stakeholders to sales and customer success as well. Awesome. Thank you very much. Good. So we can start. But I would like to also mention that before we start, there is a comment block where you can submit all of your questions. Whatever we'll still have a few minutes, we can come back to that and also cover them during the conversation or come back in FAQ round after the main panel discussion. So if you don't mind, we can start our session. So I will start with you, Margarita. You're working quite already. You shared a huge experience around your product drive. How about at your team, you have many collaborative teams. You have also many cross-functional setup across the company. How do you and each team has their own vision, mission, goals, or key hours? How do you make clear that your team and especially the teams with whom you need to agree on some deliverables and work closely, you are defining the shared vision? Yeah, that's actually very important. I think as a product manager, that is one of our biggest drivers, making sure that everyone understands and has a clear vision of the objectives that we're building. And I've actually learned that aligning diverse teams hinges a lot on establishing a clear Y that does resonate across different functions. It involves just, you know, like moving from the isolated tasks to actually ensuring that everyone understands how those tasks unify to a bigger strategy and sets a clear vision that resonates with each team, especially when they each have their own aspirations and objectives. And I think that what I've seen often during teams, for example, like when we think about options like onboarding pages on a website, a designer could be working on the entire onboarding session while a developer is focusing mostly on a single button. So they are all working at a different version of a zoomed in or zoomed out option. However, the overarching goal for both is to streamline users' logging experience. And I think as a product manager, I need to ensure that everyone connects to that overarching experience. And I achieve this in different ways. One is setting weekly sessions where we have demos or ideation or just vision workshops. And those I try to showcase everyone's work. And it helps to provide a space so that everyone sees how their individual tasks contribute to enhancing the overall user experience. Yeah. And it moves away from just the contribution, but also kind of also the realization of that. Awesome. Thank you very much. Do you have any best practice which you can share with us? Yeah, great. Thanks. So I think it all starts from you know, it depends a little bit on where you are in the overall process and lifecycle. And so where you are from a perspective of the annual flow. And so I tend to think of it as starting with an annual strategy. Typically, actually ideally it's a multi-year strategy that you're trying to pursue. And you are closely with engineering, with UX, with PGMs, and then even more broadly cross-functionally with sales and services and marketing depending if you're driving a consumer product or more of a B2B business. But if it's a bit more of the B2B side, as for example, where I spend time in ads, we work very closely and brought together a core team with a lead from sales, a lead from services, a lead from marketing, a misself as a lead from product, and so on from Engine UX. And we would develop a strategy based on an understanding of the marketplace and translate that into a 12-month roadmap and annual goals, annual OKRs, quarterly goals, and we establish a whatever appropriate rhythm of meetings where they're monthly, weekly, bi-weekly to check in and drive strategies and plans against each of those. And so when each team developed their OKRs, they were connected to the larger multi-year strategy to the annual goals. And that way we were all rowing in the same direction. Awesome. But how about, let's say, as you're covered, you're working with sales, commercials, with any other teams, of course, you can share it with a vision because vision for the company in general is shared long-term goals. But every team has, let's say, their specific OKRs. At some point, they're driving these goals. Which kind of practices you're actually applying around communication across or married, in this case, internal team goals in order to drive one vision? Yes. So when I said vision, I don't mean a company-wide vision. And especially if you think of, obviously, it depends on the size of the company. At a place like Google, there's many different teams with different focuses all lining up to the same Google-wide mission. But within ads, at Google, just to give a concrete example, there were search ads and there was display ads. And within display ads, there were six to eight different sub-areas. And within one of those was the area I was focused on. And so we aimed to run our product as if it was a standalone business, obviously, within the larger context of everything else. And so we developed a vision for revenue growth, for customer growth, for future capabilities, for our competitive standing, and developed that vision, developed an annual strategy and so on. And so we very much focused everything I described on our own internal team goals towards that. And then wrote those documents together. So there'd be a single shared vision document, a single shared set of higher-level OKRs that each sub-team could then write their own more detailed quarterly and, you know, plans in and link them all together to that one shared doc. And we'd have various tracking processes in place, whether a spreadsheet or another type of more sophisticated system to keep track on a monthly, weekly basis. Everything I'm describing is the theory behind it. It practice, of course, and are those things ever happen as smoothly and cleanly as you'd like. Nobody really enjoys updating spreadsheets or task planning and weekly meetings sometimes are super valuable, sometimes are, you know, meeting for the sake of meeting. It's what's really up to you as a PM to make them valuable, to keep them focused on the goal and make sure there's accountability and updates from each of the areas. I see. So for example, from my experience, if you take a look, we are working in B2B market and checkout is responsible for financial services. So as I'm, as a team or product manager of one huge team responsible for specific domain, we have also shared topics with other products. And sometimes it's very, it's really hard to align on the vision and align on delivery plan across all of the teams. So literally, I see that communication across team is the most valuable thing which you need to establish. So what would be your recommendation or strategy, how to be more clear on that communication? Yes, great question. So I think it all builds on relationships. As you said, communication is sort of at the heart of everything. And so do you have a relationship with the individual leads from those areas? Are you spending time with them one-on-one in addition to in the group settings? And before you even start to get into work and the, what are we trying to do and how do we go about it? Getting to know them personally, developing the relationship. Once you have that relationship, then it's a lot as a PM about listening and understanding where they're coming from, what their goals are, what their motivations are for their function or their sub team, and seeing whether they're aligned or not aligned. And if it's not aligned, that's okay. It's legitimate. It's the reality. And so just trying to create as much visibility around that. Where there is alignment, of course, it's easier. You put it all together and you know that when there's not alignment, then you can have a series of reviews with the appropriate leadership folks from each team and each function and decide on the path ahead. In an ideal world, you would at some point bring it down to an integrated disagree and have a committed set of goals. Sometimes that's not so easy to reach and there'll be ongoing friction. But the more you can create visibility around it to manage expectations and even just being aware that, hey, this is our number one priority. This is your fifth priority. That's simply the reality. We need to work around that and recognize how much time and attention each team can give to it accordingly so that you can minimize frustration. Yeah. Thank you very much. Margarita, how about you? How do you establish, what is your experience in establishing good cross team collaboration and especially communication across them? Yeah. I think very much like Aitin mentioned, it's largely relationships. And once you establish those relationships, it makes very easy to establish communication. I personally like to prioritize a centralized communication platform like, for example, Slack. And I really enjoy those kinds of platforms because it provides a vehicle so that every single team member can stay updated. It's a place where they can share documents. They can collaborate in real time and I think that's so important for communication. I do this for each one of my projects. I have a designated group chat and this enhances, obviously, transparency but also reduces the risk of miscommunication. And what I really, really like to do in this chat is pin a few files so that people can always come in, access them. And then we also have our weekly cross functional meetings and what I mean with cross functional meetings is a meeting where we have everyone from designers to engineers to developers is making sure that everyone who belongs as part of this project is present because it is in those spaces, not only where we report progress but also kind of where we dive into challenges, start planning what's ahead and it just creates a space for immediate feedback and alignment. And I guess to just ensure that there's inclusivity and kind of continuity to the meetings, another big aspect of communication is being able to document precisely what are the next steps if those next steps are assigned to someone who would be the owner, the timelines. If there's a decision made or an outstanding question, just making sure that we document those are just such important parts of it. And I guess the other aspect of communication, especially as a product manager, is a lot of like visual management tools like dashboards or Kanban boards or whatever kind of board that actually provides a lot of at a glance view of our project status. This helps identify a lot of like bottlenecks or misalignments and it just helps everyone understand where we stand in terms of the project. Thank you. Thank you for your details. Ed, as we're talking now a bit touching also alignment, as it's very important for all of us, how you would, for example, you would identify that the misalignment happened. So for example, like, you know, everything in theory works well, but misalignment is also one of the issues we have in this time. Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, I think, you know, the other panelists have mentioned, you know, relationships and open communication, I think it really starts there, you know, building a strong relationship with the leaders on the other cross functional teams you're working with, whether that be, you know, an operations team or sales or customer success, you know, make sure that they have the space to identify that. You know, I would also say in the context, it's, you know, helpful to kind of proactively check in on, you know, whether there is some some misalignment, you know, make sure you're getting feedback from your teams as well. So you can, you can raise that in a timely manner. You know, I think when that's identified, you know, most people will want to work in good faith to help resolve that.  So, you know, finding that common ground is very important to pushing, you know, getting past and resolving this alignment. Good. Thank you. As an example, at this moment is you've already mentioned that each of the companies where we work, they're large. We have a lot of stakeholders across each team. We have upstream downstream teams. And in that case, how it's very hard, like one team can have one product manager, another one has huge vertical and hierarchy of them. So stakeholders sometimes it's very hard to identify. In a case where you need to have alignment across some specific feature, how you define your stakeholder, how you make the roles about them? Eitan, what would be your practices around that? Great question. So I think, you know, we mentioned communication earlier. In these kinds of situations, I think over communicating is often a good approach. And so, and having different channels to communicate, emails, one-to-ones, group meetings, documents. And so having a wider canvas to start to let folks across a broader group of leadership in all levels and all the potential stakeholders know, hey, we're about to get started on this thing. And here's our plan. Here's our process. And we're going to have a kickoff meeting and could go a bit broader in the invite for those types of meetings. And then now we're down to a more active working group that meets more regularly. It takes a lot of time and effort to meet with each individual team and sub team, but it's often so worth it because when you don't, it ends up taking you much more time on the back end to fix things and correct things when miscommunications or misalignment happen. And so spending the time up front to meet with everyone and understand how to a degree they want to be involved, who from their team ought to be involved in what levels in the working team or as an FYI or as having input. And then establishing an effective structure to communicate around that through a variety of meetings and emails and so on. And so that's where it begins. And then you have just regular check-ins and touch points because you'd be keeping to group meetings on one-on-ones and sort of back channel communications throughout to hear if anything is going sideways. Great. I think from my experience point of view, we figure out that the main issue when first of all misalignment happening, that we drive in different goals within the same time. So it means that for me the value A, let's say I'm working on delivery a payment method and other team with whom I need to collaborate, they're responsible for let's say some card processing or whatsoever, but we're using the same service. And what I figure out at that time we have looked like at different currencies. So for example, for me I'm driving a number of payment methods, another one driving volume. So in that case what I found it's very important to find kind of similar exchange rate, which leads that when you're driving your own or some metrics, then they feed it into the metrics of your counterpart. So then you can buy in and say, hey, I'm now working on activation of new payment method. It means it brings more value. In this case, if it's bringing more volume, you're also getting some value of that. You're getting these metrics going up. So both of us have a limited value out what we actually require to do. So basically I start in my practice and mostly thinking about, because sometimes it's really hard to understand what the value of one team, so what's another one. So I try to be in their shoes and discuss on different priorities, alignments, only from position of that stakeholder. So literally if I need to, I know that these guys driving let's say number of active customers within any point of time, I will think how I can adapt my metrics, my topics. So that will also help them to lead and drive their metrics. So it helps me to think about that from financial point of view around exchange rate. Let's say what does it mean to exchange my goals into their ones? That was interesting to have. Good. So how about talking about our sales commercials? They mostly working with our merchants, customers, buyers, etc. So it means that mostly they know the feedback. They know what they need, our main customers. How is that case at you will see we can actually get that feedback or write feedback from upstream teams into the product development? Yeah, that's a good question. I think the foundation for all cost functional collaboration is building that communication and intimacy. So I think it starts there if you are closer to those teams, if you're closer to the sales team or customer success, let's say it's really easy to find the right people to have them on the shoulder to try to start getting that feedback. And then the next thing I would say is to be able to sit with them to understand how they interact with the customer. So if it's say a customer success team, sit with them, answer customer service tickets and you can see what they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. You can hear the voice of the customer directly. And I also had another point, and this was a big part of my experience was I was in the logistics tech space, which was very B2B oriented, is that to have a systematic way to collect and organize feedback and conversations that we're getting from customers. So when I was at Lonesmart, our sales team used Salesforce to track all these interactions and might be very hard to get a customer on the phone for a deep dive or product feedback conversation. But we could learn a lot about what customers needed, even from the initial discovery calls our sales team was having. So we built a way to categorize our product feedback in Salesforce. It was one drop down that a salesperson had to add at the end of a conversation. And we could use that to extract data from customers who might not be the most willing to stand up to have a call to provide a lot of detailed feedback. And it really helped, must measure the direction of the broader customer base and what they needed. Awesome. Thank you. What about you Margarita? How do you approach that? Yeah, I think different ways. One of them is obviously having a strong collaboration with those teams. Just making sure that I set up regular joint meetings with them, not only to discuss the customer feedback, but also kind of delve into what that feedback actually means for our product. When it is possible, I try to interact in those customer interactions by joining call services. Because this firsthand experience, I think just being in touch with the customer is so valuable to provide a clear window of what the customer is going through, what are their needs, what are their concerns. And it helps streamline a lot of this insights. And I think knowledge is also kind of a two-way door. Of course, like leveraging information from these teams is important, but I also make it a point to arrange sessions with sales and customer success teams so I can also provide understandings of what the product is, so that they can also immerse themselves in understanding our processes, how we develop them. And I can also understand, obviously, their sales process, their success strategies, and there's a mutual understanding around the context of customer insights and where exactly they are. Awesome. Thank you for your feedback. From my point of view, I also work quite a lot with commercial sales as well. So we try to teach ourselves how we need to cooperate together. So what I mean, usually when feedback comes and they say, like, I need a feature A, without really business case, why that required, what's the floor for that. We tend to define some kind of minimum list of questions, which we usually, if we are not allowed, let's say, to talk directly to merchants, if we are not presented there, we are training our sales and commercials to ask that specific question and provide us feedback on that. So literally, our sales or commercials, they are coming to the merchant, during the first round of presenting our solution, they also start asking questions which we basically want to have answers for. And in that case, I'm collecting them, I see, okay, that merchant need that and that. So then, at least if I'm not allowed to join, I at least have some kind of answers and feedback. Anastasia, why would you ever not be allowed to join? I tell you, because first of all, sometimes even like I'm not capable physically, I'm, for example, in another session. So but we try to train everyone, every sales and commercial. So they also have some kind of mind of product. So they thinking also not from only one merchant point of view, but how that feature will impact others. And when they come into, we also establish round tables around with merchants. But it helps us to track all that feedback in one single format. So then it's also easier to digest at the end, if you have, let's say, hundreds of merchants with whom you need to discuss the same thing, you have a template, you know what is expected, and then you can come back to answer any other session, other questions. But usually why we are not allowed, as I'm saying, like, I'm in one time zone, like, for example, today with you, the person is another time zone, not every time you can spend time with merchants, but we of course try to improve there. And also one thing which is for sure working for, for us, as you mentioned, establish weekly, bi-weekly, whatever sequencing of sessions where we, even by region, because checkout is a global payment for a PSP provider. So by each region, we set up sales and commercial round table where can consume all feedback which they receive. By the way, we also have solution engineers who are literally using our product and helping our merchant to drive the onboarding or integration. So they also extract and collect feedback with them. So we try to establish single process around different teams, which helps everyone to drive the same goal. How about you, anything to add, Eitan? It looks like Ed wanted to say something. Yeah, I would add, you know, the, it's, it's important, you know, that the sales team as you're using that feedback, developing your product or building out a roadmap that, you know, they're seeing the results of that as well.    So, you know, I've tried to sit in on, on some sales calls be available to answer, answer questions, but, you know, it might be, you get one half hour interaction with the customer, they might opt not to buy the product and you could still learn, you know, why and potentially make changes even, even based on that. So, you know, making sure that as you're collecting that feedback, the teams that you're working with can see the results of that, you know, and they can see both your, you know, progress toward your goals moving in the same direction is very important to help, you know, continue to build that trust and get additional feedback. And as a case, let's say, because we are now becoming more remote first, at that case, how you establish the relationship and communication with the teams when we are working across the globe, and how to avoid to have sales at that case. What would be your suggestions? Ed, you can start also. Yeah, I would say the, you know, most helpful thing, especially if you're working with, with distributed teams is to have that, you know, regular communication case, right, that, you know, and it doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, meetings of a video, for example, but, you know, have regular check-ins on Slack, you know, time to update the goals and see progress against that. So, if you have a document that's tracking that, that's, you know, that's very helpful. But yeah, having that, you know, regular communication, cadence helps keep people on the same page. They understand, you know, okay, I need some information to update the team at this time. You know, they can have that ready to go in advance.  You know, what's the most important thing that they're working on within, within their own function. You know, so without that regular structure in you, it becomes very easy to slip back into your own silos. So I think having that is important.  Awesome. Thank you very much. And how about you, Margarita? What would be your best practices for that? I think in a remote first environment, just to make sure that, you know, like, to avoid silos and make everyone involved in productive, very much like I mentioned, communication is such a lifeline for remote teams. And just making sure that there's a space to establish that regular communication, whether those are daily standouts or weekly meetings, is such an important aspect. And I agree, there is an importance of the collaboration tools that are important specifically for shared digital work spaces. But I also think there's another aspect to preventing teams from, you know, feeling siloed or kind of like not connected. And it is making sure that you also provide a space where, you know, there has virtual social and cultural activities. I think we mostly focus a lot on work, but there's also the individual aspect. And you can't disconnect those two when you're working with people. And I think it's such an important part of like team building processes. And also when you're doing this, making sure that you bring along everyone in the decision making process, you don't have to agree with everyone, but at least make sure that everyone understands why we're agreeing or why we're committing to something. Awesome. Ethan, do you want to follow up? Or you have something to say? Awesome. Sure. So I think it depends a little bit. So if we're talking about sales and sort of frontline folks, for example, back in the day, we had product specialists who were regionally focused. And so they could be sort of the essential funnel to communicate information out or back in. And they would have the more effective ones would establish various groups within their region of local experts in various different distributed sales teams and different verticals and sales channels. And they'd hold sort of bi-weekly monthly get-togethers and lunch and learns or a variety of different tactics like that to share information with them and information back. And so that could work really well. It's interesting when you discuss remote first, I think of, again, my time in the early days at Google working in ads. We were in office, but my energy team was in California. I was in New York. Sales were in all different offices or even if in the same building on a completely different floor and of course spread out globally. And so we were remote by definition. And that still worked well because we had the right syncs and all of that stuff. Certainly time zone makes it more difficult if it's farther apart. But all very achievable. If we're talking about engineering cross-functional with UX and PGM and so on, regardless of time zone, regardless of location, you need to have the same set of meetings. And if you're further apart, you need to have more meetings.  And yet it's unavoidable. And it's sort of just creating sort of a cultural awareness that sometimes, you know, if sometimes meetings feel like they're not as productive as they could be, but the lack of that meeting would quickly lead to a breakdown of communication and so on. And so sort of everybody just agreeing to that. And of course, I'm not trying to dismiss or excuse poor meeting management. You need to do all the right things to have effective meetings as much as you can. But again, I think it when you're remote, it goes back to a bit of over communication. And when you have a stronger personal relationship as well, then you have all the informal Slack chat, one-on-one emails, one-on-one chats to reinforce everything. And so that's that becomes super critical. It's very time consuming if, you know, you need to have a dozen different one-on-one chats with different folks. But the value of it is. Yeah, good. Thank you. From my point of view, I especially work like I'm from Berlin and we have also offices across the globe. I do at least try to visit one or another office. And as much I can build direct relationship with people face to face, it works better. So if you have a like, I would definitely recommend if you have a chance to see your colleagues from another office for sure use this time, visit them, even it's not required to have a meeting and have official conversation about anything. But it's really just to build that kind of level of deep and good open relationship is pay pay out at the end. So it's the best what I would recommend. And also it helps when you establish kind of open conversation or open feedback at that time. So basically, then you can first of all, you're establishing deep close relationship with people. And then you train the teams to be an open for feedback and also sharing that feedback. And if you can basically make this successfully, then it doesn't matter where you actually sit in which office. But I also tell you, especially in the area of financing where you need to work with downstream teams like legal, finance, treasury, where a lot of regulation, it's very important to have the understanding they domain and understand what they need. And especially sometimes even have in our case, like we tend to have remote two days in a week and three days at the office. And even though I'm working with another area, I still come into the office to see that people to know them because we are one team and our main goals are the same. So therefore it really is if there is a chance to visit people and get a coffee not via zoom that it's also very important. Okay, let's move to so how much time we have, I think we run out of time already, but I would like to go through the comment and commented questions. So I think we covered already regarding remote work, what are the some of the best practices to engage with cross functional team, as we mentioned that it's better to first of all build the close close relationship with people and also visit them and try to share your ideas with them. Also, is there anything else? Okay, how does how does the convincing happen for inclusion of digital transformation project success in OCR of cross functional teams, sales, marketing, commercial team members? Margarita, would you like to take one? Sure. I think a lot of it is convincing people around demonstrating value and the relevance of digital transformation. When we actually think about different teams like sales and marketing, they all have their drive, they're closer to the customer, they have a lot of like the understanding of what could potentially be a good OCR. But I think also being able to connect those with value is what actually is going to move the needle and make sure that we're driving those. And when I talk about value, it's just demonstrating how that aligns with the overarching goals of the organization. How do we connect those between the objectives of the teams like the sales, the marketing, the commercial teams, but with the transformation that we're kind of trying to drive? Good. Anything to add? Would you like to add some comments also? Yeah, I would say from perspective of value, it's helpful when you're working with any internal teams and this could be in the context of a digital transformation project or just day-to-day work. If you want to change a process, update something, understand how it really makes their job easier. Is it something that's going to be saving time? Is it going to be helping them, let's say a sales team, reach out to more customers more efficiently, potentially close more deals? So always when phrasing those goals, put it in the language that those teams are used to working in and really help them understand the value to that team, to the individuals day-to-day as well. Good. Thank you. Eitan, I would like to ask you, as we work across different teams, how would you recommend to establish psychological safety across the cross-functional setup? What would be your best strategies for that? Great question. I'll connect it back to the prior question as well. I think as PMs, we tend to be quite good at meeting with customers and listening. And listening to the customer, truly understanding their needs as different from what they want, making the customer feel heard, making the customer feel like you're listening and they're going to build something that will help them. I've found for myself, I often have not successfully used that same approach with internal teams. And it's in essence the same thing in every relationship and every communication you have with whatever stakeholder team or even your own team members, truly listening, understanding what's motivating them, what their pain points are, how what you're doing can solve what they're trying to achieve, ensuring that they feel heard, playing back to them, and then showing them how what you already have or what you aim to put together is going to help address those things or charting a path to get there if it's not quite there yet. And so this notion of feeling heard or not, I think is probably the most important element. You know, we all have, hopefully most folks we're working with have strong opinions, ideally strong opinions, loosely held, one of my favorite quotes. But everybody has a point of view. Everybody's coming at it from a slightly different place. Everybody's hearing something a little bit differently from each other. And so spending the extra time to listen and validate and understand where they're coming from builds starts to build a relationship. And if you start from a relationship first perspective versus a task first or objective first, hey, we need to get this done. Why are you aligned? Why are you, you know, why is there friction? If you start from a relationship first basis, then it starts to create that sort of trust and credibility. And that's the foundation of psychological safety. Thank you. So what you're trying to say, just to summarize, it's literal is that internal stakeholders, they are similar customers or even sometimes require more, more explanation, more involvement, more engagement. And then we at this moment train to be because we are looking at the end to end customer experience. But it's sometimes we need to actually look into inside world of the company across other stakeholders and drive them as similar as we will do for our direct customers. And even, yeah, to add to that, if you think of, you know, if you're meeting with a particular unit and a customer team, they will often need to, if you convince them, they will need ammunition to convince their surrounding team, their leadership, and so forth. And so you put information in front of them to make that easy for them. So too, with an internal team, hey, if you've got a variety of different priorities and goals that your team is focused on, they're all legitimate. Here's the information you need and here's how I can help you position that within your own org relative to everything else. And so I realized years ago that organizational strategy, organizational dynamics is very similar to product strategy. They're both strategy in the sense of you need to understand the vision of what you want to achieve. You need to have a strategy or game plan to get there, a roadmap and a timeline and phases. So too, with any internal relationship with internal goal setting, if you're not aligned right away, you can't just automatically align overnight. You need to have a strategy or roadmap, a timeline, phases to get there. And the more intentional you are about that, the more successful you can be and the less frustration you'll have, the less anxiety you'll have when things aren't quite working because you'll have more actionable next steps and sort of a better understanding of what's causing them as opposed to worrying about your role in the friction. Awesome. Thank you for that. Just also give you some more perspective on how I try to approach that. When we discuss new learning on some of the tasks, I'm also looking at the first of all what the personal, what this team needs and providing the trade-offs. So literally like there's potentially one solution, but you can have a different pros and cons for different options. One is for sure could be, for example, better for me, but another one for another team or the third option can be, from an organization point of view, the best one. And basically then in order to align what you approach to take, what solution to drive, look at that trade-off and see what are pros and cons for options and agree together on the path, how you will approach that at the end. Good. Mark, I think we run out of time. So many questions, which I would like to for sure cover through, but I think we need to finish. Just to summarize, Ed, would you like to give some, let's say, top advices to our audience how to build the best relationship across the teams? Sure. I think we've talked a lot about communication, but building that foundational level of trust, the personal relationship with people that can be different in different contexts, but building intimacy, building trust is a good starting point for anything. And then also finding common ground between the teams, whether that's shared objectives or aligning different teams that you're going to be working with on a shared vision. And it could also be very important as the work progresses to make sure that you're communicating on a regular basis and that people understand how their contributions are leading to that vision. Awesome. Thank you very much. So it means that as usual, communication is number one thing, which every product person or even people in general need to learn, practice, and I think it will never be, even though you can practice that thing, very often you will never, there is a plenty of area how you can improve across that domain. So yeah, thank you very much for your time. It was really a pleasure to talk to you. Hopefully, if you have any other questions, you can continue to comment them. And if you have anything you can reach us directly, I'm pretty sure you have our LinkedIn profiles, so do not hesitate. And again, thank you very much, Margarita, Aitan and Ed, to have you here sharing your experience. And hopefully we'll see us next time in other sessions of the product panel discussions. Thank you. Have a great week, evening, weekend. Bye. Thank you everyone.


My fellow Americans, I'd like to talk about three items today, beginning with taxes. About 10 days ago, we all kept our rendezvous with the Internal Revenue Service and added up our income tax. If it'll help ease the pain, let me remind you that in about two months, on July 1st, you'll start paying 10 percent less income tax on what you earn. But that won't mean anything to a growing group of citizens who've already given themselves a tax cut. It's estimated that about $95 billion in income tax is not being paid. That's enough to balance the budget. Now if your first reaction was that these are big money operators using tax shelters and there are some doing that, I'm not talking about them. The $95 billion is tax owed on an estimated $450 billion in, for one of a better word, the underground economy. The people in this economy are, I'm sure, honest people in most of their activities. They just have a double standard where taxes are concerned. They can be the friendly neighborhood fix-it man, a mechanic, craftsman, or member of the professions. They have one thing in common. They prefer to be paid in cash. The underground economy is a kind of cash and carry barter system, no checks, no records or bookkeeping, and thus no tax. As we struggle to trim government spending, it's hard not to think of how close that unpaid tax could come to wiping out the deficit. If I could paraphrase a line from a well-known old poem, Breathe there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, I owe it to my country and my fellow citizens to quit being a free-loader. Item two, a short time ago I announced I was asking Congress to pass a bill allowing a tuition tax credit for families sending children to independent or parochial schools. The credit would be for half the tuition up to a ceiling of $500 per child. That ceiling wouldn't apply until 1985. It would be lower to start with and would only apply to families with adjusted gross incomes below $50,000 a year. It would also only be for tuition to elementary and secondary schools. I wish it could be for college also but maybe we can do that later when we've solved a few problems. The public school lobby has protested that this is an attack on the public schools for the benefit of students attending exclusive finishing or prep schools. Well, the overwhelming majority of so-called private schools are church supported, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. The majority of students are from families earning less than $25,000. In some of our large cities, 40% of the parochial school students are from minority neighborhoods. Their families pay their full share of taxes to fund the public schools. How high would those taxes go for everyone if those parents decided to send their children to public schools? I think they're entitled to some relief since they're supporting two school systems and only using one. And now, item three. A couple of weeks ago I told you of how high interest rates were holding back recovery, that a lender must get a return on his money plus the rate of inflation. For six months, inflation has been running at an annualized rate of only 3.2%. And as you know, last month it actually went down 3.1% the first time in 17 years. Adding on to that a fair return for a lender, interest rates shouldn't be higher than 10%. They are, of course, because the money market, having been burned in past recovery sessions by artificial quick fixes, is afraid that inflation will take off again. Two industries, vital to economic recovery, have been especially hard hit by high interest rates, automobiles and housing. But it seems not everyone out there in the marketplace is afraid. The Automobile Dealers Association of Eastern Ohio asked some banks to lower interest rates for new car purchases. The rates were lowered from a 16 to 18% level down to 12.9% for a two week period, March 1st to 13th. The response was so overwhelming they extended the period to March 20th. In the first three weeks of February, car dealers in the Youngstown Warren area had only sold 344 cars and trucks. In those first 20 days in March, they sold 2,200. In Plainfield, Indiana, whether by coincidence or because he'd heard about this, Mr. Herschel C. Disney, chairman of the First National Bank and Trust, lowered interest rates almost four points for loans to buy cars and trucks, making $2 million available for that purpose. His offer is met with the same overwhelming response. Mr. Disney says the offer is good as long as the $2 million lasts. I have no way of knowing how far this idea has spread. But one of the major automobile companies, which has its own lending operation, is now advertising that until May 31st, the interest rate on loans to cars and trucks will be 12.8%. And just the other day, the news reported something similar had started in home mortgages. You know, there really is something magic about the marketplace when it's free to operate. As the song says, this could be the start of something big. Thanks for listening and God bless you.


The external brain. Here's the scoop. It's a notebook. That's it. It's a notebook filled with notes that you took. Most people put their external brain in a three-ring binder. Here is one of my awesome and most favorite students. She donated her external brain to me. That was very nice of her. Other students won't even let me borrow their external brain and let other people look at because they are so attached to their external brains. And I feel like that. I totally get it. That is awesome. Sometimes they'll come in and show it to us. But some of the external brains are truly phenomenal. But they don't have to be. They're notes. I had a student once do an external brain. I mean my brain always thinks it should be a three-ring binder because then it's more flexible. But this student did an external brain. I'm not kidding you. It was in a notebook that was probably this size. Like it was probably smaller than that thing. It was tiny.  And he wrote like, I almost needed a microscope. Not a microscope. A magnifying glass. A telescope to see his writing because he wrote so small. It was like, it was beautiful. Like it was like a work of art. Because he did all this really fine work in it. Awesome. I really do not care at all. If you take notes in your classes, you've done an external brain. There are a couple of rules. First of all, you can't take text. Like you couldn't take a book and copy the pages out of the book or print a website and put it into your external brain. Everything that's in it has to be created by you. So taking my lecture notes, like that packet, you can't put the packet into your external brain. You can rewrite it. I don't know why you would, but you could. You can rewrite pieces from your textbook. Again, I don't know why you would, but you could do that. You can put in it anything that you want as long as you did it. The exception to that is images. You can actually use images like this. I mean, this is an anatomy external brain. I don't even know if you can see that very well. There, look, you can see it now. This person who I love took pictures from a coloring book. She cut out the labeled parts so that none of the labels, like the images, didn't have pre-typed labels on them. She took those parts out and then she labeled them with her hand and her pencil, and that totally works. But if there's a label already on it, it needs to come out. You can write it out, whatever. That's usually less important in physio than in anatomy because images aren't, like, it's better to build your own images because most of what we're talking about are processes. It's not naming parts, which is sometimes handy to have a blank diagram to name parts. So anyway, the external brain seriously is super straightforward. Now, why would you do it? Well, you're going to get points for doing it. I'm going to look at your external brain. I won't grade it for correctness, but I'll look at it. And I'm going to look at it every time you have an exam because you also have external brain exams. And this is why you do it because you can use your external brain on the external brain exams. So those are basically open note exams. But again, it has to be legal content in the external brain. I think it's super straightforward. So don't stress about the external brain. That one is fun and straightforward. Don't stress about the integration project either, but let's talk about that one.


Item No. SCP-3009 Object Class Safe Special Containment Procedures SCP-3009 is to be contained in a standard holding cell measuring 10m x 4m x 10m of Site-17. Testing on SCP-3009 is open to all personnel with prior clearance. SCP-3009 is to be powered off when testing is not taking place. Prizes produced by SCP-3009 are to be described, photographed, then stored, with documents about prizes stored in filing cabinets organized by their point values. Description SCP-3009 is a Duncan alien-model ski-ball machine manufactured by Innovative Concepts and Entertainment Incorporated. SCP-3009 operates as a standard ski-ball machine of its making model, with the exception of a lack of dispensed tickets. Instead, a prize based on the player's scores dispensed from a large prize port installed at SCP-3009's side. The source of SCP-3009's prizes is unknown, as the inside of the prize port is sealed until a prize is dispensed, and no storage area for prizes have been found when SCP-3009 is disassembled. SCP-3009 also hosts the SCP-3009-1, a sapient entity composed of plastic and various metals in the likeness of a mechanical alien. SCP-3009-1 exhibits an often unpleasant personality towards players, and will attempt to convince people to play a game on SCP-3009. Once players initiated, SCP-3009-1 will cease communication with the player until their prize has been dispensed. Most of SCP-3009's speech amounts to insults, but it will congratulate the player if they get a high enough score, or manage to dunk SCP-3009-1 by hitting the moving target present in both SCP-3009 and standard Duncan alien machines. A game can be activated on SCP-3009 by inserting $0.50. SCP-3009 takes only US quarters of acceptable payment. SCP-3009 and SCP-3009-1 enter a dormant state when not powered, making containment fairly easy. SCP-3009 is only to be played in testing sanctioned by level 3 personnel or above. See Experiment Log 183. SCP-3009 will recover at an arcade inside the ████ Boardwalk, where numerous complaints were being filed over a rude ski-ball machine. SCP-3009 will put into Foundation custody under the guise of routine maintenance. A standard model of a Duncan alien machine was sent in to replace SCP-3009.   Experiment Number 3 Player Dr. Mansfield Score Earned 31,500 Prize Given A Stuffed Elephant Toy with a Large Red Bow Comments Made by SCP-3009-1 I'm impressed, not gonna lie, you probably devoted more time to ski-ball than women. Experiment Number 4 Player Dr. Larson Score Earned 10,000 Prize Given A Plastic Figuring Lightness of Dr. Larson Crying with No Hands Comments Made by SCP-3009-1 What? You obviously can't use them right. Experiment Number 5 Player Dr. Larson Score Earned 8,000 Prize Given Another Plastic Figuring This time depicting Dr. Larson missing an eye along with his hands Comments Made by SCP-3009-1 Your death perception can't get any worse, frankly. I'm doing you a favor. Experiment Number 6 Player Dr. Larson Score Earned 15,000 Prize Given A Sticker with the Word Persevere on it Comments Made by SCP-3009-1 I believe in you, buddy. Experiment Number 7 Player Dr. Larson Score Earned 11,000 Prize Given A Baseball Cat with the Words Not Mad Just Disappointed Displayed on it Comments Made by SCP-3009-1 Huh, appears my belief was misplaced. Interview Log 2-1-4 Interviewed SCP-3009-1 Interviewer Dr. Larson Forward SCP-3009-1 had just dispensed Dr. Larson's Prize in Experiment Number 7 30 minutes prior to interview. Begin Log 1822 I have a few questions for you, SCP-3009-1. Shoot away. You can definitely shoot anything better than you can shoot ski balls. Well, first of all, why do you do that? Take these jokes at their expense. As well as born-to-do, doc, call it a gift. Born-to-do? Born. Created. Doesn't make much difference when you can think on the same level.  But why do you feel the need to insult the players? Don't you want them to stay? Not all of them. What do you mean? What I mean is this. Imagine you're like me, making the same jokes day in and day out. The same one-liners to every player, laughing at them when they fail and begrudgingly accepting defeat when they do well. What then? You're happy when they do well, to see them get their deserved rewards.  All I got were little kids attracted to the big green alien guy, or parents trying to prove their skills to their kids. I was given the standard insults, enough to shake them a bit, abuse them, but not enough to get them to quit. I had enough of it, so I made my insults more clever, more personal. People got offended and stopped playing, soon only the best ones, the ones who could brave my initial insults, and who had the gumption to not let what a dumb alien on a ski-ball machine said affect their performance. Those were the only ones left. I wouldn't have had it any other way. Sure, I still poked fun at him a bit, but that was all in good sport. I still congratulated him and gave him their just desserts when all was said and done. I take it this means you're unhappy with containment. When I'm off-dock, I'm as good as asleep. I sure miss the good ones, but I take no players over crappy players all day every day. I'd love it if you let Dr. Mansfield play on me a bit, though. He's got a good amount of skill. We might just be able to counteract the great disappointment you've instilled in me. I'll put an award to my superiors for you. N-Log 1825 Closing statement. Dr. Mansfield had agreed to play a game on SCP-309 at least once a week. Prices to spend thus far have consisted of assorted stuffed animals.