A team had a charter to build a payments network, and our executive was like, you've got to do it this way. And so we're happy to do it, but we're skeptical. So we wanted to figure out a way to be skeptical in a proactive way. And so we started piecing together little bits of ways of doing things, and eventually came up with this methodology based on the lean. So I'm sure most people have heard of the lean startup. So that was compulsory reading for us. And then we pulled out some knowledge from there, as well as interviewed a couple people to figure out what would be the best fit for that company. At the time, the company had no formal process for how to prioritize stuff. There was ideas coming from all over the show, and seemingly people would just grab them and whatever was most important to the execs at that time go do it, drop projects, pick up projects. And sometimes that works great, and other times it doesn't. In big companies it can get a little chaotic. Has anyone ever experienced that kind of thing in the companies you work at? So we've got a couple, right? What EDD does is it helps ensure that we can go build that crazy tractor, right, if we want. But let's have a good discussion around it first. Our process that we came up with was a way to have meaningful discussions around all the ideas that we want to work on. And understand how those projects, if you have a stack of projects, weigh up relative to one another. Any questions? Nope. Okay. So the vision behind the process was effectively use the data we got, make data-driven decisions. If we don't have data, make it up and then validate it later, right? Run experiments. So it's experiment-based. Run experiments to prove out those assumptions that we made. And then measure the return of investment. So the ROI for what we're building. That was like basically the idea. So the process is kind of, I group it into three main buckets. One is someone drops an idea on your plate, or you've got an idea, your users are asking for something. Some ideas coming into you from the various inputs. Maybe you've looked at the data, et cetera. Right? How do you know whether that thing is worth building or not? We go through this process. The first one you will get into in detail is product description. Right? It's just like you've seen sheets, templated sheets for, if you've done the product school, there's a couple of different ways of doing that. We come up with our own sheet, which I'll go through in a minute. We then come up with a score for that product or feature. So we'd say, you know, throw in, and we'll go into that in a minute as well. But let's really think what are our key metrics around this thing. Throw them into a spreadsheet and output a number, like one number that will give that feature or product a score, and then compare that number to the other. So if one's like, hey, this is a $1,000 idea and this is a $2 idea, it's pretty clear that $1,000 idea is probably better. So we might want to build that. So it's a way of sort of adding data and estimates to figure out what to build. Do you have a question? Okay, cool. And then finally a roadmap. So the result of those two things is a set of experiments that we want to go run to prove that this thing is worth doing. Right? And that might be developing a prototype, developing an actual feature. It might be doing design prototypes, you know, full-on design, design research, like data analysis, et cetera, et cetera. So basically a roadmap effectively ends up being a list of things you would have to do for a project anyway to get it built and delivered. But it's a systematic way of doing it that helps the whole team that's using this approach speak the same lingo. So the product description sheet. So this is the product description sheet. It seems kind of simple. I mean, actually it might not seem simple from you guys' perspective. It seems simple to me because I filled them out a million times. As new ideas come in, we fill those out. And I can send this to you guys later if you need it. And I'll go through each of these in a minute. But the idea was if someone says, hey, I've got a great idea. It's going to make the company $10 million. Awesome. Let's spend as little time as possible figuring out whether that is actually a million-dollar idea or a $10-dollar idea or a $10 billion idea, whatever it is. And so this is a systematic way. It shouldn't take more than an hour. You don't want to spend too much time on it. But you can sit with the exec that has the idea or you can take it away with your peers and run through this and come out with a sheet. And that sheet is basically going to spell out everything you need to know or most of the things you want to know or guesstimate at what the product's about. So for example, in the top left, who is this feature for? Someone comes and tells you, look, we really need to build feature X. Sounds cool. It's like a Swiss Army knife. It's got the little corkscrew. But no one drinks wine here. So should we have the corkscrew? So who are we building it for? Who's it creating value for? What is the problem that the customer is facing? So this is kind of like the why. Why will customers care about this? What value is it bringing to them? The unique value prop? How is this unique as a solution? Can they get to the solution via some other means? Why is it worth us spending money on to build? There are normally a number of ways to solve a particular problem. Let's articulate them here. And then later we can figure out which one we go and actually put more time into. Your KPIs. I'm sure most people who are product managers here know what a key success metrics are. How are we going to measure this? Because later we want to come back and see what we did and see if it measures up to what we thought it would. Sometimes it's useful to think about who's going to be the early adopter. So for Xero's example, we might be deploying a new feature that we think accountants will be big. Or accounting firms will like. Well, let's find out who an early adopter is and see if we can sort of beta it on them or test the idea on them. What is out there that they could use? What are the existing alternatives? Are they in your industry or outside of your industry? I'm thinking about that. You can also think about what your competitors are doing in the space.  Channels. So how are we going to get to the customers? Emails. Do we have a sales team? If you're in enterprise, you typically have a sales team that's going to go out and speak to customers. How are you going to drive awareness for the future? Again, this doesn't have to be like a go-to-market strategy. It's just like, hey, we think who are the stakeholders? As a PM, you really want to identify who are the stakeholders, because you can get them involved in supporting the product and get their feedback on the product. If they think it's crap, they're not going to support it anyway and they'll tell you and that's great. But it's like so, for example, customer support. Typically very important in an enterprise situation because they're going to be the ones taking on the support for the feature you put up. What do they think about it? Does it solve one of their customers' needs that they're hearing a lot of? And then key resources. Who's going to build it? What do we need in order to get it done? Do we need more data infrastructure? Do we need a web designer? Do we need a front-end? What are those various things we need in order to deliver the solution? This is pretty key. So when you're thinking about what is the business value, it doesn't necessarily have to be money. It can be money. Money is great. Everyone loves money. It helps the business keep going, but there are lots of other ways it could be useful. It could increase the acquisition. It could increase the amount of referrals people give for this thing. It could increase revenue and maybe the features for return users. So there's a number of things that you could run through for this. R, by the way, is if you look it up, type in R, like the pirate, and there's Dave, something at McClure that has this cool video on YouTube about R and how you go measure these different things. So I suggest checking that out. And then cost structure. We talked a bit about what the key resources are. How much is it going to cost us to build this?  You know your devs are about maybe 10 grand, 20 grand a month if they're US based and you work here or in Silicon Valley. So how many man months is it going to take? We'll get into this in a minute, but figure out what your cost structure is. And this also pertains to how long do you think it's going to take? Question on the early adopters require. So are you looking for names and addresses basically that specific? Or are you talking about just generally who you're personally using a bit? You could do it, you could segment it as you like. Like it'd be cool if it was specific, but you could say like our early adopters are going to be on iOS, you know, because you know we've got a few, all of our hardcore users are on iOS. Maybe, you know, or maybe you want to segment it that way. There's different ways to splice that cake. Oh, he asked how, like, how do you identify the early adopters? I forgot, I have to repeat it for the video. Okay. So basically this is your product description, right? Once this is done, and it shouldn't take long. If it's taking too long, make it take less long. Because like typically you want, I'll give you an example. It took pretty much every company I've worked at where, you know, the exact, the CEO or the product unit manager is like very passionate and very product oriented. They're going to come to you, they come to me and say, Josh, we need to build this, go make it happen, right? It's their urgent, they've got this idea. We should put our product on the blockchain. Isn't that going to be awesome? Solve all of our needs. What you want to do is be able to get back to them pretty quickly. So with using product description, going quick, you can identify this. Then on top of that, you look at what the EDD score is. And you can do the scoring based on however you want. I'll show you how we did it. But between the product description and the score, you can go get a relative ranking. You go back to the, I'll go back to my CEO, whomever the person is that's pushing this thing and say, look, we looked at it. This is what we think it's going to take. This is what we think the score is. You still want to do it. It's your decision. I'm not CEO. So let's look at the EDD score. Okay. This is going to give you a relative return on investment. It's a dollar amount. We made a dollar amount. You can make it rupees. You can make it whatever you want. It doesn't matter. The point is that it's going to give you a relative like cash value against other features. And that cash value is just a, you can call it like a ether coin or whatever you want because it doesn't really exist. It's just a way of comparing apples to apples. We also remember that we were doing this quick. So we're going to rely on assumptions. Sometimes you've got the data. The more you do processes like this, the more data you'll have. And I'll show you that in a minute. But for example, your cost to serve in a SaaS platform, that's how much it costs you every month to support a customer. Let's say you know your cost to serve is about two bucks for a given, for your platform, right? You may not know that in the beginning. You may put a 10 because you just don't know. Once you do know it, that same number can be used over and over again for different products. So maybe your product is just an incremental feature. It's not going to drive the cost to serve up very much. But if it's a whole new product with a whole new customer base, maybe it will. And then we talked about prioritizing. So once you've got this, you can prioritize things against one another. So how do we score things? We score things. There's a couple different ways of scoring things. So these are the things we chose because we're working on the SaaS platform. There's different ways of scoring things for different types of products you're working on. Like if you're working on a hardware device, you're going to have a different set of things like your cost to serve will be different on a hardware device than on a SaaS platform, right? You might use some different metrics. Impact per user is how much revenue per user do you expect to generate in the month? Cost to acquire user, right? How much is it going to cost to get that user into the funnel so that you can start giving them this product? Just to get them to the top of the funnel, not to keep them. Generate how many customers are going to leave the platform every month? Cost to serve. We talked about that earlier. How much is it going to cost to basically support these guys on an ongoing basis? Cost to build is a one-off cost. Typically, that's your biggest cost item. And then how long is it going to take to release because that impacts opportunity cost? So when we first started, we didn't start small in this process. We developed engineering teams so we overcomplicate things wherever we can. So we didn't start small, but I'm telling you guys you can start small now because we've figured it out. It's a very simple exercise. This can take five minutes and I'll tell you why we did this in a second. But it gives you enough yield to see whether this thing is worth continuing and you can go deeper and deeper as you go. Now, the reason we had to go to very simple, which is this one, is because to get other teams within our organization to use this, something like this is far too complicated. So we said, okay guys, we want everyone to use this so we can compare apples to apples across the organization. Let's do it this way. Very simple. It's going to take more than five minutes. How happy is this thing going to make your customers? In the back, we've got numbers that are effectively mapping this to our complicated spreadsheet. How hard is it going to be to build? And then how many customers is it going to serve? So very simple. This is a great one. People use this one. This one gets a little bit more difficult because now you have to really grok what those metrics are that we talked about earlier. You've got to go and actually as a product manager learn what impact the user is. Some people just don't want to do that. So we look at our seven critical numbers and then when there's no data we just put it in there and just estimate. How many customers are going to be there in year three? But we can take a guess. So you end up with this score over here. And then finally you get to the moderate which is actually the detailed version and here you can start guessing and putting in how much do you think you're going to make year on year? How many new customers are going to impact because as you get this and the spreadsheet we have effectively uses all of these to calculate that ROI. So it's a little bit complicated on the back end but you can create that spreadsheet and I might be able to share it. I don't know, I have to think about whether I can do that. It basically takes into account what the seven key metrics are and it's kind of like a financial projection. So it's doing effectively what is your financial projection over the course of the next 10 to 12 years. That's really far out. If your business is still around in 10 years these days, but it's effectively taking into account a bunch of this adding interest, et cetera, and maintenance. I can't give you more specifics because that would mean I'd have to go dig out the algorithms that we spent weeks writing and I'd have to remember them again and I'm glad to do that. So comparing the scores, once you've done this what you end up with is a spreadsheet and your spreadsheet's going to have your score. I don't think I have an example of this but I'll have links to all the product description documents that you wrote next to it. And so anyone in the organization or in your team can go and look at this thing and say, okay, I've got an idea for something. They've already done this. They've already looked through this. What's in their sheet? Is it equal to my idea? Cool, it is. Or if it isn't just create a new one and then what the relative score is. Your execs can then go and say, it looks like we've been really trying to push product D but the return doesn't look as good as product A. Maybe we should divert resources to that.  You might have a customer that is just saying, hey, I've got 10,000 users and I'm using your stuff and it's worth a million bucks to your business and your business cares about a million bucks, let's say. You maybe just go do that. So this is just a way to get a relative score and get a relative ranking but knowing that they're environmental impacts that happen all the time in organizations. So as I was saying, the most valuable part of this that we found was just having a structured approach to talk through what is this idea about, fill out that spreadsheet and then give it a costing and it really helps you think on all the levels of detail about that idea, right? Besides obviously building a prototype and just pushing something into market, which comes next. Any questions? When you just showed six examples of products, are you generally experiencing a list of products and then doing comparative analysis or are you organically, over time, going up with products based on the desire to do some sort of comparison? There are typically a lot of products in any given team, right? So if this was a blank list, I mean we started filling it with all ideas that we had and as new ideas come in, we add them to this. What other teams who started picking this up, like I looked at our sheet, you know, a year after we had started evangelizing this and it was like really long and this is basically the PM team filling it out, not really other people in the organization, but the management team pretty much. So it's organic as ideas come up, as your CEO says we got to do this and we got to do it now, you go and do it, you add it here and then you send him a link and say hey dude, this is what we thought about, we actually think it's a great idea or we're skeptical about it, happy to do it still but here's the information that you may not have had when you thought about it in the elevator on the way to the meeting, right? So does that answer your question? Yeah. Okay, so the roadmap, this is where, how are we doing for time? Are we doing fine? If you get anything out of this whole thing to take back, the easiest part to think about is those two. This gets into a lot more like lean product management and development effectively and you'll see why in a minute. So we found that the adoption rate of the first two within our organization was very high but people started to fall off over here because it takes a lot of discipline to keep this stuff up to date. Not everyone's disciplined, right? So the point of this next part is we came up with the, we pulled some numbers out of our butts, we've got these like cool scores, we think okay, this is what we want to do. Well, you know, are those correct or not? Let's go and figure them out. So what we came up with was this thing called the experiment roadmap, right? And the idea here was to look at each of those key metrics we defined earlier, impact the user, et cetera, and do at least one experiment to prove or disprove that number and make it better. The better you get those numbers, the more accurate that score becomes and the more belief we can have in the fact that it might actually help our organization or hurt our organization by doing that thing. So what we do is we create, we brainstorm, this is actually really fun, I love doing this. You brainstorm, okay, how are we going to figure out what it's going to actually cost us to service or build or whether users really want this and how much will they pay for it, right? So these are part of the experiments. And then we also assign a cost for the experiment, which is also a formula and I'll show you that in a minute, but it gives us, and then we give it a rating. How much certainty does doing this experiment give us that this product is going to be a success or this feature is worth doing, right? Along the way of doing that, you learn a bunch of stuff and you figure out what is the right thing to build for the customer, right? So for example, let's see, do I have an, before I get there, an example might be, we believe that we can charge two dollars for this feature per use, right? We're going to do scanning of documents and we charge two bucks a document. We have this great idea for how to do that. And so what we're going to go do is to prove that is to reach out to 10 customers, interview them, like target customers, interview them and see if they validate whether they would pay two dollars or not. We believe they will and that way we think that it's going to be worth monetizing this a two bucks a sheet, right? That may not be the case, but it's, the hypothesis is fine. You're just looking to prove it's scientific method, right? It's just a hypothesis. You're looking to prove or disprove it. Other way you're going to be learning something new.  What is your target metric? You create and run an experiment. You then document your findings and then you confirm or change your assumptions based on your conclusion and then we publish it. So we were working in the last company I was in as a very distributed organization, offices all over the world. You know, you come up like, it's important for any organization to not lose all the knowledge that their employees are.  And when we leave the company, do we leave any of that, you know, intellectual stuff behind? Sometimes, sometimes not. By publishing the results, you hopefully leave some assets behind, you know? And then also you, you get exposure for what you're building, right? We'll talk about that in a minute. So, okay, let's go back here. Here's an example. Users will value and pay for a bookkeeper on demand, right? Does anyone know what bookkeeping is? I would hope everyone knows about it at this stage in our lives. I only learned about it a couple years ago. Really useful service.  So at a high level. So you say, okay, we think we want to start a service like that. Let's figure it out and see if we can charge people. So we're going to ask, you know, 50 customers, bookkeepers and partners if they would be willing to pay for the service. We're going to, we see our results where 27 of the 50 said they would be willing to pay online for a 60 minute session. Okay, that's pretty good validation. If almost 50% of people are going to do it, it's probably not a bad idea, right? Now that we know it's probably we'll have a realistic attached rate, we can better calculate the ROI. So experiments. I'll give you an example of these in a minute. They're all sort of fit in the standard framework, whether you're doing an engineering effort, a design effort, a PM research effort, you can do experiments in this way. So you can say, well, what is the, what is, first of all, what is the critical question? So what is our cost of build, a revenue per user, et cetera? Okay, your experiment, you describe what that experiment is, I'll show you that in a minute.  You see if your hypothesis is true and then you add your belief. And this is cool. It's kind of like putting a stake in the ground, saying, I believe we can charge two bucks for this. I'm putting my, you know, I'm drawing a line in the sand, we can charge two bucks for their one hour of bookkeeper time. People may come back and say, no way, only if it's free, right? Or they may say, I'm gonna charge 10 bucks. That's a happy outcome. It makes me feel more confident that I can actually make revenue of this and actually increase my revenue per user critical question. Okay, so here's how we do experiments. It seems complicated, but once you start, once I found that in our team, once we started framing everything we do in this mechanism, it helps us think through why we're doing something. You don't just go, I'm gonna go do a user research project because it's that time of the cycle and I think we need it. You're gonna say, you know, we're gonna do it because we're trying to figure out whether this thing, whether the core actions in this thing that we're developing will be easy enough for a user to use and that way they'll end up onboarding with us. So the first part of the experiment is what we'll do to conduct the experiment. We will, you know, set up a prototype and run it through user testing.com. I'll actually give you an example after this. What is the data we're gonna gather to analyze? So then we'll see if blah, blah, blah. What we expect the data to show, we think it's gonna do this, right? We think it's gonna do that. And then if it does do that, this is how we're gonna interpret it, right? If customers do say they are, have said they're willing to pay 10 bucks for this feature, then it means that we're gonna make the revenue that we thought we were gonna make and we're more confident in shipping the feature. So here's an example. We'll research company-wise pricing offer for this feature. Then we'll see if our planned pricing is less expensive. We believe that our planned pricing is less than theirs and this means that customers will pay the $1 for the transaction and so we can be more confident that our monthly revenue per user, in our monthly revenue per user critical number. So you might say we think we've got these customers already that are processing these documents. This is not a zero example, by the way. It's just a random example. We've got customers that are processing documents right now digitally. We think if we can do it manually, if they're doing 30-digital, we figure they're gonna do 15 manual a month at a dollar a piece. It's gonna add $15 extra a month to our revenue. This is the way we price and cost the experiments. This is a useful mechanism that we use to figure out which experiments to do next. This is a fun exercise.  You have a long list of stuff. You only have X number of people in your team that can run these experiments. Which ones do you try first?  If I run this experiment and it proves that I can get $15 revenue a month, I'm gonna be 9 out of 10 certain that this is a good thing to build for us. How many hours is it gonna take? Actual hours. This gets better and better over time. Product management doesn't often have to estimate how long a task is gonna take. I never used to do this. I used to be like, here's my list, I'm doing this. I feel like this is a big-ish item, but I never used to exactly measure the hours. By doing this, you kinda start figuring out, oh, when I asked the business analysts for a survey, or not even a survey, for a data that they have to mine, typically that takes two weeks. I thought it was gonna take a day because it seems like an easy sequel query, but it doesn't because it takes two weeks because they were backlogged or whatever the case may be that they're busy. Or it's a complicated query. So if it does take them two weeks and it takes me eight hours to do this, the lag in terms of days is gonna be at least two weeks. And so that adds to the cost. So your total cost is your number of hours. We just timed it by 100.  Average engineer, product manager, designer, about 100 bucks an hour maybe. And then the number of days. And then your cost of certainty tallies all of those together. Here's an example. So when we're brainstorming, we set up a sheet and it's got an ID. And then we have the critical number we're trying to validate. We articulate the experiment that we're gonna run. And then we have a cost of certainty over here. You don't see it over here, but there's a couple numbers here that impact this. And those numbers get better and better over time as you get better and better estimating hours to do things. You know, the survey question that I talked about. Your experiment process, come up with the idea, design it. Once it's designed, put it into the working queue, wait on your data, document your findings, debate the findings with your team before you send it out to the whole company. Once you've figured out what that, you know, once you've had the debate and you've updated that doc, then publisher. Our team came up with something like this. We use Trello. We've got your idea board, your experiment board, things that you're working on. Sometimes you're waiting on data, so you just pop it in there. This gives everyone on the team a good idea of where things are in the cycle, right? So that your manager and their managers can look at this board and be like, oh, okay, cool. They're still waiting on that. Homer, we had these cute little icons. Homer indicates that you're waiting on someone and it's taken forever. Disappointed dad is like, dude, why haven't you started this yet? This is typically your manager. Darth Vader is our developers. It takes the force to get this thing built. And the stormtroopers are the product managers. So we can see which are the dev tasks and which are the PM tasks. Darth Vader, I mean, the dark star represents a huge fricking task. So it's probably gonna be sitting in the, working on the data, working on this for a while.  So what software is this? This is Trello. So Trello is free, but I think they charge, they're obviously charged for enterprises because that's probably how they make money. But Trello is a great way from a product management perspective. I don't cover it in this lecture, but our product team keeps everything, the previous product team kept everything in Trello. What am I working on now? What am I finished? And that way your manager can look at it and see where you're at with anything. And that each of those cards, this is a lane. And each of these cards, you can put a bunch of data and just keep updating their status on that particular work item. So document debate share. Once you've got your results, we have a document template. Okay, this is what we learned. This is the hypothesis that we had. This is the data that we got. This is the conclusion that we draw. And then it's kind of like a, in a way it's kind of like a spec for this experiment. And sometimes they end up being specs, right? You know, for a user research project, you're going to have a lot of artifacts. Some of the things covered is, you know, how much it actually costs to do this experiment, which is always useful for us as PMs and designers, but then for the devs, it's a way of really like holding them accountable to how many hours they said they were going to take to do something as well. Did it increase our confidence? This is more important at the beginning of the project. As you get into the later parts of the project you're committed, you're building it, this becomes less important. But the structure of the experiments is still useful. And then, as I said earlier, what our team did was once the results are done, we've played a little while with like just publishing the results doc. No one likes to read documents, right? They just don't. Like some people do and that's great, but mostly they don't. So what we did was just do, use QuickTime on your computer and record a video and just walk through the results doc and the experiment and then publish the video to the intranet, the company intranet and then people can just press play and watch it.  And then you just rinse, leather and repeat or leather, rinse and repeat, whatever it is. And you just keep going with all your experiments. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you decide which ones to spend time on and how long they take? Effectively. Okay, cool. So do we pull resource and time from developers to do experiments? No. Okay, let me answer all of these in sequence. Right? Each experiment has a different cost associated with it in terms of time. Right? So dev items are experiments. Right? You can frame them as experiments and the devs go build it where there's a prototype or like an APR they're building, etc. And there's a whole part of the process that we don't discuss that's the dev side of this that I haven't talked about today, but it fits into this, the dev process fits into this and it's based on these questions. It doesn't have to be, but we made it fit that way. Some experiments for PM and design go real quick. Right? I need to change the color on this button because I think it's going to do something. So I change the color and I run a test on user testing. I can turn that around in three days. So that's why we have the Death Star. You know, sometimes things take a long time and we know, but sometimes they're really quick. Also, like, it just depends on you as an individual. If a competitive analysis takes me a day to do, it might take, you know, you an hour to do. Like, we have different competencies, right? So, so they may take time. Now, how much time overall do we expend on this process? The, for my team, our entire, like, day to day is surrounded by this, right? We don't work on anything that's not an experiment. So if someone says, hey, we're going to do something, we say, cool, let's write it up as an experiment. We put it in and then we have a card that's tracking to that experiment. So we have all of our, you know, what am I working on today? What did I finish? And all of those relate back to experiments. It's not, like, when I say that, I'm like, shoot, that sounds kind of heavy, but it's really not. Like, once you learn how to make the, like, articulate things as experiments, they help you figure out quickly what, why, how, and that's what you need to go do anything, typically, like, whatever that may be. Sometimes, I mean, I'm sure there's tasks that don't require experiments. You know, like, you've got to phone a customer for something or other. That doesn't require an experiment. But for things that, we try to frame everything as experiments for things that might end up being a feature or product that we build. Anything else in that question? Question. Okay, cool. That's it. That's Edd in a very quick nutshell. 730. That's pretty good timing, I think. So, you have experience working for large corporations and also for a long startup. Yeah. For a long startup, do you use similar methodology if you didn't know what they mean and have you used it? At which point do you use it? I didn't. In the first startup I did, I didn't have this methodology. But we did do, you know, product requirements specs and design specs that, and be like, oh, obviously we need to test this. Let's go test it and see if it's good. So we didn't put it into this framework. So it wasn't really a great, this helps provide a really nice process for tracking things. I'm working, advising a startup right now, and they've put all of their stuff around, like, oh, you should try this process out. And they've put it all in there and they're working on it that way. For my current, for the thing that I've just started doing, I haven't got to the point of this yet. No, I think even as a team of one, this would help me structure why I'm doing stuff. Like starting anything or like, it's chaotic, there's a million things you need to think about. So how do you track them, right? So we can do it this way. And there's ways to short-circuit this so that it's maybe not as verbose, but you're still capturing the same information. You know, the information helps you draw conclusions and stuff. Yeah. We are. The question on the beginning, this is a lot of campus things. Yeah. You mentioned good product features. If you were having to be an organization where someone, other than, you know, a product manager, designer, anyone that's ever really worked on software, has come up with a product idea, and you are, as it has to evaluate that for them, how granular do you say, well, listen, I see what you're saying. There's actually five few cases, and that's five product features. Let's do this on that method. And last is where you say, okay, let's put them together. And you know, as you can emphasize, it should be taking super long. Yeah. What's the method of analysis? I mean, you might, I would say, start small, right? Start quick. Sit with that person, or get the idea from them as best you can, and try to put it into this. But I think this provides a nice structure for conversation. So if this person comes to you, they're not technical, and this happens all the time, right? You've got lots of business people out there that have money and ideas, and they're like, I need someone to convert this into a product. And so you could use this to help them convert it into product. I get, like, I consult for various people, and this is typically how they want someone to help them turn this, like, thing that they're thinking about into something that's actionable for a developer to go work on, or a designer to design. This is a good starting point for that. And it doesn't have to, as you go deeper, you'll get more and more granular, right? So you take the product, and not every particular use case you would start with. Just the top stuff, like what's the top three to five things? You know, like any product, like any product is going to have, like even a simple product, like I'm working on a simple idea right now that I think solves a good use case. But like the more I brainstorm it, the more features I add to the list of things that sound awesome. But I'm not going to ship, like if there's 40 of them, I'll ship three of them. Like what are the core use cases? Like outside of this, when you're thinking about this, what is the key problem that your product is solving? And what is the key user narrative and user action that they have to take in order to solve this thing, right? Everything else is actually irrelevant when you're trying to find product market fit. You need to ship that thing first and see if people are actually, oh, you know, we identified this problem.  You could expound that outwards and be like, well, people are going to buy chocolates. They're probably going to want a milkshake and they're going to want a very clean environment so we'll give aprons with the whole thing and you develop this huge product package for selling chocolates without validating that people would just want to buy a chocolate to begin with, right?  So just go like, try find product market fit, especially in startup, like you just don't have money, right? You're lucky if you do have money, but even if you do have money, you have limited resources and time to prove this thing in market before you run out. If we can forward to the moderate spreadsheet. So I think I'm okay with calculating those seven points. The next slide though. I'm not as skilled at doing the customers year one through ten. I know it varies depending on the product, but keep you taking through your thought process for how you even hypothesize those numbers. I don't even know really where to start. Yeah, so you start small because you're going to have a couple of early adopters, right? And then with these numbers, you're comparing them to, you can compare them to, for example, without being specific about where this stuff came from a product. If you don't have any product in the market yet, these are all going to be thumb sucks, right? IE, like your Instagram, and you haven't shipped Instagram via the beta yet, you're going to be like, oh, God, we could have a billion users if we're really good, right? That might be shooting for the stars, but you could say, well, and also this is kind of a slow trajectory on this one. You can see like if you're moving this slowly, maybe it's not worth doing this feature, but it depends on the nature of your app. So if you've got like a social app, if you're not hitting 100,000 users in just six months to a year, it might be a very poor indicator that this thing is going to find product market foot. So you want like, there's some metrics that you should go and research, right? Just to get an idea of what's acceptable in that industry space, right? And what you can be thinking towards. And then what you're doing, you can work backwards, so you do like top-down from that approach, right? That's one way to go. Another way to go is if you do have customer, we talked about, you know, you're brand new to the market. If you've got, let's say you have a million customers for your product, you're shipping enterprise, you're shipping office, right? Microsoft office and you've got 100 million users. You're going to have a good idea that if you put a feature out, how many users might end up using this based on other metrics that you have, right? So maybe you have experience with office because you've been working there for 10 years and you know, hey, if I put out an eraser tool, you know, 3% of customer support queries are about needing an eraser tool, right? That might give me a good idea offhand that of the 100 million users we'll start with 1,000 and by, you know, year five, at least half of everyone is going to be using that. So that's 50 million users, right? And so you can work back.  But then you go and run some experiments to really figure it out, right? This is supposed to be quick. Let's just do a quick rough justice estimate on this and then go and ask the, you know, data analysis team, hey dudes, how many people are using the delete function for our documents or whatever, you know, whatever makes sense for that to try to figure that out. And that's one of the reasons you want to write the experiments. That was my follow-up question then, then how would you test it? And so you're saying, test the year one, but the other year it's just kind of the system. That's going to be the best year. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.  This whole thing is not real numbers. You're not going to have, it could be much more, it could be much less. This is a guesstimate. As long as you're guesstimating using roughly the same methodology for guesstimating across all your products, then this is going to be a relative number, which is what you're looking for. You're looking to have relative comparisons between these different features and products. But those numbers get better and better over time, and if your product has been on the market for four or five years, you can get a curve. Like you'd be like, oh, okay, well, I'm Evernote, I put out a feature every six months or three months. Every time I put a feature out, the curve keeps going like this. So if we, you know, you can, you can basically use that as a data point to figure out, you know, how many people are going to use this thing? More difficult in the startup situation. Any other questions? Yes. What's your recommendation on the best approach for getting buy-in for this kind of product evaluation process? To use it. No, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So the best way to get people to use something like this is to lead by example. We did a lot of work trying to evangelize this to the other teams, and some teams picked it up and some teams didn't, but we just started using it because it was useful for us. And then we started publishing these result docs and people were like, oh, that sounds pretty cool. Maybe we should frame some of our things as experiments. And so it picks up over time. Large organizations are very difficult to influence with regards to processes. Every team has got a different process, different technology stack they like to use, et cetera.  All my experience, I've never seen one that actually works. You know, teams should typically pick up this and that. So that's why I said earlier, out of all of this stuff, right, even, I think there's this slide at the end, I don't know, out of whatever. Out of all of those things, if you took away one thing, maybe it's the sheet or maybe it's like, hey, we're going to frame some of our things as experiments. That's a win, right? Like, if you have some new ideas about how to prove out whether a feature is worth doing or not based on this conversation, that's great. You know, or, so just lead by example, you know, pick stuff out of here. The product school teaches a bunch of cool stuff like about, you know, how to frame, how to select what features to go work on next, et cetera. There's lots of frameworks out there. This is what we found worked for us. It may not work for the next company, I don't know. You know, I like the way it works, but the next company I go into may have their own way of doing things and maybe I can pull one thing out of this, right? Sometimes you'll find companies don't have jack. They're just running around like headless freaking chickens and I've been, I was the first product manager in a company that was exactly that. There was a development, a developer, a hundred person developer, maybe one PM and with, you know, without a lot of like discipline and coming in there and bringing in some tools like made people really happy.  Like I'm not going to develop a feature unless you give me that PRD or the burned down list for what I need to build. Whereas before they would just go build whatever they want. So take what you can, influence as many people as you can and if you're lucky, they'll listen. In your experience in your career, is a new idea generation generally or PMs do a lot of that for the new features or is it generally like someone higher up and CEO saying, hey, like, I want you to do this and then like tell us, like, then you figure out like, you know, the game point. I mean, as a PM, you've got ideas coming from everywhere. Sometimes they're your own. You're going to build your own company. It's probably sometimes the seed has come from you or you've observed your girlfriend, you know, like struggling with something or whatever, you know, like you've seen a human problem that needs a solution and you think there's a business behind it. In a big company or actually, not in a big company, in a startup when you go in as a PM, you would have had a CEO typically who's, you know, product oriented and they wanted something that they want to build and they're going to have a bunch of ideas and they're going to give them all to you and you're going to have to go figure out which ones are worth building and which ones are not worth building. You also have, you know, if you have a customer already, that customer is going to be asking for stuff or your customers will be asking for stuff. So there's a lot of different inputs coming in. You know, the idea generation could come from the data. You've collected data.  We're spending all this time on search.  Or should we fix it? If we should fix it, what is the problem with it, right? Like this, you've got to look at each of your features that are there, maybe with the data and see, oh, okay. Maybe we need to fix this, maybe we're not. You can decide what you need to fix by figuring out what your success metric on your company is. So if your company just released this product, they probably really want to focus on acquisition, right? Because they probably don't have any customers yet or they've spent freaking a million bucks on advertising and they're not getting customers in. Why? You know, you can go figure that out and help them fix it. That's part of the value you bring to the table, right? So another success metric, if you've got enough customers coming in, you've got this great funnel, millions of customers are pouring in, might be how do you keep them, right? This, you know, we're finding that this huge funnel we made and we spent three million bucks on because we'd run a Super Bowl ad, drove all these customers in and no one's coming back, right? It turns out that they're logging in because you've got a quick Facebook OAuth, and they can do that, but there's how many pages are they going to, how many clicks have they done per page, how much time have they spent on each page? Go look at that, Google Analytics or whatever. If you haven't instrumented it, go instrument it. And then you can sort of start figuring out, okay, if we want customers to be happy when they come, right now it doesn't seem like they're happy, then we want to focus on how to make them happy. A great, smooth onboarding experience.


The study examined the effects of two-seed priming molecules, salicylic acid, SA, and hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, on enhancing the salt tolerance in lentil seeds during germination. Salt stress decreased germination percentage and primary root elongation, which was associated with increased lipid peroxidation and total lipid content in embryonic axis. The activities of catalase, guiacol peroxidase, and superoxide dismutase remained unchanged or decreased under salt stress. Seed priming treatments effectively alleviated the negative effects of salt stress by triggering the activities of GPOX and CAT, reducing lipid peroxidation and activating enzymatic antioxidative defense system. The results confirmed the potential for using SA and H2O2 to improve germination and plant growth under salt stress conditions. This article was authored by Amal Boalik, Fatmasui Si Somnowary, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Felly, we are going to begin with general questions, and our first question is from Angus MacDonald. To ask the Scottish Government what percentage of businesses and domestic properties in the Falkirk East constituency can access superfast broadband and what percentage are connected. Minister Paul Wheelhouse. Independent broadband analysis site, think broadband, states that 96.6 per cent of all premises in the Falkirk council area are able to access superfast broadband speeds of 30 megabits per second, or better. The latest off-com figures from December 2018 for the Falkirk East constituency show that 89 per cent of all small and medium-sized enterprise premises and 96 per cent of domestic premises have access to superfast broadband of 30 megabits per second and above. Off-com figures also suggest that 62 per cent of all lines in the Falkirk council area have an active fixed broadband connection in excess of 30 megabits per second. That information is not available at the constituency level. I thank the minister for that answer. The Scottish Government deserves full credit for providing superfast broadband to communities who would have fallen behind had it been left to the UK Government to get their act together. Despite the success, however, rural communities within my constituency, particularly in Avonbridge, have faced severe delays and are still without access to the superfast network. Around 12 properties face the prospect of having to wait for our 100, including businesses who are reliant on the best broadband available, having originally been advised that superfast broadband would be available to them some two years ago or more. Those issues have been compounded by a lack of communication from contractors, misinformation from project literature and websites causing frustration, confusion and anger in those communities who feel that they have been left high and dry while other communities are very close by surgeon to the digital future. Can the minister therefore provide reassurance that our 100 will learn from the issues faced in rolling out the DSSB programme, ensuring that better, more effective community engagement is at the heart of the R100 programme? First, I recognise, especially given the applause from the Conservative benches, that broadband matters, as all telecoms, are reserved to the UK ministers. As Mr MacDonald knows, we are very much recognising that—indeed, the member wants to ask a question in his parliament, I will certainly answer it—Mr MacDonald will recognise that the issues that he raises in respect of his constituents are ones that we very much acknowledge. We are certainly unhappy to hear that members of Mr MacDonald's constituency have been led to believe that they are going to get superfast broadband and have not had that. There are a number of complexities around the interaction between the commercial investment plans of operators and the public-sponsored projects such as DSSB, which we are very proud of, in terms of those state interventions such as the Scottish Digital Scotland superfast broadband programme, not being able to intervene where there are commercial plans. That means that there is some interaction between the two programmes of commercial investment and the publicly funded investment, and that can present some difficulties in understanding exactly which properties are going to be covered. As the member knows, we have committed to a 600 million programme under R100, which I hope will deal with the properties in Mr MacDonald's constituency, but if he would like to let me know which ones they are, I can give a more definitive answer. I reassure him that we have learned very much from the DSSB process and are trying to avoid some of the communication difficulties that he describes and make sure that we work very much from the start of R100 to try to give as much clarity as we can to communities about when services will be delivered in their area. To ask the Scottish Government what action it has taken to raise awareness of the Apologies Scotland Act 2016, since it came into force on 19 June 2017. The Scottish Government expects public bodies and other organisations to be aware of the current legislative framework and to update its procedures and guidance accordingly. The Scottish Government did not commit to issuing general guidance on the basis that to do so would risk interpreting the law, and that is obviously the job of the courts. Given that the act is not retrospective and applies only to legal proceedings commenced after 19 June 2017, it may be premature to look for any practical content that courts may have added to the legislation. I thank the minister for that reply. Will she consider launching an information media campaign possibly to be done using the Government's digital presence, Facebook, etc. Targeted at solicitors, local government, businesses and the general public to raise awareness about the act, and if so, will she initiate research on the uptake before and after the campaign to establish its effectiveness? I thank the minister for raising that point. The member for raising that point and I can see where the member is driving with that is more of a guidance of more of a general nature rather than particularly of a legal nature. The Scottish Government is working closely with the interaction action plan review group, and it is anticipated that they will consider reparations, including apology, acknowledgement, support and commemoration this year and next. That is likely to include consideration of how information about the Apologies Scotland Act 2016 and its benefits can best be communicated. I will take the member's point about a media campaign and so on, and I will look at that. I will come back to the member once I have considered it. To ask the Scottish Government, in light of the comments in its China engagement strategy regarding respect for human rights and the role of law, what discussions it has had with the Chinese consulate regarding the recent protests in Hong Kong? The recent protests show the strength of feeling among the people of Hong Kong who have exercised their rights to freedom of speech and assembly, as guaranteed in the joint declaration. The Minister for Trade, Investment and Innovation discussed the protests in Hong Kong with the Chinese consulate general at a recent engagement. He has since written to the consulate general outlining the Scottish Government's position that it is vital that Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy and the rights and freedoms set down in the final British joint declaration are respected in full. I welcome the cabinet secretary's remarks on the fact that the Scottish Government minister has engaged with the Chinese consulate on this. Two million people out of a population of seven million in Hong Kong came out to protest and were yet again met with battens and tear gas by their own police force. That tear gas was manufactured by a company called Kemmering, based in the UK, and in receipt of hundreds of thousands of pounds of money and enterprise grants from the Scottish Government. Given that the first minister has previously confirmed in this chamber that the Scottish Government is interested in helping arms dealers to transition into what was described as the blue light sector, i.e. the equipping of police forces, could the cabinet secretary confirm if supplying, if funding the companies that are arming police forces like those in Hong Kong is part of what the Government had in mind? If so, how on earth is that compatible with this Government's commitment to human rights? The plant at Stevenson does not produce tear gas. A grant of 160,000 was given to Kemmering in 2013 to help to modernise the company's site at Stevenson in North Ayrshire, helping to secure 13 permanent full-time jobs at the site. 4. Michelle Ballantyne Thank you. To ask the Scottish Government what progress has been made with the inquiry into the Queen Elizabeth University hospital. Since their appointment, the co-chairs of the independent review have consulted extensively with experts on the established systems for stakeholder contact. In line with the Britain report recommendations at a meeting today, they will publicly present the preliminary terms of reference and ask for feedback, and they will consult on those. They will also formally seek submissions of evidence and launch the review's website and contact details. That is all important because it is critical that a wide range of views and information is considered. Michelle Ballantyne I thank that cabinet secretary for that answer, but given that on the 9 of July next month, the Royal Sick Kids in Edinburgh is due to open, and given that it shares the same design concept and is being built by the same contractors, can the cabinet secretary tell me if she has received assurance that the same issues will not be experienced? As Ms Ballantyne I am sure will know, it is certainly a reply that I have given before in this chamber. NHS Lothian for the Royal Sick Kids in Edinburgh and other boards where we have new buildings, for example, in Orkney, were all tasked with making sure that they had the proper assurance from the immediate lessons that we had learned with respect to Queen Elizabeth University hospital in terms of air ventilation and water supply and the use of, for example, sinks, that they had applied that in terms of the design and the construction. We have that assurance and, indeed, that was one part of the reason why NHS Lothian did not take ownership of the site until it was absolutely assured that those steps had been put in place. The Queen Elizabeth University hospital is one of Europe's largest, with 1,100 patient rooms, 14 floors high and built on the site of the southern general. Why is that acceptable for Glasgow, but it is not acceptable for our hospital in Monkland, in which the cabinet secretary has just slapped a closed order on this morning? What a pity that Ms Smith did not actually read the answer to that GIQ that was issued this morning. I have not slapped a closed order on Monkland's hospital. What I have repeated is this Government's commitment, absolute commitment to source a replacement for Monkland's hospital. What I have ruled out is making that replacement on the current site. For a number of reasons set out in that GIQ, but let me give you some of them. There is no room around the existing hospital to build a new hospital. To build a new hospital on that site would require the demolition of the current hospital. The current hospital's capacity could not be picked up in the rest of Lanarkshire, therefore patients would wait longer for the treatment that they need. I am sure that, if that happened, Ms Smith would be first on her feet to criticise that. There is also an issue of patient safety if she constructs a new build alongside an operating hospital in that proximity. That is the case. What I have done is required NHS Lanarkshire to ensure that their consultation on a range of options, including making sure that new options that have come forward in the most recent period, are included. That consultation is, from the very beginning, one that involves the local communities that the Monkland's hospital serves, that ensures that the design that the clinicians have so well led for a new hospital continues to be applied in any new build, and that they take forward all of that with some speed, but making sure that local communities' voices are well heard and that they are part of the decision making before it comes to me. Those are the facts, Presiding Officer, and yet again I would appreciate if Scottish Labour would stick to the facts instead of making it up as they go along. To ask the Scottish Government how it plans to maintain Scotland's participation in the European digital single market, which is estimated to be worth £400 billion, in light of the UK Government's reported intention to withdraw from it. I recognise the value of access to the digital single market with tech. Already a fast-growing sector in Scotland would be a deep shame that Scotland misses out on the emerging opportunities of being part of the European single digital market. Brexit will have a detrimental impact on Scotland's digital businesses as they face increasing trade costs if the UK and EU legislation diverge. Willie Coffey. I thank the minister for that answer. The situation with the digital single market is akin to a luxury £400 billion cruise liner sailing off into the sunset, and the UK is sitting in a tugboat at the jetty wondering whether to try and follow it or not. One minute, the UK was fully behind in leading the plan and the next we are waving goodbye to it, to the horror of IT companies right across Europe. If we do not follow, then roaming charges will be back. Shared digital services and access to IT procurement contracts will be seriously restricted. Will the minister give us some assurance that Scotland's reputation for world-class IT innovation and developments will be protected and that we will seek to maintain our links with Europe as the market develops in the future? Minister Kate Forbes. That is why the Scottish Government put forward a comprehensive set of positions for us to remain part of the digital single market. We have engaged with the Governments across EU member states, and despite Mr Hunt's recent interventions, we will continue to engage strategically with our European partners. As Scots head off on holiday and perhaps some people in this chamber as well to EU countries, we will benefit from surcharge-free roaming. In a no-deal scenario, that would no longer be guaranteed, so we cannot have an outcome of EU exit that puts Scottish citizens and businesses at a disadvantage as we are just beginning to reap the benefits of a fast-going tech sector. To ask the Scottish Government what its position is on SIPA classifying the seawater at Fisherow in Musselborough as poor in 2018-19 and the potential impact that this has on tourism and the health of people bathing in the area. The Scottish Government recognises the importance of good bathing water quality for bathing and tourism, and any poor classification is unacceptable and must improve. Together with SIPA and Scottish Water, the Scottish Government is taking all possible steps to raise bathing water quality. That includes public sewer network improvements and fixing property misconnections. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response. What further specifically can the Scottish Government do to help East Lothian Council manage the situation and is there a time frame to completion? The Scottish Government has provided £340,000 to fund a joint programme of intense sewer investigation for Fisherow and Portobello to identify and fix sources of pollution from property misconnections. Scottish Water is also carrying out improvements to the sewer network. The Scottish Government and SIPA provide support for East Lothian Council through the Edinburgh and Lothian's Bathing Waters stakeholder partnership group, and the Government-funded Keep Scotland Beautiful My Beach Your Beach initiative provides support to East Lothian Council to reduce the impact from litter, dogs and gulls on Fisherow sands. To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to tackle animal cruelty. The Scottish Government is committed to the highest possible animal welfare standards, and we are taking forward legislation on animal sanctuaries and the breeding and sale of dogs, cats and rabbits and licensing of pet shops. We expect to announce in September the timing of that legislation to increase the penalties for cruelty offences and to allow animals seized to protect their welfare to be quickly re-homed. We are planning a follow-up public awareness campaign on the risks of buying puppies, and we are also working to establish an animal welfare commission to provide expert advice on future issues. Annabelle Ewing I thank the minister for her answer and the minister will be aware of the increasing calls indeed for a five-year maximum sentence to be available for the most serious cases of animal cruelty as opposed to the current maximum of 12 months. Can the minister confirm that she is indeed sympathetic to those calls and that in the legislation that she is referring to that will be a provision that will be part of that bill? Minister Marie Gougeon I can confirm that. The proposals for increasing the maximum sentence for the worst cases of animal cruelty, including the attacks on service animals, were consulted on as part of the Scottish Government's commitment to amend the Animal Health and Welfare Act 2006. We published the responses to that consultation on 10 May and the analysis of those responses will soon be published as well. We expect to be able to make an announcement about the timing of that legislation in the approved and for government in September. Peter Chapman To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the use of patrol boats at Rockwall in response to Irish fishing vessels. Marine Scotland continues to monitor and gather evidence regarding fishing activity at Rockwall. However, we do not discuss specific details on the deployment of surveillance assets. Our aim is to resolve the issue through discussions with the Irish Government. Peter Chapman I thank the minister for that answer, but I am disappointed by it. We have seen a major increase in Irish fishing vessels within the 12-mile limit around Rockwall from 15 incursions in 2014 to 94 in 2017. Even two Irish international maritime law experts agree that that is illegal and should be stopped. What enforcement action has been taken? Have any Irish vessels been boarded and checked? If not, why not? As I said, we continue to monitor the situation. I am not going to discuss the specifics of deployment of surveillance assets, but it is important that we address the issue as we have been doing for some time. Indeed, the figures that he has quoted are the figures that I proactively gave this chamber when I answered a previous question. 9. Jeremy Balfour To the officer's government, what analysis for transport secretary has carried out regarding how the proposed workplace parking levy could affect disabled people's access and employment? The Scottish Government has not carried out this analysis. The Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee agreed John Finnie MSP's amendments to the Transport Scotland Bill on workplace parking levies on 19 June. Those amendments include a national exemption for blue badge holders and are a requirement for any local authorities that choose to develop a workplace parking levy proposal to carry out impact assessments. I thank the minister for his answer, but would he recognise that many disabled people do not have blue badges? They have hidden disabilities, they have upper limb disabilities and they will be included in the tax. Will he stop and look again before that bad piece of legislation is passed? I certainly recognise Mr Balfour's concern, but we encourage people who think that they are eligible to apply for a blue badge to do so, and I encourage members to do that. Secondly, the charge is levied on the occupier, not individuals parking, and therefore it is for the employer to consider the needs of its employees. That is one of the variables in developing a scheme that would be, obviously, the decision of the local authority to take forward and that they undertake an impact assessment to make sure that they are taking account of the needs of disabled customers. To ask the Scottish Government when it last discussed maintenance of the Clyde tunnel with Glasgow City Council. The Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity, Michael Matheson MSP met with Glasgow City Council on 11 June to discuss a number of transportation issues that affect Glasgow, including the maintenance of the Clyde tunnel and its approaches. Thank the minister for that answer. The Clyde tunnel faces an annual funding shortfall of some £775,000. Major structural work is required to keep the tunnel open, which is used by 64,000 vehicles every day. What support is Transport Scotland offering to Glasgow City Council to ensure that the Clyde tunnel remains open and is safe? I very much recognise the strong interest in the issue. The Clyde tunnel and its approaches form part of the local road network. As such, responsibility for maintenance rests with Glasgow City Council. However, the cabinet secretary has instructed his officials at Transport Scotland to work with Glasgow City Council to explore the issues and costs associated with maintaining this important section of road.


In this presentation, we will allocate the net income in accordance with the partnership agreement. We will have a situation where we get to the end of the calculation where we will have to allocate negative amounts to the capital accounts. And that's something we want to watch out for and be careful of when we set up the partnership agreement. In other words, we're going to have the income split be based on one, just an allocation of salary type allocation to based on a capital investment. And then we'll allocate the rest in an even way. And when we do that final allocation, it's possible that we have over allocated based on these first two items and don't have enough income to cover that and then have to allocate basically a negative amount in that final position. And so that's what we want to be aware of and that's what we'll look at here. We'll do it in a table format and then we'll do the same thing with journal entries here and post that to the trial balance. So we will have our three partners, we're going to have CX and S are going to be our partners. We're going to say the net income, we'll take this from the trial balance over here if we scroll down is 50,000 in this case. That 50,000 calculated as revenue minus expenses is what we will then need to allocate to the partners. If we scroll back up, our trial balance consists of assets in green. We've got the liabilities in orange, then the capital accounts here in the light blue and the income and expense, the income statement accounts in the darker blue. Our goal here in essence to close out, it's kind of like the closing process, this 50,000 to the capital accounts in accordance with the profit sharing agreement. So if we scroll back over then we're going to say that the net income is that 50,000. I'm going to start over with the total being here and we're going to decrease this total by whatever the profit sharing agreement says to get to the allocation base at the end. So we're going to say 50,000 is the amount we're going to allocate of net income. Now the easiest way to allocate that to the partners would just have some kind of profit sharing agreement. If it was just a one-third, one-third, one-third, then that would be very simple. We can just allocate it one-third, one-third, one-third and we would be done. Many partnerships however are much more complicated or can be and that's one of the advantages of the partnership because it may be that one partner does a lot more for the business or another partner put a lot more money into the business and therefore it would seem logical to give a higher return on investments to those individuals and we have the flexibility to do that in a partnership. Many times when we teach partnerships a lot of people think that no matter what it should be a one-third distribution because all partners are equal and it should all be fair one-third but clearly there's going to be circumstances when everything isn't equal in terms of contributions who put in more money into the partnership and in terms of time who's spending more time in the partnership and that's okay. If someone spends more time than another partner that's okay then all we need to do is make sure that everybody's happy by balancing that out with whatever the partnership agreement is in terms of who gets most of the revenue and as long as everybody's happy with those two negotiations some person can put in more money another person could put in more time and we can allocate in accordance with what we believe is fair to all partners and hopefully everybody can be happy even though everything is not entirely equal in terms of distribution equal in terms in a way it's equal in terms of what's right in terms of the distribution in accordance with the partnership agreement in any case. We're going to have a salary distribution it's often called a salary distribution note that the salary distribution is not having anything to do with payroll it's just a fixed distribution of this 50,000 because it's fixed it's kind of like a salary so we're just going to take that out of this $50,000 amount the salary amount. This is usually used in book problems the salary type contribution for someone that works more in the company someone spends more time in the company we might say okay we're going to give you a guaranteed amount of the distribution of net income because of your time spent there and that's often the rationale and the reason for like just this this fixed amount that we would allocate before the rest of net income so we're just going to say that CX and S according to the partnership agreement had 4,000, 3,000 and 8,000 respectively for that allocation amount we add those up then that adds up to 15,000 so let's do that here in F6 we're going to say equals SUM double click the sum function highlight the 4, 3 and 8 to give us that 15,000 so we're then going to do the subtraction problem see how much we have left this is our first allocation base we had 50,000 before we allocated out 15 so the difference equals the 50,000 minus the 15,000 or 35,000 so then the 35,000 is what we have now we're also going to say that the capital account we're going to allocate an amount to the owners in accordance with their capital account at the beginning of the time period at 10% of their capital account and this is another thing that's pretty common a way that we can try to give more benefit to people that put more money into the partnership in other words if we need money of course in the partnership to get going especially in those beginning years and in order to incentivize the partners to put more money in and leave it into the partnership rather than take it out and put in investments or something like that we can give a return on the initial investment we will get these amounts from the capital account so if we scroll back over here and we pick up these capital accounts this is usually what the capital account was at the beginning of the time period because any withdrawals we had we recorded in a separate withdrawals account so it could be possible that someone put more money in and we would have to check that with on the general ledger to see if this is not indeed the beginning balance what we don't want to have happen is for a partner to try to put money in at the end of the partnership and then and then get more distribution just because they put money in the partnership at the end of the year so words and when the partnership agreement was at the beginning of the year but I normally this capital account if there was no investment is the partnership amount as of the beginning of the year so we're going to use that for our allocation percent so for see then we're going to say this equals the 144,000 times point one or ten percent for x we're going to say that this equals 216,000 times point one or ten percent and then for s we're going to say this equals 120 I know I'm just picking these up over here thousand times point one or ten percent so it's an allocate it's it's a distribution that we just came up with within the partnership agreement which is agreed that we're going to pay 10% based on the beginning capital accounts of net income now note that that adds up to 48,000 and we only had 35,000 to allocate of net income remaining so if we add this up with some function in F8 equals SUM of these three fourteen four twenty one six and twelve thousand we get 48,000 now if we subtract these out we only had 35 left so we're going to end up with a negative number that's the problem so we're going to say this equals the 35,000 minus the 48,000 now we have a negative 13,000 because we overallocate it we overallocated the money the net income we only have 15 and we allocated more than 15 by 13,000 more than the 15 so now we're going to have to allocate the rest in accordance with what we say the profit sharing agreement is at the end which we're saying it's going to be an even allocation so that means that we're going to have to take this 13 and allocate it evenly which could really be a consequence that would be unusual to the partnership I mean the partnership may not have expected that so we want to make sure that the partners understand that if we don't clear whatever the balance is to cover these two restrictions then the remaining amount will be distributed evenly between the partnership which could be kind of counter productive in some ways because when we allocate the net income in this format we're trying to allocate the people that put more money in so for example this this guy this KX's capital account went we allocated 21,602 X because X put more money in and therefore help the business supposedly more by having more capital investment so we allocate more of the net income earned by the company to X but then if we have to allocate this loss evenly then we're losing kind of that that distribution that we tried to make proportional to the contribution of the partners so we just got to be careful that when we have a loss we want to note what we're going to do in that case we could put some other kind of clause into our partnership agreement like what happens when a case like this happens or what happens when the company has has a loss what are we going to do in those cases but something to be aware of so we're just going to take this and we're going to have to allocate it on a one-third by one-third basis which is going to reduce the capital accounts so we'll do that by just saying this equals to 13,000 divided by 3 tab do the same thing here this equals 13,000 divided by 3 tab and one more time this equals 13,000 divided by 3 tab and then we'll just sum this up equals the sum of these three and there we have it now it should bring us down to zero so now we're just going to add these up the 4,000 plus the 14,4 plus the 4 minus the 4,333 4C should give us the amount of the original 50,000 we're going to allocate to C of net income so we'll go ahead and equals SUM double-click the sum function and highlight all those 4,000 plus 14,4 minus 4,333 gives 14,067 we'll do the same for X equals SUM double-click the sum function highlight that entire column and tab 20,267 allocated to X and then S equals the SUM we'll double-click the sum function and add that up giving 15,667 if we add these up it should come out to 50,000 so equals the SUM of these three there's our 50,000 so now we've allocated this 50,000 out between CX and S 14,067 20,267 15,067 respectively now we'll do the same thing we'll allocate that out in terms of our journals and we won't do the same thing we've got the calculation now now we're going to allocate that with journal entries to our trial balance so we've got the net income here and we're going to close this out now this is really just kind of a closing process that we will go through here and then allocate this out so we want to go to the normal closing process we would see with any type of business whether it be a sole proprietor or a corporation or a partnership and then the last component of it will be that allocation and that's what will differ between the three types of businesses so let's start this out the part that would be the same for a partnership or a sole proprietorship or a corporation would be we'll close out the sales or the revenue and then the expenses so sales has 120,000 in it we're gonna do the opposite thing to it to make it go down which will be a debit so we'll copy the sales right click and copy we'll put that up top in h5 right click and paste 1 2 3 the amount will be this 120,000 we're gonna credit something for that same 120,000 I'm gonna do that with a negative of this number we could just type in negative 120,000 but I like to use that little formula and then we're gonna put that to the income summary that's gonna be our temporary account it's a holding account used just in the closing process so we'll copy that right click and copy gonna put that in h6 right click and paste 1 2 3 then we'll indent that going to the home tab alignment increase indenting and then we can post this so we've got these sales up top it's gonna go to these sales down here we're gonna put that in in 16 where we will say equals and point to that 120 bringing the balance from 120 down by 120 to 0 then we have the income summary which will be posted to the income summary on the trial balance and in 15 where we say equals point to the 120 credit bringing the balance from 0 up by 120 to 120 next we're gonna close out the expenses in another journal entry cost of goods sold and wages are the only two that we're gonna have here in the example so we're just gonna copy these two these are debits so we're gonna do the opposite thing to them and credit them so we'll highlight those right click and copy scroll up and put this in H we'll skip a line we'll put them on the bottom in H9 right click and paste 1 2 3 I'm gonna indent that as well home tab alignment increase indenting and then we'll put the credits in J9 so we're gonna have just what's in there so 60,000 credit of 60,000 and then we had 10,000 in wages so we're gonna have a credit of 10,000 then we'll sum those up on the debit side and that'll give us our debit so we'll say negative SUM using kind of like a plug formula you could move this out of the way or go from the bottom of the top so you could just move this if you want to highlight these and then enter so of course the 60 and the 10 equals the 70 debit that we need now that's gonna go to the income summary account the clearing account again so we'll right click and copy put that up top in H8 right click and paste 1 2 3 and there we have that now we'll post this one so the income summary has something in it so we'll double click on it go to the end of it say plus and point to that 70,000 and enter and then in cell in 417 we're gonna say equals and point to that 60,000 bringing the 60,000 down by 60,000 to zero and then in in 18 we'll say equals and point to that 10,000 bringing the 10,000 down balance down by 10,000 to zero so now the income statement accounts are zero net income is now zero and the income summary has net income in it we need to do it's important to do that process I think because a lot of problems if you're looking at book problems we'll just start at the income summary they'll just say that income summary has $50,000 in it and now we need to allocate that out and we need to understand that that means that net income is an income summary and we're gonna allocate that out so it's helpful to go through the the closing process and actually see a trial balance to see what net income is and how the net income is now in the income summary now we're gonna take that and allocate that out to the partners this is kind of like just the end of the closing process very easy to do if it's a partnership or a corporation because we just allocated to the one capital accounts or the one retained earnings account but for a partnership we got to allocate it in accordance with profit sharing agreement which we came up with over here so we've already got our numbers now we're just gonna allocate this out so we're gonna debit the income summary we're gonna right click and copy that put that up top in h12 right click and paste 123 that will be for 50,000 and then we'll credit the capital accounts and now I'm gonna I'm gonna highlight them all at the same time I'm gonna put my cursor on C on L 9 C's capital hold down control and click the other capital account X's capital in L 11 and then the last capital in L 13 so they're all highlighted these are non-adjacent cells that are highlighted so we can do that at the same time let go of control then right click and copy and we don't have to do this this way we can copy and paste them one at a time too but it's a little bit faster and then we can right click and paste 123 so again it doesn't matter if we use formulas or if we copy and paste we could type it in here that would be just as well but that's useful to pick that up or it could be a little bit faster so now we're just gonna pick up these numbers the 14 67 the 20,000 267 and the 15 667 into J 13 14 and 15 we want to flip the sign however so instead of just saying equals I'm gonna put a negative instead of equals and put that 14,067 and enter and then for the next one we're just gonna say negative instead of equals the 20,000 267 and enter and then in the next one we're gonna say negative instead of equals this 15,067 and enter so now the 14 67 the 20,000 267 the 15 667 add up to the 50,000 the debits minus the credits add up to zero debits then equal the credits now we'll just post this out so the income summary is here on the journal entry it is here on the trial balance we're gonna be in the middle in in 15 double-click go to the end of it plus that 50,000 and enter that brings the balance down here here's C's capital we're gonna go up to C's capital up top will be in in nine equals and then we'll point to that 14,067 and enter and then we're gonna go to X capital which will be here in in 11 where we will say equals point to that 20,067 and enter and then we're in S's capital here's S's capital where we will say equals point to the 15 6667 and enter okay so now we're just left with the draws so that's really the last part of the closing process which we may as well finish up here so the draws were 18 38 and 24 respectively for C X and S so we're gonna do the same thing and just close those out so we're gonna close them out to the capital accounts and so all we're gonna if we net these two out we can see what it is it's it's 140 67 in other words we're gonna get rid of the 18 and include that 18 into the 158 67 resulting in a balance of 140,067 we'll do that for all the capital accounts so I'm gonna do the same little trick I'm gonna highlight C's capital hold down control X capital hold down control and S capital let go of control and then right click on those cells and copy and we'll put that in H 17 right click and paste 123 then we'll pick up the withholding's putting our cursor on the C's withholding hold down control X withholding hold down control and S withholding let go of control right click on the selected cells and copy and then we'll put that underneath in H 20 right click and paste 123 then I'm gonna indent that going to the home tab alignment and the increase indenting so that's gonna be our journal and it looks kind of intimidating looking journal entry but and we could do this one at a time like we could have just closed out the draws here to the capital account and then the draws and made three different journal entries but usually we will see this in one journal entry to close out draws and that that's an alignment with our closing process which basically is close out sales the four step process at least close out sales close out the expenses then close out the income summary then close out draws so we typically learn the closing process oftentimes with four steps with four journal entries when I go ahead and increase the indenting here to just keep it in format the home tab alignment increase indenting then we're just going to put the amounts so it's 18,000 for C 18,000 and 38,000 for X 38,000 and 24,000 for S now the capital accounts are going to be debited because it's going to bring those accounts down their normal credit balances we need to do the opposite thing to it to bring them down and then the withdrawals have debit balances we need to bring them to zero down to zero so we're going to do the opposite thing to them so I'm going to do that by just saying negative of this number negative of this number and negative of this number so we're just putting a negative or a credit for the same amounts for the related capital withdrawals accounts now let's post that out and we'll see if it does what we wanted to do what do we want it to do we want all these draws accounts to go to zero and we want these capital accounts to go down by those draws accounts and of course remain in balance once we're done so here's the capital account sees capital account here it is on the trial balance we're going to be in cell in nine double click go to the end of it plus point to that C capital account that 18,000 and enter so we'll do the same for maybe well we'll do the same for X here here's X's capital account here's X's capital account the trial balance we want to post it to in 11 something's in it we'll double click on it go to the end of it plus point to that 38,000 that'll bring this capital accounts down by the 38 then we'll go to SS capital account here here's SS capital account on the trial balance we want to be in the middle and in 13 double click go to the end of it plus and then point to that 27,000 bringing that balance down okay so now we'll post the other side to all the withdrawals which should make them go away so we're going to go to the withdrawals account for C and in 10 say equals point to that 18,000 bringing the 18,000 debit down in the credit direction to zero and then we're in in 12 where we will say equals point to that 38,000 bringing the 38,000 down balance down by 38 to zero and then we're in in 14 where we will say equals point to the 24,000 bringing the 24,000 balance down by 24,000 to zero so that's the result here we've got all income statement accounts now zero all temporary accounts also zero temporary accounts including the draws accounts which have been zeroed out we're left with a post closing trial balance for a partnership which means that we only have balance sheet accounts we've got the asset accounts the liabilities assets minus liabilities is 450,000 in this case that will equal equity the capital accounts which add up here to 450,000 the tricky part for a partnership as compared to a sole proprietor or corporation is that we got to break out this equity section by how much is owed to the partners


We've already set up a virtual network of five nodes using topology seven undervert net So those five nodes are running in Virtual box and we have this topology. We have a a browser on node one a web server for my uni the real my uni website on node four and We have a malicious user on node two using a browser and they have a web server on node five in this Demonstration we're going to do an SQL injection attack. So in fact, we only need a Single browser. So will we know to the malicious user and I'll access the my uni the real my uni website We don't need node five or node one in this case remembering the The access control of the my uni website means that a student user can only see their own grades So let's consider node two our malicious user In node two as the malicious user, we're going to access the grading website So we'll open that using links our web browser and we can log in and we're going to assume where the Student user s followed by seven zeros. So we'll type in the username our password we'll log in as as the malicious user and It logs in and We can view our own grades. So The system allows us to see the grades for COIT two oh two six two Okay, I can see my own grade now the challenge is to try to see another student's grade So another student is one two three four five six seven and when we try to do that And we see that it says you can only view your own grades So what we would like to do is defeat this security we can try With no course code. So still try to view this other students grades we can use no course code and Again, you can only view your own grades What can we do to try to View the grades of other students, well, we'll try eventually an SQL injection attack and To do that we need some knowledge of how the website or the web application works on the server So we're going to have a look at the server and the web pages we're going to the Directory for the web pages the grading system. We see that there's some PHP and HTML files that implement the grading system index login a query page is the page which We see when we type in our ID and course code. So it's a form and The form supports two fields two intro fields and a submit button and then when we submit we get the View page so let's look at the source code for those first looking at the source code for the query page and We'll briefly go through the main parts relevant to the attack We'll not explain all the PHP The query page the user is logged in This is the form code if you look closely, it's HTML and The action is when the submit submit button is press the the fields will be posted to the view dot PHP file so that's the submit button and There are two fields. There's a student ID and course code and they are given the post variable names ID and course so when a user posts that Those values are processed by the view PHP file. So let's see how that process is that so The two fields were submitted via post. So these lines of code Extract them and store in the variables are called ID and course. So anything submitted by the form is stored in ID and course so what the view page does if everything's normal is it will use the ID and course to do a query on a database a MySQL query and Get the student data and display it on the screen So Of course, you need to be logged in and query just for you if you're logged in a Steve You can see any students, but if you're logged in as a student user, you can own the ID Must match your logged in username. So that's the code that does that on the screen there Assuming that's the case. So where the ID we're searching for is the same as the student and we're logged in as If it's not if they don't match that you get the you can only view your own grades So if we try to search for another students grades, it will Not perform the SQL query. So we must use our logged in users ID And if we do here's the MySQL query So first we do a connection to the database and there's two cases There's if you have an empty course, it does one query where it doesn't continue consider the course and then the other for a full course So let's look and see An example and see what that looks like in the in the source code So we source search for our all zeros the malicious user and the course code to COIT 20262 and it shows us the grade With respect to the source code of view PHP what's happening Well, the course code was included so we consider this second query Where we select everything select star from the table Course grades and then the condition So normally we'd return all values But we place the condition that the student ID field must match their ID that we enter s followed by seven zeros in our example So that puts the condition only return the fields which with that student ID Meaning we cannot see other student IDs if we used a different student ID the the access control would not work and The course code is entered there. So essentially it runs a query on the database that returns every row which has a student ID and The corresponding course code and it orders them by a student ID That's the normal behavior and then the results are fetched and displayed on the screen. So that's For example, the grades are and the course and the grade Now What we want to do as the attacker we know that we cannot modify the student ID But so we want to try and attack where we submit in this case a different course code and Try and create a query such that we can see the the grades of other students What I'll do is run the query first and then we'll see how it works. So we're adding this extra values on the course code and You see the apostrophe or one equals one now we'll explain what that does in a moment, but of course we've got the malicious user student ID and Know what happens here. We see the grades of all students So here our attack has worked We not only see our grade, but we see the grades for the other students s one two three four five six seven So here we've performed an attack and defeated the security mechanisms of the system Why did this special course code? Allow our attack to work. So that's what we look at looking at okay, we submitted a course code and The way that application works is whatever is in the course field Whether it's a course code or as I'm long-streamed like we've used is replaced in the SQL query. So let's do that replacement and We have this COIT 20262 or one equals one And we just make some movies across so we can see all of it on the screen So now let's look closer at this SQL query We're a select everything from course grades where some conditions and though the way that we constructed that form field we now have three conditions and So student ID and course code or one equals one Now think of that from a logic perspective we The ants go together so we can think we have a Brackets around there. So the condition is student ID equals s zeros and Course code equals COIT 20262 or one equals one Now Because it's all one equals one. It doesn't matter what the first and Returns Which will return the fields for one. When does one equal one one equals one always. So in fact that always returns true so logically what we have is some condition or true and Some condition or true always returns true meaning Effectively this will return all rows in the course grades table We've created a query such that it's Returning all rows from the table and that's what we get in the result there are About ten ten rows in the table and they are all returned allowing the attacker to see this Data when they shouldn't be able to do so this structure of this form field is Specifically designed to take advantage of the floor in the system I'll leave it to you to to look out how to design the system to improve upon it and to Avoid such SQL ejection attacks