It is my assumption that the phrase needs no introduction applies here with Robert Pinsky. So with that in mind, I will not serve as an introducer, but instead as something perhaps of a character witness. I've worked with Robert for the better part of 15 years at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and he predates me there. And during that time, we've shared countless meals, swapped stories, exchanged enthusiasm and bafflements, and shared the podium for an evening reading. And as both participant and observer, I can confirm the following. Robert is generous, Robert is kind and attentive, and in any conversation, Robert is interested, curious, opinionated, and present. And his readings, always memorable, bring a mix of joy, intellect, and musicality, and all in a manner that somehow conjure a real-time paradox between the stentorium in the coliseum and the intimate whisper of a confidant in a small, private space. In Robert Pinsky, we have a poet who is fiercely committed to art, fiercely committed to believing in the best potentials of humanity, and in times such as these, when we need guidance and wisdom, perspective and clarity, truth and honesty, Robert is among the few we know we can turn to. As the pandemic overtook our lives, beginning our national confusion and personal disorientation, who didn't find solace in opening the Washington Post one mid-April morning to see Robert sitting in his home, giving voice and perspective to the fear and worries of isolation, telling us, heavy with longing in my mind is preferable to hollow. If I am heavy with longing, at least I still have some idea of what I want. And such is what we've come to expect in this writer. The search for and belief in the connective spirit of humanity, an argument for the link between intellect, body and spirit, and a constant call for life. Please welcome Robert Pinsky. Thank you so much, Adam. That is a beautiful introduction. If about 70% of it is true, I will be happy and self-congratulatory. I'm going to try to make what I do suit the necessity of doing this not in person, but virtually. So I'll tell you my plan. My plan is to read a few poems that I wrote a long time ago, and then I'm going to show you some videos that I hope very brief. A couple of one-minute videos, maybe another five-minute video, that will show what I think I'm doing when I write these things with ragged write typography and capital letters at the beginnings of lines. And then I'm hoping that would take maybe 20 minutes, 25 minutes. Then I'm hoping we'll have a kind of early Q&A, and I tend to welcome kind introductions. Adam quoted some lines from a poem. I'll start with the poem that Adam quoted from. The poem is called House Hour. There are a lot of people from different times of my life here tonight. There are two or three people I went to high school with, I'm happy to say. There's recent colleagues, and this poem is about a certain kind of neighborhood, like the neighborhood I grew up in. Multi-family houses, when I was deciding to move back to Boston from beautiful California, from Berkeley, I think my wife and I made the decision when we were in that kind of neighborhood here in Somerville, Mass. House Hour. Now the pale honey of a kitchen light burns in an upstairs window, the sash across, milky daylight moon, sky scored by foam lines, houses in rows, as patient as cows, dormers and gables of an immigrant street in the small city, the wind worn afternoon, shading into night. Hundreds of times before I have felt it in some district of shingle and downspout at just this hour, the renter walking home from the bus carrying a crisp bag. Maybe a store visible at the corner, neon at dusk, macaroni mist on the glass. Unwilled, seductive as music, wreath as dusk itself, the forgotten mirror brushed for dozens of years by the same gray light, the same shadows of soffit and beamon, a wreath of old snow glowing along the walk. If I am hallowed or if I am heavy with longing, the same. The same ponderous houses of siding, fur framing, horsehair plaster, fire bricks in a certain light, changing nothing, but touching those separate rooms of the past, those separate hours. And now, at this one time of day, touching this one, last spokes of light silvering the attic dust. I'll read a poem. I'll wet the instrument and then read a poem. I guess instrument is a little joke. But a thing I want to communicate to the students and others is that poetry is much more like singing and dancing. It's even much more like sports than some preconceptions. It's physical.  I've visited a school for the deaf. And there, it's what you do. The kids, when they read their poems, vocalized. But they also signed at the same time. It's all of the above, but it comes out of the body. This poem is the poem I chose to put first in this book, my selected poems. Rhyme, air and instrument of the tongue, the tongue and instrument of the body, the body and instrument of the spirit, the spirit of being of the air. Each bird, the medium of its song, each song a world, a containment, like a hotel room ready for us guests who inherit our compartment of time there. In the Joseph Cornell box among ephemera as its element, the preserved bird, a study in spontaneous elegy, the parrot, art, mortal in its cornered sphere. Each room stands a rung in a laddered filament, clambered by all us unsteady chambered voices that share it, each one reciting, I too was here. I too was here in a room, a rhyme, a song in the box, in books, each element and instrument, the body still straining to parrot the spirit of being of the air. Home is called Rhyme, I like to quote a very favorable review of the book that said, it's like Robert Pinsky to write a poem called Rhyme that doesn't rhyme. In fact, it does, tongue, instrument, body, spirit, air, song, containment, ready inherit there, among elements studied parrot, well, it doesn't really matter. But I guess it matters for what I'm trying to say tonight, which is that the sounds of language and that language and the art of poetry in particular is right at the juncture between the body and the mind. And the first one minute videos I'm going to show you are of babies. You're going to see a 10 week old baby, that young, the 10 week old baby. And I feel like you're seeing that they tell me there's the part of the brain that has to do with our social life and also with working our speech. And you can see how much he loves, how hard he's working and how much he likes that experience. So I'm going to share my screen now. And I think I first will show you the baby. And then I may immediately show you one of the videos I made at favoredpawn.org, which was an adult saying a poem that he didn't write. And then I think I'm going to invite questions. Then there'll be a really embarrassing silence if nobody has anything to say. And I may be forced to read other poems. But first, I will share screen. Then you want to have a conversation? And what date is it? Is it June 6th? Hi. Thank you. I think so. So you get that one last high. And I can't prove it to you mathematically, but when I see that face, I feel he's doing what is the appeal of the art of poetry and he's taking pleasure in it. The next is 18 months old, year and a half. And what I'm interested in, and again, is the pleasure, how much fun it is for the kid and how precisely he talks to bubble talk. He gets the rhythms and the exact consonants of the nonsense double talk he's hearing. He is an expert already at reproducing what he hears. Gu-ug-ug-gu-gu-gu-gu. Du-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu. Who were those? Ma-gu-waga. Ma-gu-waga do. Ma-gu-waga do. He's there. So Ma-gu-waga do is produced very, very accurately. And now these are the videos. there about five minutes each. And I'm gonna choose one where I think the guy speaks very convincingly. Here, I'll just let you see him read it. And then I'm gonna unshare screen and I'm gonna hope that either through chat or voice or some way, somebody's gonna respond to what I'm trying to say. And you all will let me know if I'm messing up the technology. I remember us very well, but I came from a really upset, and it's a date situation. I wanted to go out with this girl and I just ended up feeling very bad at the end of it. It just didn't work out the way I wanted it to. I just ended up feeling kind of lonely and graphed, I suppose. I came home and I opened this book and I read some of the poems. And up to that point, I think my sense of poetry was that it was always this grandiose, like a little better term, highfalutin, not very real way of using language. And I looked at this stuff and I could not believe it. It was light years beyond anything else I'd ever read. It was powerful, it was rough, it was bitter, it was caustic, and it was at the same time really urgent about a need for love. I was amazed that here's a woman who was from a very well-heeled New England existence. And the stuff that she really spoke to me, a man, a Jamaican immigrant, you could hardly get two people in the world more distant in terms of socioeconomic, intellectual, and religious realities. But she spoke to me, she spoke to me, she spoke, it seems directly to my life. And because of that, I have always loved her work. And I think in some ways, her work was sort of an entree for me into the larger world of art. And I think when I started looking at other poets and started looking at the world of visual art, it was because of class. I think that you can have deep, profound transformative experiences, but in a quiet setting. And I think actually the quiet setting, and I think of this in terms of my lighting, creating this kind of emotional hush. It's a place where you can, the viewers can come to and gain access to these other places. This is Nick and the Camel Stick by Sylvia Platt. I am a miner, the light burns blue. Waxy, stalactites drift and thicken tears. The earthen room exudes from its dead board of black bat airs rattling, baggy shawls, cold homicides. They well to me like plants. Old cable calcium icicles, old echo, even the noose away, those holy gills. And the fish, the fish, Christ, they are tings of ice, a vice of knives, a piranha religion drinking its first communion out of my live toes. The candle gulps and recovers its small altitude, its yellows heart. Oh, love, how did you get here?  The pain you wake to is not yours. Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses, with soft blood, the last of Victoriana. Let the stars plummet to their darker dress. Let the mercuric atoms that cripple drip into the terrible well.  I love this poem because it's crazy, because it's headlong, it's brutal, it goes all over the place and it does not proceed rationally. The first line is I am a miner and the light burns blue.  And what blue light, what are you talking about? And the last line is like this gift from the God. So, am I back here? The favorite poem project is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, fostering America's creativity and investing in our living cultural heritage. Did I fail to, are we back? Okay, I don't see myself, but if you can hear me and see me, we are well. Now, the technology makes it harder maybe to break the little shyness, but let's see if we can have a conversation. I promise that any question that people have, any remark you wanna make, I am going to treat it respectfully. Robert, there's a question already in the queue here. So, I will, others? Okay, Kyla, you're live. All right, hi, so my question for you today, I was wondering how you would describe that the relationship between poetry and emotion and why it is that you think poetry is so important and prominent in times of high emotion, such as our times that we're living in right now? I find poetry seems to become important to people at times of communal emotions. Anybody who writes poetry knows that your friends, when there's a funeral or a wedding, they say they have a poem to suggest funerals and weddings and now we have in the largest possible community a societal crisis and poetry gets important. The relation between poetry and art for me has to do with my feeling that emotion is there all the time. Thoughts are there all the time, all day long. It's rattling around in here. And I'm feeling sad, sexual, hungry, drowsy, bored, angry, pleased, amused, irritated, all at the same time. And swirling around in different proportions, something happens when an arrangement of vowels and consonants calms that down a little bit. There's a little bit less chatter on the roof of my brain. I'll give you my favorite super short example. It's a poem written, I guess 150 years ago by Walter Savage Landor, two-line poem. Here is the two-line poem of Landor. And I'm thinking about your question, Kyla. On love, on grief, on every human thing, time sprinkles leafy's water with his wing. On love, on grief, on every human thing, time sprinkles leafy's water with his wing. Speaking of babies, I've learned I can recite that or recite gates to an infant. It's like singing to the infant. The child is comforted. So even if I don't know what leafy is, I know it's what time sprinkles on everything. And not engulfs with sprinkles. My point is that like the baby learning how to say hi and very pleased that he comes close to saying hi, it's a physical experience. Three times at the beginning of that poem, I put my upper teeth on my lower lip. On love, on grief, on every human thing. Three times at the end, I purse my lips. Time sprinkles leafy's water with his wing. When Walter Savage Landor, a very rich upper class, great Latinist Englishman wrote that poem, my various ancestors were running away from Cossacks or selling the Cossacks liquor all around Poland in Bielorussia. None of them knew this language. But here I am, 150 years later, my lips and my teeth and my feelings as a result, I get to feel what it would feel like to need to say that about love and grief and everything. And what I would add to your question, Kyla, about emotion and poetry is that it has to do with that feeling of the baby liking to communicate with the voice that's looking down at him, speaking to him. Or liking to reproduce Agawaga Magadu. There is an interpersonal or social or erotic component of why we love the art of poetry. It's older than prose. It's deeply related to its sister, Song. And it goes very deep in us. It goes very far in. Thank you, yes. Okay, other questions? Robert, we have questions both for live questions and in the Q&A. Let me jump to the Q&A. We'll try to go back and forth. And this question comes from Thea Schiller. Says, I understand what you say about poems being our entire body. When I'm with my one and two-year-old grandchildren of two and two, one and two slash two-year-old grandson, he points to a squirrel and says, Agawaga, as if he is the first person to see a squirrel. And for me, it is our position as poets to say, look, look, this is what I am seeing. And I want you to see it too. What do you think about this? I think the one or two-year-old has seen a lot of language. He's seen a lot of people around him using language to say what they're seeing. And if the best he can do is Agawaga, he's happy with it. This is very much like singing, dancing, sports. I'll insert the sad fact that we have to be taught that we don't like poetry. The way somebody has to teach you, people say, I can't dance. I don't know how to dance.   And you have to be taught. All the little kids like to run after the ball. Somebody has to teach you, oh no, Adam is good at sports. You aren't. And then you say, oh, I can't play ball. This is one of the prices we pay for civilization. And I earn my bread as a teacher, have most of my life. And sometimes we do harm, we try not to. So that one-year-old, two-year-old, it's not that he's, it's not simply that he's the first person ever to see a squirrel. He's imitating all the times he's seen anybody point to anything and say, look, it's a tractor or it's kind of dangerous or it makes me think or it's a cantaloupe. He's used to these grunts that we have evolved to be very, very communicative. Thank you, Robert. We have a question now from Carol Peters who is live to talk. I'm listening, Carol. Hi, hello from Spokane. When you were doing your reading at Gonzaga, you had a little jazz combo with you. Is that something that you do often? Whenever I get a chance, there are two CDs with the great pianist Lawrence Hubgood. I did a CD called Palm Jazz, a one called House Hour. I started off wanting to be a musician. And for me, they're, as I already said, it's so much like song, I am a non-singing vocalist. I have worked, I did a show with Bruce Springsteen in, it's fairly Dickinson in New Jersey. I have worked with an Irish band. If any musicians are willing to try to improvise together, I am eager and glad to do it. And I always try to make it actually musical. They're not accompanying me. We were listening to one another and we're trying to make it one performance. And I remember it was a piano player named Seals. I think it's Mark Seals. He was wonderful. That's quite a while ago, I think, that we did that at Gonzaga. So the answer to that is yes, explanation, Mark. Thank you. Pleasure, Carol. I'm happy to read some more stuff at this point. We've got a couple more questions. Let's do that and then we'll do a finish with some poetry. Okay, let's do that. I'm gonna jump ahead to, because there's a question from Harvey here that is related to what you're saying. And that is, has your poetry been set to music by anyone that you're aware of? Quite a lot. The wonderful composer Ezra Laderman is quite a few of my poems. It's often been done. I wrote the libretto for an opera by Todd McOver that was premiered at the Loparad de Monte Carlo who's performed here in Boston and Texas and California. It's a different art. I'm much more confident when I'm reading things I've written or that someone else has written with musicians than when I'm trying to write something for a musician. Famous dialogue between Stéphane Malarmé and his friend. You can see the composer says after the performance of La Crémi d'une phone, he says, my friend, Stéphane, how did it feel to hear your poem set to music? And that bastard Malarmé says, I won't attempt it in French, but he says, that's what I thought I was doing when I wrote it. So there's the music one has written into it. So yeah, my work has been set to music and I appreciate it. I'm very proud of it. But for me, I'm not such a hot songwriter. It's different. It's a different art. So Robert, there are three more questions currently. Do you wanna read and come back to questions or do you wanna? People have to say. Okay. We have Jillian Damiani who's a student here at Roger Williams. Hi. So, Jillian. Hi. So my question was, you discussed how art and crises are interconnected. Do you think without crises, we would have no good art? And do you think that? You're talking a little fast for me. Without? Do you think without crises, we would have no good art? And do you think we'll have a kind of renaissance post-pandemic? Yeah. Everything kinetic. It's always something is rolling downhill. There's always something happening. Drama began with religious plays on the steps of churches and it turned out the most popular parts were when the devil would come out.  Something is always going wrong in my experience. Something is always not right. So the crisis in a social level brings out the craving for art. But what do we do all day? We play video games. We watch videos. We read. Our hunger for art is so deep in the animal that there's always some form of crisis. If there isn't one, we invent one. If I win a prize, then I think, oh, now I've won a prize. Everyone would be paying attention to me and they will say, what are you gonna do next? You won a prize. What now? So the happiest thing in the world, there's always some next step. Even in love. Baudelaire says in his prose poem about love, there's always a changing degree to which one person is the surgeon, the other is the patient. One person is the tormentor, the other is tormented. So, yes, Gillian, I think there is a kind of a curve, especially a communal one. And there's always gonna be an appetite for art. It's always gonna be inspired by one kind of personal or general crisis and it will never be completely filled. We always want more. Thank you. Okay, Robert, this question comes from Susan Kasent. It says, Rhyme was such a beautiful journey of rhyme words, blocking and tumbling over one another and changing along the way. Could you speak about the power of repetition and poetry in expression in the world at large, perhaps especially now? My wife is writing a psychoanalytic piece based on Freud's, I think it's called repeating repetition and working through. It's a basic thing, is repetition. It can be a curse and it can be a blessed relief. All poetry rhymes, it isn't always in rhyme. With my poem, I said, among song, the rhymes are sort of hidden. It isn't always that you got a rhyme because it's in time to do what you need whenever you bleed. But one of my examples of this is William Carlos Williams' poem about the roofers. Now they're resting in the fleckless light separately and in unison, like the sacks of sisted stones stacked regularly about the flat roof, ready after lunch to be opened and strewn. The copper and eight-foot strips has been beaten lengthwise at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping. One still chewing picks up a copper strip and runs his eye along it. In a conversation with my students at BU, the MFA program this week, I presented that poem as an example of rhyme in unrhymed poetry. Now they're resting separately, now they're resting in the fleckless light separately. It's in the key of eh, in unison, in unison, like the sacks of sisted stones stacked regularly about the flat roof, ready after lunch to be opened and strewn. And I'm exaggerating the words to show how repetition of like sounds is at the heart of poetry. The best prose writers do it a lot too. If you pick up Adam's writing, you will find repetitions of syntax, you'll find repetitions of sound, and the degree and kind of like and unlike sounds is always varying, it's always different, and you can never predict how a master's gonna do it. Emily Dickinson turned the hymn and the ballad inside out, and she made a new kind of music. Right, I've got three more questions here. Do you wanna take these last three, Robert, and then finish with some reading? Okay. So this comes from Rachel Dewoskin. I'm pronouncing it right. That plath reading was stunningly moving, especially in the context of your poems and the videos of baby speakers, their poems. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the favorite poem project, what it meant to you and to others, and why it is such connections like the one we saw in that reading, and why it is that such connections like the one we saw in that reading happened in such a particular way through poems. If anybody here has not read a novel or a book of poetry by Rachel Dewoskin, I urge you to recommend it highly. Honored to be asked the question by Rachel. That project, it fulfilled something that goes back to my childhood, where I grew up in a town where there are a lot of different ethnic groups mixed together. The part of it I lived in was not rich. My parents didn't go to college, but they were very good talkers, very good looking people, and they were part of a very aspirational, American attitude toward culture, founded largely in the American public school system. You'll find a lot of immigrants of the generation of my grandparents named their children things like Sydney, and Milton, and Herbert, because English lit and the English language was so important to them. And I wanted my Laurier project not to be preaching to people, not to be telling them poetry is good. It's good for you. You should like it. If you don't, you're bad. Instead, we desired one where you ask, not tell, ask people, do you have a poem that you love? And it was very quickly discovered that it was indeed had a lot to do. It had a lot to do with how it sounded. And as editor, I was glad to have poems by Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath and William Shakespeare. Not always my taste, my standards. And that goes back to Longbranch and growing up in whatever you want to call it, a working class or a lower middle class family that wanted the best. If poetry is a ruling class art, and if the ruling class in the democracy is supposed to be the people, then it should be the best. So those are some of the social attitudes behind the videos at favoritepoem.org. Great. Robert, I'm gonna just read all the remaining questions to you because some of this may cut. And then do a couple of poems, good. Yeah, because some of these may combine. So we have one of these two, a little bit more connected from Robert Powell and from Francisco, Oregon. And from Robert Powell, he says, I read Woodworth's Ode recently after not having read it for decades. I was floored by it in my 60s to the core and it was nothing to me in my 20s. There's clearly more than sound to poetry as important as it is. What can you say about that explosive combination of sound and sense? And then the question from Francisco, Oregon is, a quote, a poem is not a fully realized work of art until it's uttered aloud by someone other than the author. One quote, you said that 40 years ago to me at Berkeley. How did you come to this conviction? It's a wonderful poet. I have his new book of poems, Rubén Darío, is the, I forget the title, anyway. I came to that conclusion as an experience of giving poetry readings, partly trying not to be boring and realizing that poetry is in a way the most physical art. Dance is more physical, but it's an artist, it's a trained body. The poem gets under your skin. It's when someone else says it. And that at some point about when Francisco was my student, I thought, I realized that was the highest ambition a poet can have, is to write something that someone else would want to say. It's different from being a singer-songwriter. It isn't presenting your own performance skills. I'm giving you a reading, I'd like not to be boring, but the great to be as Sylvia Plath was to Sefrádi. To be as Langston Hughes is to Poe of Chin in that other video, that's what Chico and I aspire to. Maybe I should just close with, what are the other questions? There was the one about Woodworth about the Ode, Wardsworth about being more meaningful later in life. And then there's a question from Elizabeth Cage in Sydney, Australia. Yes. Asking what art are you engaging with now? And particularly in conjunction with the times, what are you drawn to reading and listening to? And then there's one question in the live questioning if you're up for one more after that. Yeah. I always have trouble saying what I'm reading because I'm always reading several things at once. I was reading Thomas Hardy this afternoon for some reason, probably with similar reasons that one would read that Wardsworth Ode, different times in your life you have different attitudes. Wardsworth's Ode is all about uncertainty and doubt and feeling are you quite sure? And I remember when I was in my sixties, you begin to become a little bit unsure and to wonder. And this comes at different times in life. I saw a wonderful quotation somewhere that you never feel older than when you're in your late or middle twenties, but maybe it comes back again in your middle sixties. And it's easier for me to answer the question from Australia about what I did. Just yesterday I finished a prose autobiography. I sent it to my great agent who's also a great editor, Jill Nerum, she'll probably tell me 150 things I need to improve, but in some way through these trying times through a great national anxiety and dread and calamity. If somehow it was comforting me to go back and start with my mom making fun of my dad and then go to the favorite poem project, it was okay, I liked it. And so I officially congratulate myself. I finished at least one draft of an autobiography. I'll read a couple of poems. Well, Robert, I wanted to interrupt one second because you have one more question, I think completely ties to what you're talking about from someone I'm presuming you went to high school with thinking of autobiography. So I'll let Bill, I guess, ask the question. Oh, Bill Gildeev, but he knows so many terrible things about me when I'm in my teens. Maybe we should just eject him. Okay, Bill, let's hear it. Oh. Maybe, are you ready? Go.  It's rare to have known someone with as much panache as you've shown in your poetry and in your life. We truly appreciate it. Thank you, Robert. Thank you very much, Bill. I call you also as a witness, there were a certain number of people, including Mr. Colaboss and others would have said, is that guy him? Right? Ha ha ha, that is hilarious. It had to be that guy. Mr. Forkevich, Mr. Forkevich would have said, that kid's no good. Thank you, thank you. I'm very glad that you and Marina and Michael are back in her here. I saw you on the list and it means a lot to me. This book that I just finished, Long Branch is very, very much in there. We come from an historic town. Long Branch is where the American concept of celebrity was invented. It's true. Well, just down the road, spring scene too, so. Well, yes, yes. He played those bars in Atlantic, anyway, we won't go on. Here is a poem, I've been using this word, so I'll read it. I don't need to be a downer and it's not. Here is a poem called, Grief, Grief. I don't think anybody ever is really divorced, said Lenny. Also, I don't think anybody ever is really married, he said. Because English was really Lenny's second language and because of Yiddish and its displaced place in the world, he never really believed in his own prose. He wrote sentences the way a great boxer moves.  Something Lenny might have said about hunting for a parking space in Berkeley. Mike too, was himself. His last month, too weak to paint or make prints, he sat and made drawings of flowers, ink attentive to the rhythms of beach rows, wisteria, lily, forms like acrobats or Cossack dancers. Mike had a vision of his body dead on his studio floor seen from high above. He didn't feel sad or afraid at seeing it, he said. Just sorry for the person who would find it.  Of course they do. Lenny died, Mike died. But the odd thing is, but the odd thing is the person still makes a shape distinct and present in the mind as an object in the hand. The presence in the absence. It isn't comfort, it's grief. I have 756. I think if I read the first poem instrument in my most recent book at the Foundling Hospital, I think we'll just come out exactly at eight o'clock. And the Roger Williams students, the high school friends, Elizabeth Cade from Australia, someone calling from Spokane. Thank you very much. You helped me try to make the best of relying on technology because of the great national pickle that we're in. So I will close with this poem. I've used the word in a previous poem. I used it when I got my glass of water, so I'll wet the instrument. This poem is about what is good and bad in us that makes art. It's the first poem in at the Foundling Hospital. So I will say goodbye and thanks to you all with instrument, instrument. It was a little newborn God that made the first instrument. Sweet vibration of mind, mind, mind enclosed in its orbit. The little God scooped out a turtle shell and he strung it with a rabbit's guts. Well, what a stroke to invent music from an empty case strung with bloody filaments. The wiry rabbit flesh plot were strung, pulled taut across the gutted, resonant hull of the turtle, music from the hollow shell and the insides of a rabbit. Sweet conception, sweet instrument of mind, mind, mind, mind itself, a capable vibration, thrumming from here to there in the cloven brain flesh contained in its helmet of bones. Like an electronic box full of channels and filaments bundled inside a case, a little musical robot, dreamed up by the mind embedded in the brain with its blood-warm channels and its humming network of neurons engendering the newborn baby God. As clever and violent as his own instrument of sweet, all-consuming imagination held by its own vibration, mind, mind, mind pulled taut in its bony shell, dreaming up heaven and hell. Thank you, everybody. Robert, thank you so much for joining us tonight. My only disappointment is that we can't take you to dinner, which we would do if you were in Bristol. So I hope you'll take a rain check and we'll do that next time. One day. All right, thank you all. Bye-bye. Good night. Bye-bye, everybody. Good night.


So yeah, so this is a sort of new idea we have so what We wanted Was a way to sort of let you know beside the scene. So we give all these courses like you see us answering issues you see us Like teaching here, but really who are we and how did we get here? So Mmm My personal goal here was to sort of like demystify the kind of career we have so we can open up More possibilities for y'all that are listening to this course like why would you want to? Consider working for someone like us instead of the other options So I have some small Questions prepared and Thomas and I can sort of have a discussion and I guess anyone any other instructors can Jump in at any time if they're interested Yeah, so that's the idea so if you have comments, I mean Please say so So Thomas, um What's your background like how did he start off your career? Well, okay, I started initially studying bioinformatics went into protein structure analysis and these kind of things then did a PhD in Metabolic modeling was constraint-based models linear programming and so on and Before before joining here was a postdoc again on this metabolic modeling and Essentially the the whole time I kind of had the impression Yeah, I'm not I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing and what I enjoyed most was helping people with comparatively smaller tasks normally so Some some technicians who had problems with their way or who had to enter Stuff into extra sheets all the whole time Which could simply be automated by a small script that I wrote them Stuff We're supporting people with a toolbox that I was co-developing Metabolic modeling and These kind of things so essentially helping people was something that I enjoyed actually a lot more than the research itself Partially because There's research it was always the Yeah, okay, you have to you have to publish this you have to make this publishable. There was a lot more I would say pressure in a way on getting results the and there was a lot less Yeah, for me a lot less reward like Like reward that I felt where where I had the impression that what I was doing was really something useful There were the work the work samples where I had where I noted. Okay. Yeah We actually can do something useful, but that was again where we were working with some groups where we had an Interaction we were to some extent helping them do something. Mm-hmm. So so it's just like going outside the Publication cycle or something like that like or yeah, I'm too broad To me Well, when I when I finished my last post I was like, okay, I I liked what I was doing in general but There were two things that I didn't really like and one thing was the whole short-term Contracts that were omnipresent in academia. So if I would have gotten a permanent postdoc position. Yep Okay, that I would have been happy with yeah, and the other it was the This this Impression that a lot of the science that was out there or that was done in my field Mainly got published in higher impact journals if the right names were on it not necessarily because of the Of by the the quality of the research was actually better Mm-hmm. And this whole yeah cycle was kind of Not appealing. Mm-hmm. So after that last poster guys actually say, yeah, I Don't want to have this anymore You know, so I guess that sort of answers my next question. What led you to transition to research support? Yeah, how did you actually make this transition? Like when did you realize? Oh, there's an option and I have the skills for it Actually That was After When we when we moved over to Finland my wife or just started in alto as a researcher and I Wanted to stay at home with the kids and Shortly after we after moved over on my actually not that shortly There was the first time they all I think it was the second RSE position that was advertised with alto Mm-hmm. I did apply for that as well in that round didn't Wasn't take it taken on but Essentially Yeah The this this that was kind of the first time that I really noticed this RSE kind of position because while I was still Working as a postdoc. We had we did hire a bioinformatician at the time Which was also something where I thought okay, there are a couple of things that Essentially any biosciences that should have and one of them is probably bioinformatician one of them is probably a bio statistician and I hadn't ever heard of a research software engineer Yeah, so what is research software engineer? I guess that's RSE Well to me it's helping people with coding issues Not with I need my excel installed or something but more I Have code that is that I can't get to run on Triton for whatever reason I have I can't get Some libraries installed on the on the cluster I've code that works, but it's terribly slow For whatever reason and I well it's all it's in a state That's either close to publishing or already published, but we would like to reuse it and Yeah, but we don't really have the time to go dig in and Analyze that so So is it sort of like being the computational generalist that can do anything for people To some extent yes Or at least having having the having a general overview of how to program how to how to code having probably a bit of a deeper knowledge on How to structure code so that it's usable or more broadly reusable How to Get a useful interface for some code that is otherwise Very difficult to access Yeah Yeah, the these a lot of it is these kind of things that You code a lot you code along you do use you do your stuff and at some point, you notice. Oh, I might need to reuse this Oh, this will be This would be a lot of work to make it actually reusable again because it's so focused on one specific task and The knowledge of how to hide the avoid this from the beginning That is something I think that a research software engineer should at least Well learn during their career. Is it like a programmer for a research group sort of or Yeah, yes, yes to some extent It's Okay, well, maybe let's just engineer. I would say is is is more about how to structure the code and how to Get the code in a shape that is understandable then designing a most a designing well designing the Solution to a problem Because I mean, I've I guess we don't do this as much at Alto, but I've heard some RSEs They might actually be doing this like solution designing or like You know starting earlier, but I guess that just how it is Yeah It's potentially just teaching teaching a group the best practices of using github Using version control and these kind of things. That's also part of the RC job So should we move on to the next question? So there's from hack MD Someone asked do you think that what you learned in academia can be reused outside in the real world? And what is that thing? Which I guess what is that thing means? What's the real world? Any comments on that? Also, I have a comment too that I could I think that that that is a good question the problem I think a lot of stuff that you learn in academia can be reused The problem is a lot of it will not It could be it will not so it's more the more specialist knowledge that you have them less likely It is that this particular special knowledge will actually be reused Partially due to If you know one specific Kind of let's take an experimental some some kind of experimental setup It's very likely that whatever company you go in has a different setup Or at least to some extent different setup that you need to learn what you can use is Understanding how this setup works So if you got the general knowledge on how how is this set up and what are the different parts of it? That is something that you can reuse so a lot of it comes down to you are With a good academic background here. You're probably good at adapting to two things and Yeah, that's I think what makes it different or Yeah, where where stuff can be reused Yeah Once I was at a really great talk. This was like 2014 Maybe it was here at Alto. I can't find any evidence of this talk any of the material anything like that but it was what can a PhD no What use does the PhD have in a company and this was actually an amazing talk it was something like You know, what do you do is the PhD so it's things like you take a problem No one knows the answer to and you do research you study existing sources and you figure out a solution Even if it means working on it for a very long time You know how to write things in a clearly clear way, you know how to give presentations and these are I mean, these are not obvious things like this is something that is like Yeah, that's a very new Yeah, that's not your specialist knowledge. That's your General knowledge that you that you get by being an academia. Yeah, and I think that given people are always reinventing themselves anyway Then this is like not a bad thing to go sort of transitioning and learning different specialist knowledge and reapplying your generalist knowledge There's a question here. How long did it take for you to get the hang of scientific computing? Hang of scientific computing I'm not sure if I already kind of have it it This is how long does it take you to get the hang of computing in general? Yeah, I think that I think there's the difference between I'm able to write a Script that tell I'm able to write a script Yeah, and I'm able to structure code so that it So that I can actually reuse parts of it at least that is I think where Where I would draw the line between not having not getting the hang and getting the hang of it This can be pretty quick This can take quite some time depending on your depending on your environment and What? Yeah, essentially what teachers you have Yeah Yeah, I would tell us what is the hang of scientific? Yeah, I Bet if you ask any one of us we would say we're still getting the hang of it like we're still learning Things and that's sort of like maybe getting the hang of it is learning that you'll never know any everything and You're just constantly able to learn new things as you need to Yeah, for example now now I'm looking at the projects that we currently get a lot of it is about web servers and web server development and Yeah, I have I essentially hadn't done any web server stuff before starting here. So Is this scientific computing or is this not scientific computing I think it is Because it gives the it gives the sign or it gives access to the science, but on the other hand it's not It's not scientific code as such Because it's kind of the scientific code itself. I would actually say that as an RSE You might want to you might have the job of optimizing it But developing the scientific code is up to the scientist kind of The scientist should have should come up with the idea on Of a certain how to implement it how to optimally implement it that could be an RSE but the idea the the the the pseudo code algorithm Well a little bit more than the and the pubes fee that that is up to the researcher. Yeah Okay We're running short on time so if there was someone who's just It's a standard question I always ask what do you know now that you wish someone had taught you when you first started your career as a scientist To be well, um I think what Is now There very much a different topic for me because I at some point got the impression. Okay. Well there Um, I think it finished. It's less than in Germany for example, but I I once Said to myself. Well if anyone asks me what I should do I would say well if you if you want to get a Let's say steady reasonable reasonable Income have a life locally Probably rather look for some kind of apprenticeship or vocational school While if you don't have any idea what you actually want with life The the studying um route is At least it has a much higher chance of of giving you an overview of the world So, uh I I after doing my undergraduates. I was uh, it was essentially I know nothing. I have no idea what I'm doing, um I I felt I felt like okay. I I still need to learn so much and even after finishing my phd. I was like, okay yeah, I have some idea about this field now, but uh, yeah, I still don't know a lot and um Yeah, if I would have started off, um, essentially going to a pro kind of programming school or Starting to become a programmer right after school. Um, I would probably be in a decent living as well It And even if if uh, well the the most steady, uh The jobs will probably still be um, some kind of carpentry. Uh, that is always needed or well Anything that's to do with plumbing If you have the stomach for it. Yeah Okay, so now we're At the limit of our time Right now, I guess we can keep asking questions or answering and asking questions via hack md And we can return to this topic Either in smaller discussions or in our next course. I think that this was a Um, stimulating discussion And good for young people


My story is about how I, as a scientist, discovered my creative side and brought together a team of people to explore and to develop new technology. I started out in the beginning by turning my garage into a clean room. I went to the university in Cambridge and borrowed or stole bits of stuff from the dumpsters or skips where they thrown them all out. In my garage I figured out how to print transistors. I was really pleased with the science that I had created, but I quickly realised that what I needed to do was to create some products. The first lesson that I learnt really is that science doesn't pay. I needed to make some money. What I did discover was a real passion and love for printing. I think print is an amazing process. What print can allow us to do is it can make things in high volume anywhere in the world. But what I also discovered that many of the processes in printing and also what's known as converting were very similar or the same processes that you would see in a silicon fab to make transistors. The only difference is that everything was much faster. Things were running at hundreds of metres of minute or tens of kilometres an hour. Since I was a child I've had a fascination for electronics and I'm really embarrassed to say that my bedroom was riddled with wires under the carpet and in the walls all connecting little speakers and switches and microphones and things together. More recently what I've discovered is the processor that was used in the Apple II is now available in volume for less than ten cents. What I became really fascinated with was what if we could combine the pervasiveness of print with the power of electronics. What I wanted to do was to use printing to print conductive tracks to make a friendly user interface, stick a little chip on, write some software and make print interactive.  So I kind of got ten credit cards and loans and got loads of money together and I bought myself this printing press. It was a huge, it's like five metres long and I covered myself and the floor with ink and I just made a total mess. But I learned how to print. Okay and then there was a company came along to me and they said can you make a piece of a carton do something more? And then so the engineer inside me thought I'll put a little light on the inside so when you open the box you can see. And a student working for me looked at that and said that's useless why would anybody want that? And so what she created was a cat that was a circuit that had eyes that when you open the carton the cat's eyes will hit up and to my surprise everybody I showed really, really loved it. And what I learned from that was the value of creativity and the value of design. So the first person that I hired to join me on my journey was a graphic designer. Actually I'm skipping these, they weren't supposed to be there. Okay what I also quickly realised that was that me and my printing press wouldn't be able to print all the things that we wanted to do and I didn't really have the skills to do that. So the next person that I got to join my team was someone from the print and packaging industry because it's really important that everything that I create has to be able to be manufactured anywhere in the world on any sort of industrial type of printing press anywhere in the world. Okay so print is going to be really loud. Sorry that was one of the things in my bag of tricks was my speaker that makes these noises. Print is amazing because you can print really fine lines and you can print over really large areas at the same time. And what we created using litho print is this DJ poster was when you touch it you get different sound effects on the poster. But again this is created on a printing press in a factory that prints many of the posters that are in the stores in the UK. Maybe you can turn the volume down now. And also I'll just show you some of the print is that we can print really fine lines on very thin materials so we can print capacitive touch pads that are transparent or opaque and we can stick those on anything. Also what we've created is a pharmaceutical carton that knows when you've taken the tablets because some conductive tracks break it reminds you when to take your medication but when it goes back to the pharmacy it tells the doctor when you took your medication so there's some sort of compliance thing.  It has colour coded keys so anyone who can read and exist some lyrics on the side as well and is not colour blind can play the piano. We wanted to look more at how we could connect pieces of print to the internet so we wrote an app from a phone and when you touch this postcard it makes things activate on the phone so it could be web links on a phone. And the technology in that postcard would cost less than 50 cents. So the next people that I added to my team were electronic engineers embedded software engineers and a developer who could write apps for pieces of print. I'm going to try a live demo and I'm really worried it's going to go wrong but we'll see. So this poster is bluetooth connected to my iPad that's over there and I can choose whatever. So anyone can have a jazz jam from a poster. That was just in case it didn't work. So also what we've created is a poster that's all about cake and I really love cake and this poster talks to you and it has four multiple choice questions that you can touch and it discovers your perfect cake but at the end it doesn't tell you your cake it uploads a picture, the name and description of the cake to Facebook and Twitter and maybe we could also do something like print a Facebook like button in the real world and the physical and the digital together. Most of what I've done is all about sound and touch but what I also want to do is explore something different and we're working with really small LEDs that are so thin you can't feel them when they're on paper that are so small I can't see them when they're on the end of the tweezers but they're so bright that they hurt your eyes when they come up and we're making light come out of paper. So what I want to do is have control as into stickers that can stick on to any piece of print anywhere and make anything interactive. So my story really is about how I discovered my creative side and my belief that anything can be made to be seamlessly interactive and my innovation is all about integrating existing technologies and people with different skills and also having a lot of fun. Thank you.


Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, and digital marketing courses online and at our 15 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams, and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Today we have an awesome guest presenting. I'd like to introduce you to Premal. Premal is an experienced leader with an emphasis on e-commerce solutions that drive business growth and improve customer experience across all sales channels. He is passionate about building usable solutions and product features that deliver desired business outcomes. He also has an inherent ability to articulate product and technology positioning to both business and technical users, thus driving customer satisfaction. He's highly motivated, persuasive, innovative, a team player and a builder. Feel free to leave any questions for Premal in the comments and we'll be sure to address them in the end. Without further ado, let's welcome Premal. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks Dan, and thanks everyone for joining. All right, let me quickly pull up the presentation for why you're all here. All right, can everyone see the screen? All good. Awesome. So we're here, like Dan said, we're here to talk about some of my experiences and how we can build some great products. Before we start, I just want to let you know that whatever I say here, this presentation is based on my personal learnings, experiences, my journey that I've gone through and this is not endorsed by Salesforce or the previous companies that I've worked for. So some of the key topics that we're going to cover today is my journey into product management, how I ended up where I am, the role of a product manager, how do you build great products, what goes into that, and then how do you adapt and learn within your journey and keep innovating. So my journey, I started back in 2006 with an e-commerce company called GSI Commerce, which was one of the leading providers for e-commerce solutions back in the day. And they had a whole bunch of e-commerce sites for a lot of different brands, Dick's Sporting Goods, Aeropostale, all of the sporting leagues, NFL, MLB, NBA, every one of them was on the GSI e-commerce platform. And I started as a business analyst and a product owner. I wrote multiple user stories and features and things like that for the platform that could be adopted by our customers. In 2009, I transitioned into another vertical within the same company to learn more about business-facing aspects of what customers cared about that cannot be delivered through a product. So a product can only do so much, but there could be business needs that could go beyond what a product can deliver. So how do you implement certain features and functionalities that are customized to a customer's need. And when eBay acquired GSI Commerce, I got an opportunity to move into the business side of things and work closely with the retailers to help them drive strategic growth, revenue growth, drive projects that could help them with all those aspects, as well as drive customer satisfaction. And in 2015, everything that I'd learned, I got an opportunity again to go back into the product management team, lead the product management team to take everything that I've learned and define product and strategy for omnichannel technologies, including auto management. And in 2016, Salesforce came calling, not literally, but they came calling. I had a good opportunity to join their commerce and retail team to help customers around the globe by providing them with the right story and solutions. So just want to summarize my journey by saying you can be any in any role within the company. But if you're passionate about your customers, your business as to what your company is doing. And if you're passionate about that, you believe in that you would be able to build solutions for your customers and product management would be lucky to have you and you would be happy there. So a role of a product manager, it's not what says here in the Dilbert cartoon that I really like your role is not to include every requirement that everyone asks for within the product. And when you do that, sometimes it could, you know, just backfire. So be careful about what your role is within the product management, how you would go about doing that. So I think a product manager really is the CEO of the product.   But you have to make sure that you're working with your teams, your different teams, whether it's your user experience team, whether it's your business and your customers, whether it's your engineering teams, whether it's the marketing team, you work with them, you take input feedback from them, and you're able to make the right decisions to drive the success for your product. You are the one that are defining what vision of that product is, and you're the ones that is responsible for collaborating with those different teams to bring about success. Sometimes you may not always make the right decisions, but you have to ensure that you're making the best decision based on whatever's available to you at that point in time, and you have to solve problems for your customer. That should be your aim as a product manager. You're not there to create something that you love, but you have to do something that your customers will love, and you're passionate about delivering that experience for the customer. So how do you go about building a great product? What are some of the steps? One of my all-time favorite codes is people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and it's by Simon Sinek. He's an amazing orator, presenter, and a lot of product managers can learn from it, and he has a book called Start With Why, which I've read, and I would encourage others to read it too, but you have to remember people don't buy what you've just built just for the heck of you've built it, but they buy why you're doing it, because that should help them solve their problems. So remember that every time you're building products, and for you to be able to do that, first and foremost, it's all about learning. You cannot just build a product in a finance industry if you're not familiar with that industry, if you're not familiar with your company, if you're not familiar with your customers, if you're not familiar with the market. Similarly, I was not able to build the products that I built with GSI, eBay, Enterprise, without knowing what that industry, what that market is, what the company is, what our customers are asking for, what shoppers are asking for. I had to understand how technology was changing, I had to learn everything to make sure that I'm taking all that into account to drive business value to my organization and to the company, and in the process achieving the business goals that are set for the company as well as solving problems for the customers, because while you're solving problems for the customers, they need to meet goals that your company has set for themselves. So in the age of internet, your customers are not local, so you have to understand your customers. That's the most important thing. Your customers are global, your customers are in different countries, different regions, they have different sets of problems, different sets of needs, so you have to understand who your customers are, what their needs are, and you should be able to prioritize those needs, those problems when you start planning on what your product. And if I look at my own experience, I constantly learn from what our customers and other retailers are doing, what they're asking for, how they're adopting newer technologies, and everyone knows how Amazon is just reshaping the entire shopping experience. I have to keep an eye on what Amazon's doing, because ultimately, Amazon is that bar when it comes to the customer satisfaction, the customer experience. Long gone are the days when customers waited for seven to 10 days for the product to arrive. Now with Prime and Prime Now, they want instant gratification. They're able to order products from their mobile devices with one click. They're able to order products through Alexa. So I have to stay on top of all these technology things and make sure that customers who are buying through Amazon and are shaping their experience of retail through Amazon or other retailers are able to drive a similar experience. So that's first and foremost. So it's learn, learn, learn where you're making sure that you've learned what you can do within your industry, within your business, within your customers, and your competition and the market to be able to drive value. Once you do that, once you've learned everything that you have to learn, or if it shouldn't take that long to learn something, but again, varies on people, varies on industries, varies by product. But once you do that, you start with the vision. What is the vision of my product? When Salesforce was launched 20 years ago, Internet was still in a very early nascent stage. Mark Banyov, the founder CEO of Salesforce, decided to leave Oracle, his executive position as Oracle, and start build a software application on the cloud when cloud was not even a word. But he said, I am going to build something that customers can start using whenever, wherever they are, through their computers, and they don't have to rely on being in the office, being in front of their monolithic application and on-premise installation, and being able to serve their customers wherever, wherever. And I should be able to deliver continuous improvement to the customers. And that's how Salesforce started. And now we all know Salesforce is the pioneer in software as a service. And others are now following suit and building capabilities and features and functions on the cloud. So it's very critical when you design your first product that you have a vision for your product. What are the problems that you're trying to solve for your customers, both short-term and long-term? And once you've done that, you start defining and prioritizing those problems. Everyone here has probably taken an Uber or a Lyft, but did we really need Uber or a Lyft? Did we even think before Uber and Lyft out there that we needed like a ride hailing app, right? We all used taxis and we would wait in line for a taxi or we would wait on the street, putting our hands up and saying, waiting for a taxi driver to stop and take us to our destination. Sometimes they would refuse. Sometimes the fare was not what they would be asking us or estimated fare. So Uber and Lyft saw an opportunity with those problems and said, I can solve these pain points for the customers. And they revolutionized the taxi industry by creating a ride hailing app that essentially does the same thing. It takes you from point A to point B, but what they did was they created an app that made it so easier for customers to just ping the drivers around them, get an approximate fare estimate. They know exactly how long they have to wait for the driver to get to that. They know exactly how long it's going to take for them to reach the destination. So they just simplified their experience for their customers. So you have to start focusing on users' needs and you cannot do that alone. You have to work as a team. You should brainstorm on the problems for your customers with the extended team. You have to involve them as a part of the group and solve that problem. Next step. So this is just one of the template that I used to use for product vision statements and then I customize it for my own needs. But these are the typical questions you should be asking when you're writing a vision statement. Who are my target customers? What is the opportunity here? What am I trying to solve? What category is it in? Why would someone buy from me and not go to someone else? What is my competitive advantage? What is my differentiation between my product and the competitor's product? And once you have all that, you know you have a vision statement. Once you have a vision statement, that's not the end of it. That's just the start. Now comes the heavy lifting where you take the product vision, which is the long horizon, right? But you have to start building multiple milestones and how are you going to get to that, you know, long horizon? How are you going to go to it? You're going to write your short term, your long term goals and you start building towards that. You need to develop a culture in your organization that helps you meet these goals. Sometimes goals can take longer to achieve and some can be quick, right? And there might be a few failures along the way, but you learn from it. So you learn from it, you try it again with the same goals. Maybe the timing wasn't right. Maybe you didn't have the right amount of resources. Maybe the approach wasn't right. You need to go back, see what the end results was, tweak it and keep working towards that. You know, most companies realize the importance of creating a roadmap, but an effective roadmap is the one that clearly communicates the vision, the areas of focus, how you're going to get there and when. So when you're defining your product roadmap and milestone, you know, just make sure that you understand the difference between a product feature and a product itself, right? We all know Facebook likes, Instagram likes, but they are essentially a feature. They're not really a product. They might be considered as a product within Facebook, within Instagram, but you cannot sell a Facebook like by itself to a customer. You cannot sell an Instagram like to a customer by itself. They were designed to drive engagement on Facebook. They were designed to drive engagement on Instagram. So you have to understand what are you driving and what. Now, when we all know when Google Maps was first introduced, turn by turn directions was a feature, right? And Google Maps was a product as customers use Google Maps. They saw the difference of using Google Maps and turn by turn directions versus, you know, following a traditional map through map quest and turn by turn directions printed out and figuring out, you know, where they are, how they are, and someone was not there to guide them. But over time, turn by turn directions turned into a product for itself, for Google, right? Because now they've added AR capabilities. And with those capabilities, you're able to bring in businesses and other helpful content for their customers. So it's no longer a feature, but it's driving more and more value for Google, for their customers by adding more capabilities and top of it. So once you design a feature, it could evolve into a product at a later date, but that would only come as time goes. As you understand how your customers are using it as you evolve in your thinking, everything keeps on changing. So the roadmap is always going to be flexible. Keep it flexible. It's never too rigid. You need to make sure that you do that. The last and the most important thing, once you have a roadmap, once you define everything, what are you going to achieve, how are you going to achieve, right? You have to have, you know, a way to sell your product, your vision across different teams. The engineering team is the most important one where you have to convince them what kind of problems you're going to solve. They have to be on board with you to identify the right ways of solving that problem for the customer. So you need to have a very unique view of what's happening across your customers and your business. You need to have a better understanding of the market opportunity that you have for your product, the problems that the customers are facing, the solutions you have. Once you have that and you have a strong communication skills, which is really, really important for product managers to have, the messaging to internal stakeholders becomes very easy because you're able to help your internal stakeholders, which could be sales, which could be executives, which could be the engineering team understand the problem statement you're trying to solve for your customers and why the product and the vision that you have would be a good way to, you know, solve those problems and drive value to the business and the company. But the messaging is very different when you go to external parties such as your customers and your partners, right? You are going to tell them, you're the problems that you're trying to solve, here's a solution that we have and you're explaining to them in a language that they understand because you're not going to tell them, hey, this is going to help us drive five million dollars in revenue. That's not what you're telling your customers, but maybe your pitch to executives is that, that once our customers start adopting it, we could see a revenue of five million dollars or whatever you come up with as metrics, right? You need to start thinking about those things and for you to start thinking about those things, you need to have a go-to-market strategy, which means what are the problems you're solving, right? Why are the customers buying your product and not your competitors? What's the differentiation factor? How will the customers adopt your product? That's the most important thing, right? Is it an off-the-shelf product, right? I mean, am I downloading it from the App Store and that's it and I don't have to do anything else or is it something that requires implementation where I have to work with a technical team on the customer side or leverage technology partners, system integrators that are going to implement something for my customer. What does that implementation look like? You have to understand all those things because those could be barriers to adoption. If your product needs an implementation, you have to make sure that when you're designing it, the barrier to adoptions is least because the customer has to pay for not just the product, may have to pay for implementation and that could cost an arm and a leg and that could steer them away from your solution to another competitor's solution. So you have to make sure that you understand what it takes for customers to adopt your product. Finally, you have to know, have some idea as to how are you going to charge for that product, how are you going to, what is the pricing going to be? Am I going to charge them based on usage? Am I going to charge them a flat fee? Am I going to charge them an ongoing subscription fee? We all downloaded apps from the App Store and there are apps that charge you $5 and a one-time fee and you're done and you never have to pay it again. And now there are apps that charge you nothing when you install it, but then there are in-app subscriptions and in-app purchases that you have to make to keep playing, to keep getting new features and that's the way they make money. So you have to have a strong an idea as to what your product pricing could be, but you have to be flexible because when you're working with your sales, your executives, you work with them because they understand the market, they understand the customers. Your marketing team plays a crucial role in that because they understand the feedback from the customers through a variety of different channels that could be coming in. So work with them to find out what's going to be the best pricing model for your product and be flexible in that so that you could ultimately see the goals that you want for your customers and also internally. And how do you see those goals? Those are the goals that are measured through KPIs. You have to define how are you going to say KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators and that really is when do you say that my product was a success? Is it customer adoption? Is it time spent on my product? Facebook really looks at how many monthly active users does it have, how much time they're spending on the Facebook site or the app, the involvement that they do, and then based on that, they're driving revenue through ads. So similarly, you would have those goals that you need to define as to how are you going to measure the success? Sometimes product could just be based on customer satisfaction. In retail, it's more about based on the feature, it could be that we're driving revenue for our customers. So when our customers get more revenue from shoppers, because we're making the shopping experience better, that means our customers are making money and that when customers are making money, that means they're happy, which drives customer satisfaction. And when they're happy with the product, with what we've built, they're more likely to promote our product to other customers, right, to other prospects. So that is the net promoter score. So when your customers are happy and they love your product, they truly become your ambassadors of your product, because then that is the marketing that you will get for free, because they'll talk about your product with other customers and with other prospects, with other people in the industry, and you will get the free press and the mileage that you need when you build a successful product. So last before we leave a few minutes for Q&A, always keep learning and always keep adapting. Product management and that role is always going to be fluid. So it doesn't stop with what you know. What's new today could be old tomorrow, right? Technology is always changing. You need to review feedback from your initial product launch, your initial discovery, talk to your customers, identify what is working, what isn't, right? Sometimes when you review your results and your findings and you're deeper into customer adoption, you may realize that, hey, what I had originally thought that this product would do this, it could actually do much more, right? It may open up more opportunities, more target markets, address other customer problems that you had not thought about, and open up new opportunities and probably a new business model for you and the company, right? And when that happens, right? You pivot from your original strategy to a new strategy and a new vision that could be much more, right? Just talking about Uber, right? Uber started as a point A to point B ride-hailing app. They realized that now I can use those same drivers to do deliveries for retail businesses, right? I could just tap them to say, hey, while you're on your way working for rides, pick up this item from the store and deliver it to this particular customer, right? And they still get to make money. They opened up Uber Eats, right? They realized, hey, there's a market opportunity, again, leveraging the same drivers by picking up food from the restaurants and delivering it to the customer. So you can also do that once you start seeing how customers are adopting your products, how are they tweaking it, what kind of additional opportunities and markets you may be able to achieve? Microsoft did the same thing when they realized, right, that customers love their office apps, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, everything. And just because they love their apps, it's not like customers are going and clamoring for Nokia devices when Microsoft bought that handset division, right? When the new CEO took over, he made a conscious decision to say, I'm going to open up these apps for iOS and Android devices. And that's what I really care about because I care about my customers getting to use our products more versus trying to use our products to drive revenue to another set of business, right? So think about all those things when you announce a product, when you're launching a product, when you do discovery with your customer, there is always something to learn, right? You always have to stay in touch with what's going on in the market as well. So there are new and upcoming technologies in your domain that could help you accelerate your product vision, help deliver better solutions to customers' problems, right? Who would have thought that Apple would abandon the Touch ID button that they just introduced three years ago, five years ago, actually, and get rid of it altogether and replace it with Face ID, right? They just were like, okay, the technology is there where I could make Face as the security for a secure interface for users to log into their device and it could be not just with a camera but 3D, the technology is cheaper now and I can do this and I can replace this Touch ID button which takes a lot of real estate on the device and make the screen bigger, right? So think about everything that you could do from that standpoint. Keep aware, be aware of the technology, be aware of your competition, be aware of what the customers are asking, talking about your products and learn from that. I always see what Amazon's doing in the retail business and I always tell my customers, right? Learn from Amazon. Amazon may be a competition and a threat to you but you too should be able to deliver an Amazon-like experience for your customers and for them to drive that experience, I have to make sure that when we're building products at Salesforce for retail customers, right? That we're empowering these retailers to deliver a similar experience to Amazon or sometimes even go above and beyond, right? So keep that in mind and with that, I just want to say that's all I had to share for today. Thank you for your time and I'll leave room for questions if there are any out there.


Hey everybody, today we're talking about tempo deadlifts, and I have my trusty umbrella here to act as a barbell Which I do not have in my living room. So tempo deadlifts are done very very slowly I have a very slow eccentric lowering and I have a very slow Concentric raising during this entire lift. I try to keep tension on the muscle to maximize the fatigue that my muscles feel So that I can get the adaptations that I want, right? I want According to Joel Jamison's book Ultimate MMA Conditioning I want slow twitch hypertrophy. I want some Strength of these oxidative fibers, right? Maybe strength is the wrong word I but you know kind of I want hypertrophy, right? I want size in my fatigue resistant muscles So I fatigue the crap out of the entire muscle group and the type 1 fibers are the ones that can last and I keep training them Right so that these sets are you know 30 40 even you can go 60 you can go however long you really want to go seconds long and I just I just try to work the weight up if possible though It's not really a thing that I'm ever really pushing towards I just try to find the right weight, and then that is the right weight. So tempo deadlift looks like this I Am generally going to start from the top, but let's let's make it This is it's simpler to start from the top with like an RDL if you have a Rack and you can just grab the bar and walk out and start going But let's start from the bottom because that'll be more difficult. So I'm here.  Okay, and again. I shoot for about three seconds in each way Three seconds down three seconds up and I'm trying to keep tension on These muscles Okay, there we go. That one was a little better. I think my shoulders are a little too low On the first couple Yeah Okay, and I just keep doing this for 40 seconds I'm setting a timer letting it go and then I rest for about 40 seconds I generally go 40 40 with any person that I'm working with unless they're a little less trained in which case I might go 30 40 Um, I usually don't subject people to 60 40 because that's just terrible But that's how you do a tempo deadlift