What steps we take to co-regulate with children who may be struggling with their feelings? That's the topic of today's episode of Pookey Ponders. Let's dive straight in. So co-regulation is the topic of today's episode. This is a Patreon request and one of my patrons said to me, I don't really know what co-regulation is. People talk about it a lot. What is it? Why does it matter and how do I do it? So I thought, okay, let's go. So co-regulation is essentially the way in which that as adults who have learned, hopefully, some of the time to emotionally regulate, to manage how we feel, to keep things in check and allow ourselves to cope and thrive, how we can do this alongside children and young people or indeed other adults who aren't managing that right now, so that together we can kind of find that emotional stability and get to a point where everything feels in check and we are able to manage. Now, this works because of clever neuroscience stuff. Essentially, we have what's called mirror neurons, which make our kind of brains and bodies copy what they see. So this is why sometimes when someone who you know is of a really cheerful, happy disposition, then you tend to feel yourself reflecting that feeling, feeling it too. When they walk in the room, they literally light up the room or when you're with someone who's really calm, cool, collected, it tends to make you feel a bit more calmer and like things are in control. Of course, the opposite can happen. And when you are met with distress or anger, you can feel that that gets reflected too. So when it comes to co-regulation and particularly thinking about how to calm, be angry or anxious type feelings, we're trying to make our calm catching. We want a child to catch our calm. That's our key aim. So what I'll be thinking about in this episode is a few steps that you can take to create that sense of calm that you might be looking for so that you can help a child to find that too. Now, what happens in terms of this co-regulation piece? People worry sometimes that, well, if you're always there to calm and soothe and help a child when they get to these points of emotional distress or unrest, then they're never going to learn for themselves. But actually what we see is the opposite is true. Learning to manage your emotions to calm things down when they're feeling really challenging is big and difficult and it takes a while to learn. But if we've got a good role model and we're able to feel and see how that can work and someone who can support us alongside us, then it's a bit like riding a bike. You know, when you might run along behind at the beginning and the child really needs you to keep holding on. But gradually you get to the point where you can let go and suddenly they're doing it all by themselves and they're not quite sure when it happened. Emotional regulation is a bit like that. And there's going to be days when we're wobblier and we're more likely to fall off and we still need that adult guidance right through to adulthood sometimes. I need a bit of co-regulation on a bad day, even now, and I'm 40. But we will find that children don't not learn to do it because we do it alongside them, it supports and helps them in the process. So don't worry about co-regulation. In fact, every time that you co-regulate with a child and you help them move from a point of distress to managing and coping and feeling like those feelings are in check and they know what to do with them and they're able to continue with their day. Then you are helping them to learn to do this for themselves. So in terms of the bits that we're going to cover off today, I've got six ideas, always a list as commented on recently by one of my lovely patrons. He was wondering, do I always work through a list because that's a specific way I order things? Is it part of my autism? Is it what? I don't know. The reason that I work through lists is because I think in lists. I believe that other people have exciting imaginations where they see things in images or sounds or different things like that. I literally see life as a series of bullet pointed lists. And that's why I work the way that I do. OK, so number one in our list today is low demand. So when we're at a point of emotional dysregulation, high distress, we want to remove as many demands as possible from the situation. So this might be a time when we're going to allow various other things to slip that we might not otherwise, we're not going to be asking the child to do things. We're going to essentially place as few demands on them as we can. So we're going really low demand, really reducing our expectations of the child. This is likely to be more a time of quiet doing together and connection rather than a time when we're expecting a child to respond to us. They might be very not capable of interactive speech or communication at this point. We might we wouldn't be expecting them to get on and do various tasks that might be expected. It might be that the distress is a reason because they have not complied with an order that's been given or their behaviour has been in some way challenging to us. And if those things have happened, we just let that go for now. We let that go for now. We might revisit that later at a time of calm. But all we're going to do, if we would heap those demands on is we're going to overload that brain, we're going to make the situation more distressing. So low demand is number one. And that's kind of something that needs to encompass this whole interaction. Number two is just to think about your breathing. So remember, we're trying to get our calm to be catching for this young person. We need to be alive to the fact that sometimes when faced with a young person who is anxious or angry or distressed in some other way, that we might catch that anger, anxiety, distress and feel ourselves getting a little out of check. So just consciously check in with your breathing. Slow it down. Be taking nice, deep breaths. Be thinking about long, out breaths. I find things like five, seven breathing where we count for five on the way in and breathe out for the count of seven to be really helpful in these situations when I'm just trying to slow it down. You might choose to do a scripted breathing exercise alongside a child as part of your co-regulation. You can teach them these strategies and this gives you a go to script if you're feeling a bit lost for quite what to do here.  We imagine a feather on our hand and we blow for as long as we can to keep that imaginary feather floating in the air. And this encourages those big, long out breaths and tries to prevent that kind of in breaths and panicky breathing that can happen when we're really anxious and kind of angry. And you can get very sort of anxious in the more that that breathing goes like that, the more anxious we get. And it can actually trigger sort of panic and anxiety in itself because it makes our bodies start to feel funny. In fact, just doing that for a few seconds. I've done that for me. So let's imagine blowing that feather. And very quickly, those long, out breaths will start to really calm things down. So you can do a scripted breathing exercise. Just pick your favorite or you can just also be just thinking about your breath, your breathing, making it slow, calming it down because a child will fall and sink alongside you. Even if you're just sitting or walking alongside a child, you will find that after a few minutes, their breathing will fall and sink with you. So let's make sure that this is nice, slow, calm, controlled breathing so that they've got something really great to kind of copy and regulate alongside. Number three, so we've thought about low demand. We've thought about breathing. Number three is about having a really nice, calm voice. Now, anyone who's been to any teaching sessions with me ever, probably I will have mentioned slow, low, low. My all time favorite technique for turning around challenging situations. So slow, low, low is when we think about how we're speaking. We don't really worry too much about what we're saying, but we think about how we're speaking. So we slow down the pace of our speech. We lower the volume and we lower the pitch. So we speak a bit more deeply. We do this because when we are angry or anxious, we speak fast. We speak loud and we speak shrilly, so very high pitched. And we're trying to do the opposite of that. We're trying to do the equivalent of giving an audible hug. And when we speak like this, it sounds very measured. It sounds very in control. It sounds very calm. And this is very soothing and reassuring for the young person, regardless, actually, of what we say. And this can work with great big groups of children, as well as with individuals that you're trying to support. But just check in when you're trying to co-regulate with a child about how your speech sounds and can you apply slow, low, low. Just imagine your favorite bedtime story being read to you and how soothing and lovely that sounds and try to make your voice sounds a little bit more like that. Number four is about body language. So when we're trying to help a child to calm, we're trying to co-regulate with them, just be thinking about what your body is doing. Particularly if whatever distress has brought them here, brought you together in this moment, might be also triggering some thoughts and feelings for you. We can find that we go into kind of defensive body language. We can start building barriers sometimes between ourselves and the child. So just check consciously in with your body. Think about having soft body language. So be thinking about actually softening the body. Just do a quick physical check in with yourself from your head and run down through to your toes. You're tensing the shoulders if you've got your hands and your fists clenched. Just unclench everything and just just consciously relax. But then also just notice, are you holding your body in any ways that is less open? So have we got our arms crossed? If so, choose to uncross them. Have we got our palms as fists? So palms up is the most open way that we can be working with someone. So that's a really open, inviting, calm, safe way to be with someone. Have you got your legs crossed? Again, these are all things that kind of form a barrier. So just think about that open body language and also think as well about your position with regards to the child. Depending particularly on the kind of power dynamics of your relationship, being face to face can feel quite confrontational, particularly if a child is scared and particularly if they've had less than brilliant experiences with other adults. Side by side can often feel much, much safer for a child and much less confrontational. So you might just think about changing your position with regards to them. Forty five degrees also fine, but I wouldn't recommend face to face unless it's a child that you are really, really comfortable with. And this is a position that you have spent lots of time together in and they're happy with it. Or you might be doing something like, say, a board game where that makes much more sense. And there's kind of a barrier between the two of you of like chess, say, and that might make it feel more possible. But just just notice, just notice what your body feels like, what it would look like to the child and how you are positioned in relation to the child. Is there anything that you can do here? Small changes that you can make that will make this feel a bit calmer, a bit more relaxed, a bit safer for the child and a bit more inviting of anything that they might want to ask or to talk about. Number five is thinking about grounding. So grounding, there's so many strategies out there. Do Google it if you want lots and lots of them. But grounding is about bringing ourselves to the here and the now. So when we've got a child who is emotionally dysregulated, who is struggling with big feelings, actually bringing them to right here in the room with us right now can be superbly helpful. Really simple ways of doing that can be to check in with our senses in the room that we're in. So we might be doing something like our five, four, three, two, one exercise, which is where we will have a look around the place that we're in and we'll think about five things we can see. And we might name those out loud or we might point to them depending on the child and whether they're talking or not. We might then think about four things we can hear, three things we can smell. We work down through the senses. Don't get hung up on the order. It doesn't matter. Start with whatever feels easiest. I usually find the visual the easiest one. But whatever feels right for you, order just doesn't matter. But you're just working through your senses and trying to route yourself in the here and in the now. Other kinds of things that you can do here might be looking out the window and gazing at the clouds and noticing what you can see there. Just noticing ourselves here right now. We might really check in with our bodies and how they feel right now. We might think about the feel of our bum on the seat and our feet on the floor. Anything that brings us to right here, right now. And using those senses can really help. What can you hear? What can you smell? What can you taste right now? We're trying to take ourselves away from all the other things around or all the stuff internally or that internal chatter that might be causing distress for the child. And then number six is walking or doing alongside the child. So we can co-regulate not just by consciously sort of sitting there and saying, right, we're going to co-regulate now. But actually in doing an activity together, the easiest activity, the easiest way to co-regulate, in my opinion, is to walk alongside a child. When we fall into step with a child, it sends a really powerful message, I'm here with you. We're on this journey together as cheesy as that might sound. But also you'll find that you fall into step, that your breathing falls in time with each other and that any conversations that might need to be have will happen much more naturally when you're on the move. It also means that silences can happen and they don't feel so awkward as if you're sitting in a room side by side. And you will also be able to look and notice different things in your environment. Get outside if you can, notice a bit of nature and just walk alongside. You can do other things together. So if you're not able to or you don't want to go for a walk, then things like sitting and colouring alongside each other or playing a familiar game together, a board game or something like that can be really helpful. Anything where you're doing alongside the child can create that feeling of kind of companionship. It relieves some of the pressure of the expectations of now because we now have an activity and we can focus on that. And then the other things will begin to follow. And also it just sort of absorbs the time a little bit while perhaps they begin to get to more of a place of calm. So doing alongside can be an incredibly helpful thing. And as I say, my number one favourite there is to walk.  So a reminder then of the six ideas that we covered. We thought about being low demand, not placing any demands on the child right now in this moment. We're just focusing on getting things to a place of calm. Then we thought about our breathing and how we can consciously look to breathe more steadily, more calmly, more slowly, perhaps and maybe use a breathing exercise alongside the child. We thought about our voice having a calm, controlled, audible hug of a voice using our slow, low, low speech. We thought about our body language, softening how our bodies feel, thinking consciously about whether we are creating any barriers with crossed arms or legs or whether we've got our fists clenched, for example, and looking to change that to make our bodies feel soft and safe and inviting. Then we thought about grounding, rooting ourselves in the here and now using our senses to give a sense of right here, right now and taking the child away from the chatter in their head or the distress that might be around them. And then finally, number six, we thought about walking alongside or doing something together. I hope that there are some ideas in there that you feel that you can use with the children or young people that you work with or care for. If you find the work that I'm doing helpful and you'd like to support, you can do so in so many ways. First of all, please subscribe if you haven't already to my podcast or my YouTube channel and share the work that I'm doing with your friends or your colleagues. If you want to go up a level, you can become one of my patrons for a pound a month where you can join my little community there who get first dibs on all my resources and get a lot of say in suggesting what I create next. Or there's the super, super, super nuclear option where you can invite me to deliver a webinar or come and speak at your setting or at your next event, whichever way that you choose to support my work and engage with what I'm doing. I'm incredibly grateful to each and every one of you, both for your support of me, but even more so for your support of the children and young people in your care. What you're doing every day really, really matters. And the children that you are working with and caring for are incredibly lucky to have an adult who cares so much. So thank you until next time over.


Hey, everyone. I'm Ganesh, a director of product management at Google. So thanks for joining me in this webinar today on growing as a PM in the post of your career, illustrated by yours, Julie. So I'm pretty excited to talk to you about this topic. It's a great topic, so let's just get into it. Now, I need to take a moment and acknowledge that product management is still a relatively new profession. Even as close as 10 years ago, people didn't really know what PMs were, what they did. And there are a diverse set of entry points into a PM career. So what you do every day can vary because teams and products and companies. So all this is to say that there's no real one great recipe to make a product manager. You're gonna have to experiment, try working with different teams, skills and styles over the course of your career and actually encourage you to move around and try a few different opportunities. You will find your fit.  So we'll talk about that a bit later. But if you approach all of this with a growth mindset and you practice and learn new skills, then you create this room for yourself to scale. So what does growth for PMs actually look like? One myth I think we should bust right at the start is that your career is not gonna be a straight line up until the right, as much as we want it to be. There are gonna be times where you burn hard into a new phase of your career and you actually need to underperform for a while, while you learn new skills and how to scale yourself. So the hyper growth economies that we pretty much all live in has brought us to think about growth in terms of power and influence, more money or more seniority and status. And these are not inherently bad things to want. They'll probably happen over the course of your career, but you may not always unlock the fulfillment you're looking for by just bulldozing through the career ladder. And you actually run a real risk of burnout, which we'll talk about as well. So I think about growth as three pillars that you need to invest in equally. Number one, skills, literally what can you do? Over the course of your career, you need to learn and master sets of hard and soft skills, which allow you to take on more scope and complexity. And you wanna develop complimentary sets of skills at each stage of your career. Number two is accountability. What are you responsible for delivering? At different stages of your career, you're accountable for delivering different outcomes. So PMing is all about influence, so it's important to note the difference between being personally accountable for delivering something and needing to influence an accountable party. And I'll get into that in a little while. The third is sustainability. So how do you actually balance your time and energy on the right things? This is everything from work-life balance to meeting load, tactical to strategic work. Great PMs are really masters of balance. And while this is a people-focused job, it can actually be really isolating at time. So you have to have a long and fulfilling career, learn how to take stock, measure and sustain your performance over time. So ultimately, product management is about leadership. But the type of skills you deploy and the leadership you demonstrate over the stages of your career are different. So let's take a closer look at how this evolves. This is a framework that I use to describe how a PM's accountability changes over the course of their career. Let me just explain this chart a little bit. You can think of the green as the areas you're expected to deliver and the blue is the things you need to influence. So you can see immediately that all PMs at all stages of their career own and influence a variety of work. But it's this balance that changes between what you own and what you need to influence. So I like to think of PM skills growth over the course of a career using this model of cumulative skill development where the skills you develop at each layer helps lay the foundation for the next. And that means as you grow in seniority, you can flex and provide support where needed or use your understanding of these core skills to help develop the next generation of PMs. So as I mentioned, the type of leadership you demonstrate and the skills you master and deploy at each stage are different. Such what digging into and understanding what makes PMs most effective at each stage. This is what I describe as growing from being a product leader early in your career to a strategic leader mid-career and to an organizational leader later in your career. Not everyone goes to every stage depending on the company you're in. I'm purposely not talking about things like years of experience or levels because I think these vary a lot based on your route or where you work. Generally speaking, this is the growth path. So let's explore these in more detail. All right, early in your career, the PM job is all about product leadership. You often find yourself on a small single product team. You own a set of features, a specific user base, or a problem to solve. So back when I first started my career at Google, I was a PM for a Google Drive on Android, a very small team, couple of engineers, a designer supporting the full product all 100% of the time. And my mandate was to take what we knew within early cloud customers on mobile and just expand user adoption and happiness. This is a very standard example of what an early career problem looks like, relatively well-skilled problem, general direction to go in. Ultimately, all PMs at every point in that career are judged by their ability to execute and just get things done. This is why the first set of skills you learn when starting as a PM are how to get things done. So mastering and getting things done at a small scale, you then have the foundation for knowing why you are or aren't getting things done at any applicable scale after that. So let's talk a little bit about the skills you need at this stage. So split these between hard and soft skills, but they're very complementary. On the hard skills side, you wanna be able to analyze data, user feedback, research, and then provide some perspectives. You wanna define critical user journeys, success metrics. You need to be able to articulate more than one option for solutions to problems. Designing MVPs is really important. You need to create visions and roadmaps that you can share. And then you're gonna be defining goals for a team, typically in the form of things like quarterly or chaos. So kind of short term. On the soft skills side to compliment these, you're gonna be doing a lot of relationship building with your peers. You're trying to form that mind meld with your engineering or design peers. You're gonna get really a lot of practice at telling a product narrative and that's gonna compliment your vision deck. You'll start working on incorporating feedback into work. I always say share, work early, and then you wanna actually get really good at listening to what people say and learning how to incorporate it. And then communicating just the status and plans of your team, build more visibility into what they're doing. Finally, you're gonna start investing in team culture. At this stage, it's probably things like ensuring there's like some team health going on. There's might be standups or retrospectives or just even just celebrating the moments where you succeed or fail. So coming back to the latter, the early stage of PM career focuses primarily on what you can see as these bottom two layers of accountability. And a PM success at this stage is primarily driven by the ability to get stuff done. So as you grow over the stage of your career, you'll likely pick up larger responsibilities and you will grow by start leading multiple teams. The reward for PMs who do good work is often more work. So this is why the next stage of development is team effectiveness. In order to continue to scale, you need to learn how to keep a team effective even if you're not able to be in every meeting or decision point with them. Once you're leading across a larger team or many teams, the relationships you have with the specialists matters a lot because you're gonna have to dip in and out of these teams at critical points to deliver on execution outcomes. So this takes you into the mid-career stage. Many PMs at this point find themselves leading several loosely connected projects and at the limit of their personal capacity to execute on each one. So there's a key pivot point here. In order to have more impact, you can't really just keep executing. At this point, you're probably very good at getting stuff done given the right resources and direction to head it. So thinking back to my career at this point, I was leading across multiple internal teams building productivity applications for Google employees. So very much an enterprise focus, but I was working on a range of different products at different stages. So it became really important to balance my time and be able to articulate the opportunity cost of doing X versus Y given our current resourcing. So the nature of the job actually shifts. Learning more impact becomes more about how you coordinate between disparate teams towards a common goal. Or in larger organizations, it's about how you influence outside your area of control, convince other teams that are not a part of the company to work with you on a common goal. So yes, we're actually talking about product strategy here where a higher order understanding of the why and how needs to be expressed so a PM can influence both inside and outside the domain to get teams to band together. Sometimes this takes the form of ramping down existing efforts or pitching for new funding, resourcing and bringing folks onto the team. So let's talk a little bit about the skills you need at this stage. On the hard skills side, there is obviously building product strategy. If you have the time and inclination, I highly recommend a book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. It goes into a lot of detail, it's just excellent. And then once you have a strategy, you need to actually take it and connect it to priorities. Then you need to define what I call guiding metrics. These are higher level metrics than just a teams metrics that actually you can measure them to see if you're succeeding in your strategy and they tend to pull teams together. You're then going to start working on probably things that are more complex, roadmaps that are involved, things like migration or deprecation or prototyping. So you may have multiple teams, different maturity levels, and you're going to kind of flex how you think about roadmaps to suit where they are. You're going to start creating like longer term goals, maybe like one year out. These are more strategic in nature. They might be annual, they might cover a range of teams. They may be shared between teams too. Then on the soft skills side, you're probably going to need to be really good at designing and facilitating workshops. I'm talking about doing summits or sprints. Design sprints are an excellent resource. You may have actually done a couple of these as a more junior PM, but at this point, this should be like tools you have in your toolbox. You know how to deploy really well. You can identify when a team needs one and you can go and get it done. Then the interesting thing about leading across teams is that you immediately can tell the difference between a higher performing and a lower performing team. So part of your job starts becoming looking into why teams are lower performing and then how to actually get them out of that mode. You're going to manage a much more complex list of stakeholders, probably in and around you and the organization. And so that also involves getting really good at communicating succinctly up and outward in ways that make sense to them. And then finally, you may be starting to become a people manager here. It's not required, but what you will do is actually starting to attract and retain talent onto your team. So even take this as an example, your engineering lead might come to you and say, hey, for this project, I'm really trying to attract this key engineer. I think they're really great. Can you please convince them of this project? And so that actually becomes part of the job. You start practicing it with other roles too. Eventually you're going to be starting to hire your own PMs onto the team as you become more senior yourself. So coming back to the latter, this mid-create stage of PM is all about making this lead from tactical strategic ownership. So it's no longer sufficient to just get things done. Over this period in your career, you'll go from being accountable for delivering product strategy to supporting the team through hiring and retention. And then finally, taking this wider organizational view across all resourcing and priorities. Keep in mind that this will likely span a much longer period of time than before due to the amount of effort it takes to actually define a strategy, shift priorities, then deliver by execution. So at this time stage, you should be constantly seeking to understand the opportunity cost of executing against current priorities versus potential strategic opportunities and learn how to define and communicate this opportunity cost to both the team and stakeholders. So then once a strategy is selected, the challenge becomes, how do you align the organization? Which may have been working on different priorities to deliver against this strategy. All the skills you master in execution and building effective teams come back to bear here. Now you can't possibly be everywhere at once. So you'll be balancing your time between teams to help set their direction and then you might step into the day-to-day execution only when necessary to unblock another performing team or create a new one. This is a really hard transition to master. I can't overstate this. Take some time and take some patience. As this is the first time, though definitely not the last time in your career where you have to actually avoid all the things people love you for and you can't do the work you were doing previously. And instead you got to teach your peers or junior PMs to influence you influence to start driving execution outcomes themselves. So assuming you do this successfully, you're starting to push into demands of like a later stage PM career. And here's where you're going to be leading larger organizations. To ballpark this, I'm going to say it's about like an organization of 100 plus people. That's just an average. I'm saying that because it's when you actually encounter problems that you get when you manage many different job functions. There's many layers of hierarchy to organize those people between you and the team's focus on execution. And so at this stage, many product managers find themselves managing managers. And while it's actually very possible to be an individual contributor, you're still going to play a really important role shaping the standards and best practices for PMs across your organizational company. So you're a leader no matter what. At this point, you've proved your ability to set strategy at the level of probably a single product line. And you're now stretching to define the purpose at the company level. What's the purpose of your organization? Which may involve many product lines at varying levels of maturity. So the nature of your job shifts again and you'll be spending the bulk of your time with senior leaders in your company helping align across a variety of domains. In this part of your career, you're going to take a much broader view and align your organization's purpose to the company's success. And this may involve managing major commitments to key clients or even restructuring to shut down or merge teams that are not delivering with strategic projects. So building on the skills you develop for product strategy, you'll need to think into the even longer term, something like two to five years, which will mean articulating an opinionated view on how your organization needs to transform over that time to deliver value to the company. So again, you're stepping away from the things you did really well during your mid-career, which were often focused on being a highly effective manager or a strategic leader. Now your focus will be creating purpose and getting the organization to align around a strategy and deliver. So let's talk about the skills you need at this stage. I've already talked about purpose. It's really important to kind of think about why is there a team of this size at this point in time? What can you uniquely deliver that nobody else can? Then you're going to spend a lot of your time doing actual hiring, thinking about retention, thinking about organizational health. You'll be defining the organizational structure. Like you'll actually be building layers of senior leaders and teams and trying to think about how do you make them complementary with each other. You're going to be connecting the actual business priorities of the company to strategy and resourcing.  You'll spend a lot of your time doing decision-making and approvals, right? You're running a fairly large organization at this point. So people will be coming to you to like approve things. And so setting up good processes to handle this is really important. And then on the soft skill side, a large part of the job actually becomes people management directly or coaching. You're actually going to be growing senior leaders. So you need to think about this yourself. You'll be defining what a healthy culture actually looks like in your organization. This is beyond just like individual teams, including things like DEI and making sure that the organization is kind of supporting itself really well. You'll probably almost be leading through change. You need to think about change a lot because at an organization that side, there'll be teams that are in some state of flux and like being very good at knowing how to communicate change and land it with the team becomes really important. And you'll be providing air cover for your teams. You know, you want to be a good leader and you want to actually like help them change when they need to, but you also want them to have agency and go innovate as well. And so you'll have to decide where the line is and when to defend them from incoming escalations. And that gets to the last part. This is the sad news, but unfortunately at this point, you're in an organization that is large enough that you will always have overperforming underperforming teams, overperforming underperforming people. There'll be always be some sense of conflict. And so you'll actually have to be really good at mediation, resolving conflict, dealing with escalations, dealing with firefighting. So looking back at the career ladder, at this stage you're mastering how to transform organizations themselves, lead with purpose and scale senior leaders. PM leadership at this stage tends to become a little bit similar to other senior organizational leaders. So at many companies, you might actually become the single-threaded owner or start leading as a GM or a CTO, whether or not you manage people directly, you really will be a people leader. So you'll need to ensure that you can support the needs of many different functions within your organization, but actually deliver on business outcomes that you are accountable for. The buck pretty much stops at you at this point. So late career PM relationship is all about scale. And when you scale people, you get complexity. So there's no real guidebook behind this point as you're very much in charge of your own destiny. That doesn't mean you have it all figured out far from it, but it's the point where you pull together your cumulative mastery of skills that you built at earlier stages of your career. And it's the point where you master the most important scale of them all in my opinion, which is scaling yourself. So I've saved the best for last, I think ultimately growing as a product manager is all about actually being able to scale yourself. So we had contradiction of product management career is that it's at the same time, both a people focused job, but it's also quite a lonely role at times. PMs are by design very rarely allocated to the same team with same responsibilities. So it's considered best practices to give PMs clear scope and ownership so you can unlock their creativity and avoid friction. This effect only gets more pronounced and more senior you become in your career. As the teams you lead look to you to define purpose and help unblock them, but at the same time you're further away from their day-to-day team activities. So you kind of get more isolated in a way. Outside of these hard and soft skills it's important for PMs to learn to scale themselves. And that means as you progress in your career, you take the time to master skills at each stage instead of just blazing through and you minimize the amount of time and energy it takes you to solve particular problems. So you're actually creating this space for sustainable growth. So burnout in the PM role is actually a real risk. I don't think people talk about it enough. And as someone who's experienced work-induced burnout before I've learned a few lessons to help me scale at a pace that I consider sustainable. So number one, be aware of transition points in your career so you know when to seek growth. I've talked about a few of these points in this talk, but here are the most important ones in my mind. One, when you start moving from execution to strategy. The two, when you learn to influence across many different teams including ones where you're not actually the primary product manager. Number three, when you start managing product managers and then again to a lesser extent where you start managing managers or product managers both times your job changes. And number four, when you're actually transforming organizations and thinking about how to lead through change. Each of these stages represent a time in your career when you find that everything that got you to this point will not get you any further. And if you try to just do more of what you're doing you actually run that risk of burnout. It's important to know when you're one of these stages you take a step back, identify the skills and behaviors you need to develop. There's no doubt that you're actually gonna do a worse job for a period of time and you need to be okay with that. These are times of growth and if you don't allow yourself some space to experiment and fail, well, you just won't learn how to scale. So the second tip I have is to create space to intentionally reflect during times of the year. So at least once a year I would say create a period of reflection. You can ask yourself the following questions. One, am I learning something new or am I just implementing what I already know at a greater scale? But two, how can I reduce the amount of time and energy it takes me to drive a particular outcome and just focus on one? Number three is who's a good role model for the behavior I wish to learn? There's a piece of advice I got from a mentor on mine if you wanna go to the next level try and find someone who represents a really good role model at that level just observe what they do and more importantly observe what they don't do and then start to kind of match your behavior it'll kind of teach you where you should be investing your time. Number four, I'll hop on about this a lot but do you have a mentor that can help you grow? And that's really important like mentorship in every stage of your career is one of the best ways to kind of have somebody on your side kind of helping you grow try and find somebody who's close in you and seniority just maybe in the next stage of their career who's willing to spend some time with you to kind of objectively talk through where you are. So these are all questions you can ask and techniques you can use to step out of your day to day and check in to see if there's more you can be doing to grow. So the thing is, there really is kind of infinite room to grow. I mean, I'm more than a decade into my career as a PM I still have a lot to learn and I find that really exciting. Much of what I shared with you today is the wisdom of many great mentors and managers who've helped me on my journey and we're still kind of in early in defining what a PM career really looks like end to end. So we all get to be part of this journey and that's really fun. So I'd love to hear from you on how you think about growth in different stages of a PM career. So we can kind of broaden our collective understanding with more perspectives. So thanks for taking the time to join this webinar. I'd absolutely love to hear from you. So if you have any questions or feedback or comments on my wonderful illustrations, please find me on LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation there. Have a good one.


Hi, so my name's Tom. I'm a front-end web developer at a company called With Associates. We're a digital agency based up in Hackney, and we make websites and apps and other webby stuff like that. My talk today is going to be pretty short, essentially just going to be running through my first Ember app. I'm reasonably new to Ember, I've been coming to the meet-ups for a little while. But yeah, it's my first Ember app that I've worked on from the beginning and it's gone into production. And I'm going to talk a little bit about reasons for choosing Ember, some of the design decisions behind the apps, some things I liked about Ember and that I found useful, and also some things that I found a bit tricky or that tripped me up a bit. So a quick bit of background about the project. We worked with an artist, illustrator, author called Marion Duchard. You may have seen her work around, if not check it out, it's really cool. And basically we made a promo site for her book series, which is called Let's Make Some Great Art. And these are sort of beautifully drawn, fun activity books for kids. And so along with the promo site, we made some sort of web-based drawing apps, which were essentially digital versions of the activities in the books. We made a bunch of prototypes and some were pretty silly, but we picked three and built them and they looked a little bit like this. There's no not using any framework there, it's just sort of vanilla JavaScript and a little bit of jQuery and some sort of custom scaffolding around which they're built. But they worked pretty well and people used them and they used them quite creatively to make stuff like this, which is a sort of punk rock monster with a big bogey hanging out her nose and a sort of relaxing beach scene and this kind of fashionable cowboy with a nice shirt and a turtle being sick. But so those all looked really nice, but the problem is the code looked a bit like this. You know, it's just one big long file with no comments or documentation and some sort of bizarre naming schemes and decisions in there and really I was the only person that fully understood it because I built most of it. So maintaining and iterating on it wasn't that fun. So when Marion came to us and asked if we could make some more changes so that she'd be able to use the apps in an exhibition she was having up in Scotland where the kids would sort of be drawing on iPads in the exhibition space, I was a little bit worried and I looked at this code and my face looked a bit like this. So I decided to sort of learn a bit of Ember and rebuild it in Ember rather than sort of digging through the old code and trying to bludgeon it in there. So it's not really modelling much data or anything like that so it's not exactly a prime candidate for a full on framework like Ember. But I think there's plenty to Ember that makes developing any kind of front end application really nice. So why Ember? Well I wanted a code base that was easy to maintain and iterate on unlike the previous one and that meant having some structure and conventions and I didn't want to have to plan these out myself in advance or sort of retroactively try and fit them in so Ember's good for that. I wanted to make use of the work of plenty of smart people who worked on Ember which left me to do just the fun bits like the drawing code and stuff like that. And so this is the Ember version. It looks very similar, it's got some new design elements and some different buttons and stuff like that and it didn't take too long to port across. There wasn't a huge amount of code reuse but now it's iterating on this and maintaining it's really easy. If we want to add in some new functionality like a new modal or a new button that does something else it's just a case of adding in another component. So some of the stuff that I liked about Ember components, components are really cool. Tidy units of functionality that do one thing well and they're supposed to be reusable where possible. I didn't worry too much about that because I think they're really great for just packaging up any nice tidy unit of code whether it's particularly reusable elsewhere or not. And they're really simple and obvious. It's sort of one JavaScript file and maybe a handlebars file. So it's a good way to keep the code nice and tidy. So this is just a simple component that we're using it which is just an overlay. It's got some content in between the handlebars tags that we want to show at a certain point and the isVisible flag is just its computed property on the controller to say when the overlay should show. And so in the JavaScript it just looks like this. There's another computer property there which just sets the display CSS to block or none depending on whether we want the component the overlay to show. But one thing I found a little bit difficult or a little bit confusing with components was how to get a component to do something for you on command. This is the sort of main interface for interacting from a parent view into a component and back which is just basically a bunch of sort of shared data bindings. So I think what you're supposed to do is make the data available all the time across these bindings that you want the parent view to be able to interact with. But that was a bit tricky with the canvas component because the data I wanted to send back up was a computed PNG data URL which on the iPads it took about a second to compute that and during that time the interface locked up. So I really only wanted to do that under specific scenarios when the user clicked save or something like that. I'm still not really sure the best way to do this but we opted for an in-between way which is basically this function update value gets debounced when the mouse up or the touch end happens and then if the user starts drawing again during that half-second it will just cancel updating that value. In components like views they have access to all the interaction events like touch events and this isn't really ember specific really but I thought it might be nice to just run through it quickly in case anybody's interested. So in the component you can just alias the mouse methods to the touch events but you have to do a little bit of work to get sort of compatible event data through that. So for a single touch it's quite easy because you can just do the mouse event or the touch event but for multiple touches which you wanted so that you can draw with lots of fingers it's a bit tricky because you have to keep track of the change touches through an ID like that. One other thing about components and events unlike jQuery or playing JavaScript where your event handler the context is going to be the DOM element in a component it will be the component or the view which is fine once you get used to it but it tripped me up a couple of times when I was porting code across. And then another thing services they're not really the most exciting bit of ember but I think they could be useful for all kinds of things a good use case that I came across was for doing responsive interfaces where you can obviously do a lot with just CSS but there might be times that you want your controller or some logic in a component to know what the view port is like to hide or show some specific interface or do things differently. So this is a really simple view port service that's in there which just gets the window width and height and it's got computer property whether the view port is a mobile device and then it's getting injected into the component and the controllers so that we can use it in there like this in the template where I'm only showing certain user interface elements when it's on a mobile device and also in the canvas component where I'm using some CSS properties to zoom out so it's not kind of massive on the screen so it's useful to know that in there too. The other thing that's cool ember app kit or ember CLI now when I was building this CLI wasn't quite ready so I used ember app kit which was really cool I've got lots of fun stuff in it but for me as a beginner learning ember all the stuff around the ember code like the ES6 transpiler and broccoli and bower and NPM if you're not familiar with those things at all then that can be kind of daunting just getting to the ember specific stuff and to compare with my single JavaScript file at the beginning that the app kit tree looks like this which is also pretty daunting if you're new to ember and you don't really know what's going on but I think now this is really useful for keeping code separate doing what it's supposed to be doing and yeah so my talk was supposed to be a short talk so that's pretty much where it ends but I just show you some photos of the apps in action so this is setting up the iPads this is the exhibition space and there's some in use and some of my favourite drawings that came out of the exhibition there's this cool guy in a red hat nice stick lady sort of rainbow bus which I liked Mona Lisa clan face on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and yeah that's it so thanks Q. Could you talk us through the ejection stuff you did with the viewport again I found that really interesting I haven't used the ejections yet so I tried to and failed for most of the weeks so this viewport service up here it's just got a... you can put a bunch of functions on it it will essentially act like a global variable when you inject it into here so what we're doing is ingesting this viewport service into the component and then in the component you can just access it as a property on the component itself so .viewport.isMobile Q. In your naming convention you're about to last screen you're injecting so app.inject component obviously is where you're injecting it Q. Yes Q. Then viewport is the name of this so this is a bit confused about the ES6 transpiler but this gets imported as viewport and then sorry so it's viewport and then gets injected into the component with this namespace Q. So service viewport is the name in the actual container and then viewport is the name that's exposed to us Q. What that's missing is where it registers there's a line probably above the service where it registers that service as service Q. In this example that's probably not necessary right? Q. No I just picked out these lines just to show how it's used in the app I mean Q. Is it just too clarified so appkit and CLI now if you put file in app slash services slash viewport in this example it will be made available as a module with that namespace and then the resolver knows when you say service code on viewport it will go and find that module load it in create it and sub it and then inject it in all right places Q. With that with the namespace in the second Q. So that's the property name it will get on the target object Q. Any other questions? Q. But before and after Q. Yes Q. I reckon there's probably less code now there's less code now but it's just split up amongst a bunch of different files for doing stuff like you see how easy the overlay component is when I was written in jQuery there's a lot of sort of like handling interaction events and where it's on in the ember vision it's just toggling a flag and it shows or it doesn't show so I mean there's obviously more code in the ember vision but I've only written a small part of it Q. Is it available to more comments Q. Yes, yeah maybe you can correct me from wrong Jamie but if I put the name of my component after this just inject it into a specific component


Well, let's review something that we have seen with Stefano and Oliver and Lucia and Irene and David. We'll be working with a set, a sigma algebra b and mu, a measure. And just to keep it simple, we are going to assume that this is a probability measure, the probability measure is when the measure of the whole set is one. Okay, and so we, you have seen, I think with Stefano, you have seen the Birk of Ergodic theorem. I don't know if you remember it, I will. And so, you have this, and just assuming that mu was an invariant measure, invariant measure for measure of map f, well, we have put other hypothesis on f, we will review it. Then almost every point satisfies this. This limit exists for almost every point, okay, for some, let me, let's keep it like this. Okay, this is what we have seen with Stefano. Remember that? Yes. Yeah, it's for, we have seen this for every c continuous map, have you seen, or have you put other hypothesis on c? L1. Okay, thank you. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, so we should state this better so as not to avoid confusions. We first state the c, thank you. We first state the c, then you see what Amy's comment is, this is a, there exists a set of measure one, okay, for, for every c there exists a set of measure one on which this holds. But this measure, set of measure one is not universal, that's not, that's good for every c. So, this set, this is a set will depend on c. Okay, so this is what we have seen, and now we are going to see a version of a previous version, which is a version of von Neumann, it's a mean ergodic theorem, version of this, but, and this states something more or less similar, but it says, now we have this f will be measure preserving, measurable, and then for, I will explain this for people who doesn't know, who don't know, for every map in LP, there will be, there will exist some map in LP such that this, what does this mean? This means that this goes to zero, okay, what's the norm in LP, LP, just in case you are not familiar with this, if these are measurable maps, and the norm in LP, okay, so this is, this LP with its norm is a Banach space, so it is complete, with this norm it is complete space, okay, but we are, concentrate this, I mean this is a version in mean, the mean ergodic theorem, okay, here you got this for almost every point, and here you got, you got it in mean, okay, we will concentrate though in the case P equal to, what's so special about P equal to, is that this LP, in the case of P equal to, is a Hilbert space, this is a Hilbert space, what's a Hilbert space, well if you don't know it, just it's a Banach space, but which has, its norm comes from an inner product, what's the inner product in our case, in our case, this will be the inner product, okay, sorry, no, no, no, thank you, P will be greater equal than one, thank you so much, but we will focus on P equal to, okay, and so this is a Hilbert space, so we will have this inner product, and what's so nice about this, is that we can make projections, okay, and this is our idea, yes, the L2 norm like this, but with P equal to, yeah, the norm will be, okay, so let's just make a comment about what we are going to do, we are going to prove this in a very, well we haven't proved this, but just we are going to give it an easy proof of this, but before that let me, let me define the conditional expectation, just to make a few comments, we are not going to use the conditional expectation in the proof, so well we have B is our sigma algebra, but let's suppose we have a subset, a sub-sigma algebra, let's take, and we want to produce a map, which we are going to call like this, we want to produce a map that is in LP of this sub-sigma algebra, but it has the same integral, okay, this exists, is unique, and it is defined by this formula, of course, over the sets where this makes sense, I'm not going to prove this, but you can prove it if you like, then ask me, I will give you some hints, okay, the claim is that for every phi in LP, there exists a unique map, this is a map in LP, but of the sub-sigma algebra, so that's for any open set we have that this belongs to B, okay, but now for this let's call it, just to be simple, this is more restrictive because the pre-images of any open set will have to be in B prime, these are less sets, we have less sets to choose, so even so we managed to produce the same integrals, integrals over all B in B prime, okay, we're not going to use this in the proof, but what it's good to have an idea of what we are producing with this theorem in terms of the conditional expectation, we have a very interesting sigma algebra of the invariant sets, we have this, this is a sub, what are these, these are the sets, the sub-sigma algebra of invariant sets, okay, okay, and so in particular the conditional expectation sets that we have that, you can check it, this map, this is a set of F invariant sets, this map, these maps are the set of invariant maps, of course, with, so we have a characterization of orthodic maps, these all I leave you as an exercise, choose white, have the following remarks, remember the definition we have done of our codicity last week and that Amy reviewed today, I think it is, but it is, I make a confusion because I define this, like this there and the conditional expectation, it will eventually be the same, it will be the same, because it will, I mean for the Hilbert space this will be like the projection of C into the subset of invariant functions, okay, this is what we are going to see in a minute, but in that case, in this case was just coincident that I used the same notation, it will be eventually the same, okay, so F is ergodic if this subalgebra of the F invariant sets is modulo zero, the trivial sigma algebra, this is, well this modulo zero, modulo zero measure sets and less trivial can prove that F is ergodic if and only if L2 with respect to this sigma algebra consist of constant functions, obviously constant modulo zero, almost everywhere constant and the third is that this, in fact is this, not BF, B, okay, for all P in L1, this is this, well this I leave you, these are remarks, but you can, this is some of them are more advanced exercises, that's true for LP, yeah, it's true for LP and P greater equal than 1, yeah, okay, okay, so let's, more remarks, do I have time, yes, more remarks, this is our characterization of ergodic proof, just let me observe that if F is invertible, then the sigma algebra of invariant sets for F is the same sub sigma algebra of invariant sets for F to minus one, okay, this follows from definition, okay, and in this case we would have if F is invertible and since these sub sigma algebras are the same, we will have that E, the conditional expectation will be the same and in particular this, we will have this, this will be very useful, remember this for later when we are going to see the hope argument, this limit is the same if we iterate forward or backward, okay, I'll state it with P, but we are going to focus on P equal to, as N goes to infinity, so remember this when we see hope argument, yes, this uses that this is indeed this, this is going to be the conditional expectation, this limit map is going to be the conditional expectation on the sub sigma algebra of invariant maps, okay, I have a further comment which is going to be one of our exercises today, I don't want to erase this, well I don't want to but I will, pardon, F is invertible and its inverse is measurable, yeah, thank you, that's true, not only the best approximation but in the case of Hilbert space, it will be indeed the projection, which is the best approximation, okay, it will be in LP, LP is not Hilbert space, that's not have an inner product, but in the case of L2 which does have an inner product, it will be the projection onto the space of invariant functions, okay, so I have this final remark, how this mean ergodic theorem is related to the bulk of ergodic theorem which I erased, I probably you know this, but I will put it as an exercise, it's an exercise or just remember it if you have seen it some at a certain moment, if you have a sequence converging LP, then there exists some subsequence such that converges almost everywhere, okay, so in particular we obtain the bulk of ergodic theorem but for some subsequence, okay, for some subsequence we obtain this, in fact we will have, well this is going to be this, well I have not written this here but it is, you can prove it too that this is an invariant function, you can prove it, yes, it, yes but we have not proven it yet, so you, if you only have this, that this has a limit, you can prove only with this statement, you can prove this, okay, and once you have this, you can prove this, okay, so let's go into the proof, so the idea, the idea is to decompose the space, well we have the Hilbert space of L2 maps, the idea is to decompose the space into the subspace of invariant maps and in orthogonal complement, okay, and then project any map into the subspace of invariant maps, okay, and this, in this way, well we, we will prove that for maps in this subspace they go, every map goes into the projection, into the invariant space maps, so let me be more clear, so this is going to be, we are going to use this notation, H is going to be L2 and we are going to consider the Kupman operator is going to go from H to H, supername but it's the operator, it's very simple, it's just composing with F, okay, so this operator is, has the following properties and it's continuous and its norm is less than one, what's this, what's, what's U star, U star is the operator defined by this, so what we mean here is that U star is the inverse of U, oh yeah, okay, U of 1 equals 1, so this, you will have to prove it but it's, this is easy, spend time in this, so we have this and so this is a continuous operator and so we have the following decomposition, we can decompose the Hilbert space into the following space, subspaces, the kernel of U minus I plus the closure of the image of U minus I, I'm not going to prove this if, but if you have never seen this, you just, just can imagine in algebra and finite dimensional spaces you have this without this closure, okay, you have seen this for finite dimensional vector spaces in algebra, okay, so it's the same only that it's higher dimensional version of it, okay, so more exercises prove that this is an orthogonal decomposition, prove that this is orthogonal and prove that this decomposition is U invariant, if you apply U to this space it goes into this space and if you apply U to this space it goes into a space, so it is U invariant decomposition, okay, so let's see, so we have this space of all L2 maps and then we have this and then we, we will take any map here and we will apply this procedure of averaging this and we will see that this converges to the projection of this map into this subspace, okay, this is what we are going to do, but here we are going to use that this is, well, this is invariant and so first thing is that we are going to write this sum in terms of U, so let's take, let's begin by taking an L2 map and then let's write this in terms of U, so this is in fact this, okay, you apply U k times and you average this and the idea is just taking any map, the vectors and the idea is applying U and averaging and see that this converges to be a vector, the project, it converges to be a vector of this space but not any vector, just the projection of phi, how can we do this? Well, one possibility is what we are going to do, seeing this for any phi, we are going to take a phi here and see that this holds for phi here and also take f, sorry, fc here and seeing that this holds for maps here and taking fc here and seeing that this holds for maps here and since now any map can be decomposed as if this holds for this and this it holds for this, so let's take this one, we take c in curve of U minus i, what does it mean to belong to curve of U minus i? It means that U of c equals c, so this implies that c is invariant, the kernel of this, this is how, I mean, this is why we chose this in the first place because we wanted to project it into invariant maps, so that is why we chose this subspace and not other one, okay? So if this is in the kernel of U minus i, this implies that this is an invariant map and if this is an invariant map then this, what this is equal to because all of this will be c, you will be summing this n times and divided by n, so then we will have that, so this will trivially go to c which belongs, so this not only converges, it's constant, it's a constant sequence, so for the first case if we take a map here, this trivially follows, the second case is more delicate and we are only considering maps in the image and I will leave you as an exercise to see that this holds when you go to the closure, okay? So let's consider case two and with this we finish, so this implies that phi equals some U of some phi minus phi, okay? So it implies it is phi of f minus phi, but then when we evaluate this, this sum, we will get the following, see? I just applied the definition, but what kind of sum is this? Telescopic, so all the intermediate will be cancelled, so at the end we will have, and this is no other thing than U nf, sorry, this goes to 0 in Lp, this goes to 0 in Lp because, well, this is finite U divided by n and this will go to 0 and this, we have stated that this is, its norm is less than 1, okay? So this in norm will be less or equal than 1 over n and this goes to 0, so for the more advanced students, I leave you as an exercise to show that this holds also in the closure because I have only taken maps in the image, okay? So this goes to the closure and this is it, we're finished.


The Federal College of Education, YOLA, has been shut down by the management. This is following students unrest in the early hours of Tuesday over water scarcity in the college. According to the management, the closure became necessary to avoid the breakdown of law and order in the institution, also to prevent miscrans from taking advantage of the situation to cause destruction of facilities in the college. The problem is said to have started when the industrial borehole, which provided water to over 5,000 students broke down, bringing about a serious water shortage in the school. He said that so. He is in the interim right now. The level of concern has gone back on now. He assured me that in the morning, four talks of water will come into the college. And within a short period of time, he told me that at 12 noon today, the management will fix the generator. Only yesterday, the college received information that one of its industrial boreholes broke down. And immediately, the Works and Services Department was asked to fix the problem. Equally, the provost directed that the college water tanker be deployed to argument the problem of water shortage occasioned by the breakdown of that industrial borehole. The college has other boreholes, but given the size of our students on campus, the other smaller boreholes could not meet the water needs. Hence, the decision that the water tanker should argument while efforts are being made to fix the industrial borehole.