What's next? Yeah. Next we have Radovan Bast with a talk called When and How to Ask for Help. So, yeah. Radovan is a, what's research engineer? Is that your title? At the University of Tromso. Yes, and so nice to see you all. I'm joining here. The kickstart from Northern Norway. The sun came out five minutes ago. It's a beautiful day. And I will take over the screen. Share my slides. You can find the slides also in Indian HackMD. You can also find them on the website. And in the next 25 minutes, I will be watching HackMD for your questions. So please keep them coming. And I will talk about asking for help and answering questions or answering help with supercomputers, but not only with supercomputers, also with computers, with computing, with programming. Yeah. Okay. Don't wait, don't wait for the end task. So I know you're rather packed here, but as a starting point, would you rather more people ask for help or less people to ask for help? More people to ask for help and wait less or with asking for help. So let's ask more for help. Okay. And I understand your presentation will talk about how to ask for help in the most useful way to get the best answer fastest. But I'll also talk about the other side also, like how can we actually answer and encourage more questions. And I'm really passionate about this topic, but I'm also joining this kickstart from Norway because I really, really like to hang out with my colleagues from Aalto and CSC. It's every time a lot of fun. Yeah. So I want to hear the outline is that to list some of the, like where we can ask for help, what kinds of help is available for different levels of work, when, and the short answer here, well, sooner, always. And there will be a bit of focus on support requests so that you get quick and useful answers. And depending on how the time goes, I might also discuss how to create reproducible examples, how to grow calculations. I may not have time, but then you find this in the slides. And really the goal is to improve our experience when solving issues. And I think we should also create some guides for staff on how to answer questions and provide training for how to answer to support requests. And there is a lot of recruitment needed. So super briefly about me. I collaborate with with colleagues in Aalto and CSC through the Code Refinery Project. We have been collaborating in a couple of contexts. I started doing programming and computing during my PhD, 2004. And I've been on both sides. So I've been, I've been on the side of asking for help. I've been on the side of answering these questions. And I'm part of, I'm working in Norway within a center for high-performance computing. And many good suggestions came into these slides. So here they are listed. So thanks, thanks for these. And there you also find some more resources. So maybe let's first talk about where to ask for help. And here I listed some places where I could ask a question if I have a question about computing or programming. So I could ask my colleagues in the hallway or in a Zoom call. There is the Aalto Scientific Computing Garage. In Norway we have Q&A sessions. It's the same idea. So people can pop in and talk about their ideas or issues. There is the search engine. There are different chats. I will have some, I will focus a bit on issue trackers. Where you send an email and it opens up a ticket. I guess the main point there is that it's asynchronous somehow, like you send and yeah. Good point. So there's asynchronous. There are also resources for my engineers around you and among you. And they are good to ask for problems that is with the code you are writing or want to write or want to rewrite. And there are mailing lists and fora and stuck exchange. And more, I try to sort them a little bit also in terms of, I don't know, scariness. I think I would first start asking questions here before I would write a question on stuck exchange and many people would. And I think the one reason is that the places here on the bottom, they create kind of a permanent record of a question which can be scary, but it can also be very useful because then other people having the same question, they can find my question and they can find the answer. Yeah, like in Alto, we try to make sure that make as many questions be asked in public as possible, like internal, not public public. So that way people can learn from each other. But yeah, that's the big advantage of these, these down here because the other ones can be a little bit one-to-one. And there can be also different levels. So I can be asking for an advice. Should I do A or should I do B? I can also maybe be asking for actually having something done for me. Please can you install this? Can you help me with scaling? Can you help me programming or reprogramming? So there are different levels. Yeah, okay. Okay. I think before, before I focus here a little bit on more on the issue tracker, because I think this is the place where we very often interact with, with cluster support. I want to remind us, I think it's good to be reminded that who is on the other side of the question or the other side of the answer and there is a human being. I think it's good not to forget about it. And I have to remind myself from time to time that when I'm answering questions on behalf of the cluster support, it's good to remember that it is not easy to ask for help. The person asking for help has maybe 20 years less experience with, I don't know, Linux or command line or the Fortran or Python. Also the person on the other side has perhaps spent weeks already on this problem and is frustrated and is waiting for my answer. So I have to be really respectful. I think it's good to remind myself about it. For those asking through a ticketing system, and I should maybe also clarify what it is and I will, is that it's good to know that when you ask a question, it may not be always the same person on the other side. There might be a rotation system that this week it's, I don't know, and we go on and the week after it's Richard and the week after it's somebody else. And when I get, when people ask questions through the support line, I don't know everything. So I'm also often searching for the answer. And I'm sometimes spending less time on a supercomputer than the person asking. Also, I often don't know the person who is asking me the question. And I might not have the context. I will come back to these points. I actually remember the first technical question that I asked and the answer that is 2004 or five that was before Git and GitHub, I think they didn't exist. So I wrote a very long email, a novel paragraphs and paragraphs motivating to a researcher. I was asking, I wanted to have access to a code. And I wrote these paragraphs and paragraphs and motivated them. I was praising their work and motivating how I would use it and very polite and respectful. And after a few days later, I got all this answer that I think the person was really confused what did I really want because it wasn't very clear. And the answer was, well, I guess what I meant among all these paragraphs was, can I get please access to the code X and here it is. And this is, there's nothing wrong about this answer. So I don't show it because it's impolite. And I think this is perfectly fine. But I felt, I felt like, okay, I didn't find the right tone of asking. I was happy I got the code, everything was fine. But it made an impact on me. And 20 years later, I still remember it. So what I want to say here is that when the answer helps, it matters. It can make an impact on the person. And there's something like I've noticed, like there's a balance between being long and trying to be very polite and being short and getting the answer as quickly as possible. And I think sometimes maybe I'm too on the side of being long and polite. Yeah. Yes. So I spent half a day writing the email. And I think the other person spent half a day thinking about what does the, what do I really want? And also today, when I get such a long email at some place, I've got another novel. But good to remember, like there is another person there and they really care. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to say something about the ticketing system issue tracker. This is my understanding is that this is how it is work, how it works at auto scientific computing. This is, this is, this is how it works in Norway and also in Sweden where I used to work is that you send an email and a couple of hours later or minutes or days, somebody will answer and solve the problem. But what happens really is that the email opens up an issue or a ticket and the ticket gets a number. And I mean, in Norway, we get 10 to 13 new requests every day. And I don't know how much is, how much it is at auto. But each ticket is then filed under a number. Each ticket is an owner. And that's typically the person writing back to you. But it's good to know that the owners can change if it takes very long to resolve. Or maybe the person answering doesn't have the solution but needs to involve other people in solving it. And the first thing that the other person sees is the email subject. That's why it's really, really useful if the subject is descriptive. So this is a better subject than this one problem. Because if I see a subject email with the subject problem, I have to open it up. I have to read everything to find out what it is about. Here I get a little bit of a better idea. And if you include keywords like a software with software use or the research field, it's maybe even easier to root the request to the right person without reading everything. And if you have two issues on the same cluster or two issues that you would like to get help with, but they are unrelated, it's better to send two separate emails. So not to package them into the one, into the same email, because the person answering may be able to solve one but not the other. So it can speed things up if you send two emails instead of one. And it goes also the other way. I mean, if you talk about the same problem, then it's better to actually reply to the email and stay on the thread and not open up a new email which will open a completely new ticket, a new issue. So if we talk about the same thing, it's good if we stay in the same email. Yeah. Like if it's not linked or whatever, that can take a lot longer to deal with. Yeah, like the subject, like if I get a message and the subject seems vague, then I'll think, okay, I have no idea what to do. And it's like more resistant to looking at it. But if it's clear, like my Python job is crashing, or my Python job has import error, then suddenly it's much more clear. Yes. So that already helps a lot. And thanks also for the comments on the PMD. I'm watching them. Yeah. So it's good to provide context username if you are on a cluster with many, many users, because the person answering, they can find out who you are, but it takes a few minutes and it's not the most exciting work. So it helps already if I write my username. Explicit path is better than implicit path. Like this is in my home, but then the person needs to find out where is my home? Well, it's here. So this is helpful. Which machine it is? In our way, we have several clusters. So what cluster is this about? Which software is this about? Which research field? Also, if you use any customized environment, then you can mention it because this can make it easier to reproduce the problem. And sometimes text is better than a screenshot because I can maybe copy-paste out of a text, but also screenshot is better than nothing. Or you can send an attachment. Here's my input script. And here's the problem output. Yeah, I think this is probably one of the most important things here. So getting an issue without the context needed to know what's actually going on, there's almost nothing to do. And then it takes time making a long, nice sounding thing saying, please let us know where you are and what you're trying to run. Which I think Radhavi will mention shortly. And I may not be able to solve the problem and I may need to involve a colleague of mine. And then it's nice if there is some context already. So the colleague can read up on the context. So that helps a lot. Here are some tips on how to formulate a question that already it will again avoid a lot of back and forth. So has it never worked or has it ever worked? So has this worked last week, but has it stopped yesterday or has it never worked? I mean, this is already useful to know. Also, what are you trying to accomplish? So not just this current technical obstacle, but even to go to and I will come back to this. What did you try? What do you do? And try to be specific enough to be reproducible. So copy paste the exact commands you run, the exact output messages so that I can try to get the same problem because then it will be easier for me to work on it. Also, what do you need? Do you need a complete solution? Or do you just need like a advice pointer on how to get started? That can also help us to help. And now coming back to the question, so when to ask for help. That was the first question that also Richard asked me. So don't hesitate to ask for help and in doubt ask. Nevertheless, if I'm on the answering side, I do appreciate if I see that you spent more than two minutes on the problem before asking. So spend two minutes, but don't spend hours. I guess that means like if you say, oh, I found these pages, but it didn't work. That's appreciated. And again, let's also change the role, those helping. Don't forget that the person asking may not know yet how to look for solutions before asking. So help them showing how. Also, instead of just sending a link to a documentation, which can maybe feel a little bit rude or a checklist, which can also sound a bit annoyed. It's nice to package it into a empathy sandwich. So start with empathy and work together through the checklist. Show them what you have tried and what you have found so that we really solve it together. We are not, we are not around in this. And I think this like when to ask for help relates to the last question or last question of what to include. So like, are you just starting? So are you saying, okay, like I'm trying to do X, I can keep looking more, but do you know a quick solution? If you don't know something, then let me know and I'll try for another week and then ask for more help. So for example, I think some of this context is often missing and that means people want to wait too long or the people answering get annoyed that they're being asked too soon. So like. Tell us also what you have tried. What do you have tried to isolate or simplify the problem? Also check the documentation in the web, but again, do not hesitate to ask. Nevertheless, the documentation could be outdated. The XY problem is something that happens often is that I want to do something X and I think I do some searching and I have some reading and I think that this is a good way to solve my problem. But then I struggle with this and I hit a problem and then I write to the support and then then there is a lot of back and forth and three weeks later, 30 emails later, we realized that my approach to solve the problem that I have was not the best approach, but nobody knew because I never told anybody, but I really had in mind. So it's really useful to communicate in my request. Also, where do I want to get to? Because there may be a much better way than what I'm trying to solve right now. This goes also the other round. The other way round is that we as support staff, it's good if we try to read a little bit between the lines and not only try to close the tickets and close the issues as fast as possible, but try to go deeper if we have a feeling that there is something different that can be done, which might be better for the person asking for the research group or the students. And I would like to show you two example requests. And we can also think about what you like about these requests and I can tell you what I like about these requests. So in this example request, okay, I'm user John Doe on the cluster, so that's some cluster in no way. Since this morning, I can't log in anymore. I have tried to log in to some other clusters and this works. And the way I try to log in is I use the ZHKies, whatever that is, and the error that I get since this morning is, this is the error that I see. Thank you in advance for help advice on how to solve this. This is a very nice request. Yeah, like it shows things. And like if I see this, I immediately think, okay, so the person is probably not doing something wrong. And maybe there is a problem with the cluster. And that means it becomes top priority because it has all the information there right away. But it has everything here. I know which user, I know which machine it is. I also know that it's probably something with the machine or with the setup on the machine because it works with other machines. I also can see here that this is something that used to work. It's not the first time that the person tries ZHKies, but it's something that stopped working this morning. And then also I get an error message so I can try to search for it myself or try to reproduce myself. So very nice, very nice request. I wanted to show you another one, which is actually, it's a little bit paraphrased, but a real request. Okay, I'm not sure I wrote the right support, but what I am looking for is a virtual machine where we can install a PHP web server with a MySQL database behind it. It doesn't matter so much what these really are. What we have in mind, that's very good. What we really want to have is we want to have a service where we can share our data from our recent study. The data can be fully public. It's about 2,000 records so it's not much data and we would like to create a web front end where people can search through and plot our data. And looking forward to hear more and what you think about our approach. What is really nice about what I really like about this approach is that this request is that it's not only asking, please give me a virtual machine because I want to have a PHP server and MySQL, but also writing what they want to do with it. And this is actually a real request and it turned out in this case that there was a better way than PHP server and MySQL database. We ended up putting everything on GitHub. We didn't need any virtual machine. We didn't need any server. Everybody was happy and actually right now the collaboration with that group is paying 10% of my position. So it was really, really good to include also what they have in mind. There might be a better way. So XY problem. And I have two minutes left. So what I will skip here, I will skip this how to scale a problem and how to create a reproducible problem. But it's very useful. I still encourage you to please check out these slides. I think this is incredibly useful. I just want to go to, I want to jump to the last slide and remind that, well, you are not alone. There are resource software engineers near you. Go to Altogarache or pop in into a Q&A help session. Say hi. It doesn't have to be a problem. It can be an idea that you want to bounce off other people. You are probably not alone experiencing the issue that you are experiencing.  Many people actually really like, enjoy, they really enjoy helping. And here we talk a lot about problems and issues and tickets, but it's actually also nice to just write when something is working and when there is no problem. So every two years we get this email that somebody is actually really happy and things are working well. And this can be also really motivating to hear. So you can also write about stuff that has worked very well.  Let's see whether we have any questions that we didn't answer. So XY problem case. Yeah. So this second request that I showed would be, that was the danger of being an XY problem that asking for something very specific, if the research group didn't include what they want to get to, they would have gotten the virtual machine. I think they would not have been very happy five years later. Yeah. There's also this question about chat. Okay. I'm switching to the HackMD. There's also this question about chat for things. So it's something at Alto we're trying to use a little bit more. So the problem with chat is that someone has to be watching it all the time. And it's really easy to be asked something to ask something, and then it gets forgotten and sort of scrolls off.  But for small things like, oh, I can't connect to the cluster, is this something? Then maybe we can more immediately answer that. Or I'm interested in such and such. Is this a good idea? And you can get like some of these things. And also users can help each other because again, our chat is internal, not private. And I think I have one more answer to the question of XY problem that I see often. But I will type it there is that somebody asking for more memory. My job rents out of memory. Can you please buy more RAM or can you show me how I can use more gigabytes of memory? And that can sometimes mean that it can be useful to actually look at the code. It can be a one line change in a Python code. And suddenly something that used to consume 10 gigabytes doesn't need to be about anymore. So I have seen also XY problems like that, something that can be solved with programming instead of throwing more memory on it. Yeah, okay. So I guess next is, well, thanks for everyone who listened and answered.


Great. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another product school talk. I'm Cassandra. I'm excited to have everyone here today. As many of you know, we teach product management, coding, and data at our 14 campuses. Really excited about today's session. Since this week we have Randy Edgar, who is a product manager over at Uber, and he's going to be sharing his insights on cracking the PM interview. So hi, Randy. How are you doing today? Hey, good. Thanks for having me. Great. Well, thanks for joining us. It's really great to have you here this week. I know we've got your presentation pretty much ready to go. So before he takes over, just a quick reminder to everyone. We'll be taking questions in the Facebook comments right after his presentation, so you'll get some time there for Q&A. And Randy, I'll let you go ahead and take it from here. Okay, cool. Thanks for having me. So I've given this presentation a couple times over at product school in person. I've changed it around a little bit, but my background is I work as group product manager at Uber. I work on a lot of the communication products that we have here at Uber between rider drivers or through marketing. And in my background, I've done probably 500 interviews or so on the product management side and definitely seen sort of the pros and cons of things. And wanted to go over today the skills that hiring managers are looking for. And then some of the sample questions and go over like when you get that question, what are hiring managers actually looking for when they ask that question? And then at the end, I have some overall tips that go for any interviews, just not PM interviews that usually go pretty well. And the whole thing should go about 15 minutes or so, 20 maybe, and then I'll save the rest for questions at the end. So when we talk about the nine skills that product managers are looking for, what we do is certainly look for the main skill. And that is that you are focused on the customer, that you are creating features that you are constantly thinking of solving customer problems first. So the idea about, and we'll talk about this a little bit, but creating features just because you think it's a good idea, or you think that it'll solve some sort of need. What is the customer's need? Are you hyper-focused? Here we use the term customer-obsessed. Are you absolutely obsessed about the customer and what their needs are, or customer slash user, let's say? And making sure that everything that you're talking about is focused on the customer or user first. So what comes after that is that what a product manager's main job is, I see it as that the product manager is the person who understands what problems to solve. What is the right problem to solve? And how you go about doing that is by being very attentive to metrics and goals. Do you have the right goal for your product? Are you able to use data and metrics to determine success of your product?  And we'll get to that to the next slide. But without being hyper-focused on a goal and an objective and key metrics that you're going after in order to be successful. So that's the second one. So as long as you're hyper customer-focused and being goal and metric oriented, that usually gets you through the main part of the interview, if you will, the main file. The third piece, and I talked about this a little bit, is being data-driven. So being customer-focused means that you are diving into data, both qualitative and quantitative and understanding customer needs and understanding what people need based on the data that you see. If you have intuition or gut feeling about a certain product, that's great for Steve Jobs, but for most product managers, it's really good to have the data behind you to make an informed decision. And you're going to need that data to be able to communicate to both engineering, to executives, to design, to operations, to use data. At Facebook, they like to say data wins arguments. And I think that's a great way of summing up why it's so important to use data in your decision making. The fourth piece is how innovative are you? So can you create features based on what we just talked about that are helpful for customers, that are data-driven, that are certainly unique and can move the company forward? Can you think about new features? Can you think about why to build a particular feature and come up with something just one feature that's new? I once had an interview and I asked someone to pick a product and they started talking about what the customer needs and that sort of thing. But they came up with the most, just this very small, innovative solution, which I was totally wowed by. And she tied it back to her key goals and metrics. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But just being innovative and thoughtful about that. Fifth, certainly is what does good design and UX look like? So just because you've met a customer need doesn't mean that you're a good product manager. It means that you need to know what the customer needs within a particular product or within an application, right? So a lot of times you'll get, you might get a question about like, tell me about a product that has really good design or tell me about a product that is really poor user experience. And tell me about that. And the user experience question is really there to dive into the user need and the user flow and the mental model that the user has to go through a particular use case. So as long as you're driven by a good user experience, usually that's very helpful. So the main question I get usually is how technical do I need to be to be a product manager? And the answer to that, like a lot of the questions that we're going to go through is it depends. It depends on the company and the culture and what they're looking for. There are some companies that you need to know enough to dive deep enough to determine the right solution and be able to have a very intelligent conversation with engineering. And sometimes you need a CS degree. And sometimes you do not. And sometimes you need, you know, an experience of being an engineer. And sometimes you got there are certainly are companies that, you know, a computer science degree is required. But there are some that are not as well. So it really depends. But being the I would say it is a it certainly benefits you to have the technical acumen in depth. And to show that in an interview as much as you can. The the next one is really around inspiration. Do you have the the ability to create a vision for a product? So it's not just necessarily about features, right? So day in and day out, we have a three month roadmap or six month roadmap. Can you look deeper into the future? Can you go 18 months to two years on our or or three years on a product and really dive deep into where that product is going? And why that's so important is that you need to on your roadmap when you're building a roadmap, usually, certainly it's data driven and it's customer focused. But it's leading to an end state. There's an end goal there that you're trying to reach. And how do you get your your customers and your internal stakeholders and your and your team to buy into that vision to move towards that that vision and being an inspired communicator and have that vision and lead that team to move in that direction is really important. Certainly communication, right? So the ability to not only clearly articulate what we're what we've been talking about as far as your vision or your plan or your feature or what have you, but do it succinctly, right? So we will get through this in a little bit. But one of the questions that we usually ask at the beginning, right, is tell me about your background. As long as you can do that in a succinct manner and really clearly articulate what you want to do, that's what they're looking for, right? And so being able to just watch yourself as you communicate and give feedback, like, is this enough? Is this too much? That sort of thing. And the other one is around execution, right? So can you get your features built? It's great to have that vision. It's great that you have the acumen and skills to get a product built and get the right product built. But what is the work that you do in order to get work done? And do you mistake motion for progress? And what I mean by that is just because you're doing work doesn't mean you're making making progress towards your goal, right? So being able to clearly articulate that we have goals as a team and we have milestones and we're making progress towards towards those goals, not that just we're doing work. And the third part about that is collaboration, right? You get that in just about every interview. How do you collaborate with other teams? Product managers can't get anything built on their own, right? Unless unless you're also an engineer and a designer or a researcher, usually it's done with a team. So being able to prove and communicate that you have the collaboration skills to work with others is super important. So in a summary of this, like, it's really around, do you have the skills to determine the right, you know, problems to solve? Are you thinking about the customer and customer first and customer obsessed? Can you clearly articulate a vision? And can you build that product flawlessly and create big impact for your customers, right? So when we go into the sample questions, what what is next, the next part, you'll see that we're tying that back to the skills that we just talked about. So let's go through those typical questions that that you've probably seen on interviews, on product management interviews. And let's talk about what the what the hiring manager is looking for when they ask that question. And I put there the hint there is right, it's one of those nine school skills that we just talked about, right? So like I mentioned at the beginning, tell me about yourself or your background. That question certainly is to break the ice, but it's really also to to show the sickness and clarity in your communication. Keep it brief. Keep it just three or four minutes. If they want follow up, they can ask, but really keep it brief. I had one, I one candidate who went on for 18 minutes about their background, in a half hour interview, and I wasn't able to answer to get all the questions that I want. And you could, you could determine that that wasn't a very successful interview. But the real thing, the question that you're going to get a lot is I'll either tell you about a product here at at company X, right? Or you can pick one yourself. Just take out your phone, you might get this a lot. Take out your phone, pick any app on your phone. And tell me about a feature that you would build for that product, or we have a product here, you know, Uber eats is rolling out for fast food. Tell me about the product that you would build for that, right? You get that question a lot. So what are they looking for? So what we're looking for is the exact thing that we just talked about those nine skills. And the easiest way to break this down is to structure your answer into the skills that we just talked about, right? So first, what I would suggest is go to the whiteboard, right? And then write down the customer problem or customer needs that you see in your mind. So there's going to be more than one, right? And for and there's going to be there might be more than one customer, right? There might be like, you know, for for Uber, certainly there's, you know, right or right. There's two sides of the the market there. What are the customer problems? Right? What are their names? What do the customers have to say? What does the what a qualitative research say? What do focus groups say? What do sales say? What does support say? What is the feedback that you're hearing from customers? And then, secondarily, what's the data that you see, right? So dive into the data and make sure that you really truly understand the customer problem. Now, in this case, if you don't know what that is, you're going to have to make assumptions, right? So you'll have to say like, I assume the customer feedback said X, Y, Z or on if it's a question about a product that at the company that you're interviewing at, you're not going to know, right? So you're going to have to ask follow-up questions like, what does the data say? And what does focus groups say? And what is support saying about the product that the customer needs are? So after you go to the board and write down the problems, you'll want to write down like three or four different problems that you're trying to solve and pick one of them. And the most important thing we're looking for is the why, right? Like you're going to have to make assumptions around it, like I said, but you're going to have to say like, I'm going after this problem. It seems like the most impact for both our customer and our business and the main objectives that we're going at. So that's the third piece, right? Like what are the objectives that you're trying to solve? Right? Are you trying to solve for engagement? Are you going to start to solve for more users? Are you going to try to solve for a particular customer area? What is that objective of your product? And then come up with that feature that and then tie that feature back to the objective and the problem and the customer needs, right? As long as you've done that in a structured manner, I know as a hiring manager that you're thinking in a very structured way, the right how to solve that problem. And then as long as you have, so you come up with a feature and you're like, here's my feature and hear the key results that I see from that feature, right? This is what I'm going at. My objective is X. I'm going to go after it with these key results, Y and Z, right? And then then you talk about how I would actually measure success, right? I would measure it by by understanding the following and then the most important thing then is to tie back your answer of how I measure success. I'd like I measure success by understanding like the product adoption and the monthly active users, let's say, and then I would tie back how I got to that monthly active users to the feature that I built and not through any other cause and try to correlate that feature back to the product or sorry, the benefit, the measure of success back to the product. And then finally say, but that's not it, right? That's just my feature. But where I would go with that product after this is I would do more customer research. I would look at the data. I would understand how it's performing and then I would come up with a roadmap and iterate from there to make sure that I'm hitting my vision, right? So as long as you go to the board and structure that answer, that's really what we're looking for. So this is probably the most important slide that I'm talking about today. Another one clearly is how would you measure success of the product? What are the key KPIs? I can't tell you how many, how many interviews I've done where they did the candidate did not tie back a feature to the key product indicators, performance indicators that they're that they're looking for. If you don't have a goal, you don't have a feature, right? So make sure 100% of the time that when you have a feature that it's tied back to a customer need, but then you clearly articulate what the key the measures of success are, right? You have to have to do that. Other things you might get, I wanted to talk about this, is that you might get trade off questions. You know, what's more important, the number of weekly average users or engagement of those users? Or if you build a feature X and that's getting adoption, but it's cannibalizing another product, what do you do? Right? The answer to these questions is almost always, it depends on the goal. Right? So you're going to have to ask a question back that says it depends what is the goal of the company? Is it really to grow the number of user? Is it a brand new product that we're just trying to get as many users as possible on the platform? Or is it a stable product that we're trying to get more engagement, more user, more daily actives or more like time spent, that sort of thing? To drive other metrics. So if you don't have a clarity on what you're trying to solve, the answer will always be, it depends until you figure out exactly what the problem that they're trying to solve. It's a little bit of a trick question. So that's why I always say like, ask follow up questions or make assumptions and make sure that you're trying to figure out the key objectives of the product. Because if you don't then these questions become traps. Let me move. I know we're running a little shorter time. So I wanted to go through some of the overall tips. Okay. One that I didn't do too well on this one, but it's really about speaking slowly. The interview is a conversation. It's not a way to just talk at someone. You're talking with someone. So remember to slow down and be personable, be friendly, be kind, right? The one thing that, and there's a Malcolm Dadwell book called Blink, and the one thing they suggest in the interviews is to just smile, right? To be friendly. Like I said, follow up with questions and articulate assumptions. One of the most important things you can do is understand the company culture. So go on Glassdoor, read about it, talk to other people. The answers to your questions may depend on the culture of the company. At Facebook, there was a culture around move fast and break things. So if you talk about moving slowly and using waterfall as a technique to ship anything, you're not going to do well in that interview. So make sure you understand the culture. Really come prepared with thoughtful questions, right? Really think about what you want to ask. Any interview that ends with like, Hey, do you have any questions? And the answer is no, that's usually not a good sign because you're not really thinking through the questions that you want to ask. Also, certainly, you know, research who you're meeting with, right? Like, who is the person and do you have any shared connections with them, either through other companies, through education, through interests, like anything to break the ice and and to make the conversation more relaxed and more personable is certainly in your favor. Two last things. One, this interview is about you. So sell yourself. A lot of times people may overpivot and talk about we did this and we did that and we did that. That's not that's fine if you're talking about collaboration. But this interview is about you. So you should sell yourself. I did this, I did this, I did this, I think about this. This is how I this is how I get stuff done. And lastly, interviews are tough. They're difficult and they require practice just like anything else. Please, if you get an interview, take it even if there's a company you don't want to work for, take the interview. You'll learn something about yourself when you do that when you do that interview. So it's it's my biggest piece of advice. Take those interviews. Okay, so we got about eight minutes or so for questions. I'm happy to take anything. Awesome. Hi, Randy. Thanks for the great presentation and a really good point on understanding company culture. I think that's really so important. We have a couple questions coming in. So let's see here. One of the first ones was if you could give some more examples of KPIs when it comes to product management. Sure. So any KPI would be so you have an objective like you want to you have an objective to grow, let's say ridership by 1% or let's say less. So that the or to grow to to to, I won't use your example, to increase, you know, user sentiment. That's one of that's one of the things that I'm going after. I'm going, I think it's really important that people feel a sense of happiness or what have you about my product. What are those KPIs? So the KPIs might be a certain percentage or like how am I going to measure that? So it might say that the K are there. The key result might be I'm going to grow that by 5%. And how I'm going to do that is by sending out weekly surveys, but to to users every every X number of days. Right. It could be around engagement. So how often people come back to the to the particular product right over the app. It could be around how many monthly active or daily active or weekly active users. Those are all key KPIs. And usually they include a number over a period of time and how it's measured. Awesome. Thank you. Our next question comes from Igor. Do you have to be a domain expert in a specific industry in order to be a good PM? Yeah, that's an awesome question. The the answer like it almost every it depends, right? So there are some companies that only want to hire people that have a domain expertise in certain jobs. Usually it's very it's it's more like unique to a particular industry like I'm looking for someone with a like a really good oil and gas experience because I'm creating some product over there and that you do need to have that experience for me. And you so for a lot of the interviews we do, we're just looking for really good people. And and the answer for me is usually no, it doesn't matter as long as you stick as long as you have a product mindset, as long as you're thinking about a particular product in the ways that we talked about, it doesn't matter about the the background that you have as far as like different domain expertise. Awesome. We have quite a few more coming in. So let's see this next one is from. Okay, Winston, oftentimes product managers get overly obsessed with a specific KPI. What tips do you have to ensure you don't go down the wrong path or you're not analyzing the wrong metric? Yeah, that's a good question. So it could be that KPI is right. But like, so the question is really not just about like, are you solving the right problem? But do you have the right measures in place? Right? So I would say, what's the overall goal of your product? Right? So go back to the goal of your product, right? And it by moving a particular KPI, right by X percent or what have you, if you have four different KPIs, which one of those sort of that which one of those is moving the the needle of the objective in a better way, right? So always so Winston, what I would say with that is always go back to the key objective and try to understand which one of those KPIs is going to move that objective the best. That's that's the one that you should be focused on. The other one might be time considerate. So it might be that this is my key KPI for the first six months. And after that, I'm going to move over here. That's okay as well. As long as you're deliberately talking about why you're doing why you're going after that strategy. Awesome. And we have some more coming in on the interview process. Let's see here. Kelly, what's your advice if you're given a product challenge in a domain that you know very little about? So for example, a non social networking company asks you to dream up a new messaging tool for Facebook, but you don't use Facebook. So, so you can either, you know, be completely honest that that that is something that is out of your domain, which is fine. Like being completely honest in an interview is is is great. Like, certainly as a consultant, the best thing you can say oftentimes is I don't know, we'll get back to you. Right. So that one you could say like this is that is not my domain expertise. I might have to ask you a lot of questions or, you know, make a lot of assumptions about what I'm going to go through. Is there another example that may be maybe better? Do you have another example that we could go down? And if they say yes, great. If they say no, then you're going to have to say like, well, can you give me a minute or two overview about the product and or the domain or the product space just so that I understand the context a little bit better. Awesome. That's definitely a good way to go about it. Our next question comes from Winston. Here, actually, sorry, they keep coming in. Okay, here it is. Sorry, this is from Steven. I understand that you said we should talk more like I did this and focus on, you know, things that you've accomplished. But when I do that, sometimes I feel like I come off as selfish or showing off. How would you recommend focusing on what I did without appearing showy? Yeah, yeah, that's a good question too. These are all good questions. So you are there to sell yourself, right? So to come off as showy, you can balance the eyes and the wheeze. But when you talk about we, you talk about like, I didn't do this on my own. Certainly I was using, you know, I was collaborating with these different folks. As long as you're making a balance between the eyes and the wheeze, that's okay. But this is an interview about you, right? So we want to know how you think, we want to know what you've done versus like just in general, like, yeah, we built this product and we did this. It's really hard to decipher what it was that you did. So oftentimes I'll ask the question like, okay, I understand what it was that you worked on. What was it specifically that you did, right? So really, you know, it's more of a balance, but I'm just trying to articulate to not balance too much on the wheeze side. All right, awesome. Well, that's just about all the time we have today. We do have a lot more questions coming in. So we'll try to get back to those on Facebook and if, yeah. Yeah, I'll come back to to the Facebook group and then over the next day or so and try to answer as many questions as I can. Okay, awesome. Appreciate that, Randy. And thanks again for a great presentation. Before we let you go, I would love to hear your final advice for aspiring product managers. Final advice. It's a great field. It's really fun. Just keep practicing, keep at it. And the other one is my old manager used to do this and I used to love this. Every app that you use on your phone, think about what the objective that app is trying to solve. And if you were product manager, what would you do about it? And why? And you get into the cadence of thinking like that. It makes interviews like this so much easier. Awesome. Well, thank you again, Randy, for joining us. I appreciate it. Okay. Thanks very much. Yeah, thanks, everyone. If you guys want to get more information about us, you can go to productschool.com and we'll see you guys next week. Thanks. Bye.


Okay, let's try this one again. Rank the following in order of increasing the activity. So the fastest one is going to be number 4. Okay, this one's ranking leading groups in an SM1 reaction. So which would give you the fastest SM1 reaction? The biggest one. The biggest one is going to give you. The biggest one, okay? Why the biggest one? Not chlorine. That's iodine, right? So iodine is going to be 4 or 3 in this case. Roaming is going to be 2 and chlorine is going to be 1. Why? Well it is bigger but not because it's going to make the reaction more polar. Anybody remember what we said? What was that? Polarizability. Kind of, I guess you could think of the bond as more polarizable. But it's really, if you recall what we said was bigger atoms can carry a negative charge or any charge better than a smaller atom. Because the charge here and here is equivalent, right? Does everybody agree with that? So that's like carrying a weight, okay? So iodine is like a very big atom, okay? And it's got that negative 1 weight, okay? Chlorine is a very small atom. It's got that same weight, right? So both atoms are trying to disperse that negative charge around their surface area. So whichever one has the biggest surface area can distribute that charge to more parts of its surface area and kind of distribute that weight, if we will, right? That weight that we were talking about along more of its surface area and make it less charge dense in any one area, okay? So it can break up that charge more. Is there any questions about this one? Okay, we'll kill it.


Hi, everyone. Everyone's here. Welcome to my session. The title of my talk is Improving UX with an Interactive Decision Tree. And that's a challenge that we have had internally, and we talked about how to resolve this problem. I'm going to take you through the journey we had with it. New story here. My name is Hugo Hauman. Take lead at Morphed. I'm based in Western Australia, in part. And I've been working in the Drupal world for roughly eight years, eight or nine years now. I'm working at Morphed. And if you have been to any previous sessions today, I'm sure you have caught the Morphed tagline on what we're doing. I shouldn't bore you too much with that. We should try to get on to what we want to show you today. So I divide my talk into four, which actually five parts. So we'll do a demo in that, but run through the steps we took and how we worked with it. And often, when I have built websites in the past, who is going to write the content? But when you're working with government websites, you often face another challenge that you essentially have too much content. You have lots of documents, lots of information. Well, the problem is instead of getting the content into the website to guide the visitor to the right spot, so the visitor website can find the right information. And we needed to integrate with the Gulf CMS project as a service and software as a service. So we couldn't use custom modules in this case, because we want, while we needed to work in both ways. And it needed to be easy for a content editor to work with. If a product is not easy to work with, no one will use it, and no one would like it. It was really important for us how can we get the content editor to like what we're doing. We put a few hard requirements, things we needed to fulfill. We have other ideas as well, but these were the four hard requirements. The first one was must be manageable by a Drupal editor without any further training, or very, very little training, at least, because otherwise it defeats the whole purpose. It must work with Gulf CMS, both versions. It must instantly be no service site loading, no waiting. We want to make it easier and easy for the visitor. Easy to work with, it should be fast. And it shouldn't require an extra code. Once it's deployed, you should be able to do essentially everything, all the change you can without getting a developer on board. The solution we picked was to use the taxonomies in Drupal. They are already there. People are familiar with them. So to get any content editor or Drupal admin on board, it should be easy, and it will be easy. We opted to build it in React.js, because that's something we internally have experience with, and it seems very suitable for this use case. We have also added a handlebar, the JSON, into the compile template if needed. You don't need to use it. If you want to extend it with code, it's possible. So you don't have to touch the React code. Instead of touching the React code and compile, you can just work with a handlebar template. It can be added as a block, as a paragraph, or inserted manually in the code. And as was one of the requirements, every item can be customized in the template from the back end. This is a screenshot from the back end. I will come with a full demo yet. I just want to run through a few things that decisions we made. I have opted for a COVID symptom checker, just as a demo. As I say, I'm based in WA, where we don't have much COVID, but I can see that it's a problem in the nation in general. And it feels like everyone can identify the problems, and I've been nervous about it. So this is a screenshot from the experiment review, and those are the other steps. We have the, you can edit the terms, and we have one editor, the name is for the editor, and the option is what the user sees. And then for every step, you can display something towards the end of it. This is how it looks like in our case for the user. One thing that was important for us this door, you should get a minimum amount of coding. Like if you have a design system, it's fitting, and we can feed in the CSS. So what you see on this one is three different design systems. At the same time, we get the new design system, get the Australian design system, and bootstrap. One component is, which means you can send in your classes, and it works out to the folks. The installation is fairly simple. You create a taxonomy with the required fields. There's a few required fields and a bunch of optional fields that you don't really need, depending on if the user wants to get started. The timeline is commonly, it needs to be done yesterday, and that's what's one of the focus here. And then you create a block or a paragraph. Then you need to do a little bit of code just because we cannot have it in a module. But this is the minimal implementation. We add one div to the template, and then we require three JavaScript files. That's all we need to do. I'm not going to run through a little demo of it. And if anyone has any questions, just send them through. You got the, I may be showing a little bit, so everyone can see. This is what the user will see when they first come into the page. They will get the question, how are you feeling? Thank you, they choose if they have any of the symptoms or they're not feeling too well at all, having more serious symptoms. This can, of course, be expanded, but I should keep it very simple so we can run through the whole journey. In this case, I choose the first option, and the next question I'm getting is, which state are you based in? Because it's likely that depending on which state you should take different actions. If I were to choose Queensland, in this case, I get the next question, where do you live? What's your closest city? And I pick one on them and get a little bit of information. During this, I can always go back, either with the bottles or by clicking in this one. If we can also see, we can either present the information here or we can choose to, if I choose use in this case, it will redirect me to another page on the site. So one of the things that was the main thing with this was to not only provide information, but also getting the person to the right page. So in many ways, many times, you are testing, it was faster for a person to do maybe three clicks than to work the way from manual and read a lot. But here we can get a question south, there is no wait time, click, click, click, and it takes you straight to the right spot. Can reset, if someone feel that they haven't done it wrong, they can reset and we'll start from the beginning of the journey again. And sometimes we need to, if someone is really not feeling well, have serious symptoms, we want them to contact the emergency services as fast as possible and then we just present them with a link. So this is the front, what we'll see when we're working with it, or as a user. I will now redo that, show you back in and how easy it is to work with things in it. I'll start with just one of the terms which is the most common symptoms. This is the view for the editor. So you can set a label on one of your items, but you can set something else that are shown to the user. And if you need more information, as is so on the more serious symptoms, we can put extra, we can also put pictures. Anything you can put in a with a backend, you can put here. And once you click one, we decide to, we can show information that often we show the next question. So we show a little bit of information and then the next question, we're next step. We have a few more things that I want to divulge in now. We can choose a template depending how we want to display. So we can pre-design templates for each step. We can have a default one and for each step. You saw on the screenshot earlier, we just work our way through, essentially we can move around things and we can also do something that we call a jump. So say it's many, it could be in a case like this, it could be many different paths that should lead to that. It should contact the emergency services. And instead of adding them by the end of each step, we can choose to load here in the advanced setting, we can choose to, okay, here, when you click this one, you shouldn't go to the next step, you should be directed, you should jump through the system. The visitor will never see that, but then you can have one item. Maybe she never has to write any content more than once. And as you saw for new such ways, we can also put a redirect. So we can redirect someone to another page. And if you redirect someone to another page and choose to keep the journey on that page, you have been added as a block. That can be used with keeping, with keeping it as saving it through local storage for every click. So no matter where you are on the page, it will always remember where you are. I'll now just go quick here. If I add one term, say I add the WA here, I just write a little bit of info for this one. We don't hear much. And then I of course want to choose where in the tree. Either I choose it here or I will move it around while I create it. Once it's added, all I need to do is to reload the page and pick one here. And I have these steps. I can move on to the next step. And normally you need to clear the cache, but this is my local testing environment, so I don't have to be saving a little time there. So this is our idea. It should be easy to create this decision tree either to provide information or to guide the person to the right spot on the site. If you want more information, you can either just ask me now or send me an email or contact more. We get the exhibition both here at the conference. Any questions? Yeah, I have a question here. How many levels of nesting and rules will be possible? And I don't think that I guess if we will have a practical limit somewhere, how many nesting levels? I never managed to nest out Drupal in the economics, but if there's not a hard limit in Drupal, it would not be a hard limit in this one. But if you have 300 levels, it might be a bit heavy. So I wouldn't recommend that. You can insert multiple journeys on the same page. So if you have that much, you might be an idea to divide it. And another question is, if you go to an external URL, you can still show the navigation, et cetera. Once we go to an external URL, we cannot control it because then we have less, but we can put any kind of link. So if we have an external site where we can put a query string and tell them we're coming from this site, that's the way we can. And of course, when you're coming back to the Drupal site, it will remember where you left, no matter where you're coming to. Good question there. How to flag that a particular taxonomy is for driving a journey. You don't really need to flag them in that way. The taxonomy is a taxonomy. You could use it for other things as well, even if it's, of course, best used for the journey, because otherwise it might not make sense. I might have missed to explain that part in the head. In this case, I have used to embed it as a paragraph. And in the paragraph, I specify the name of the journey. I have stated that the full template should be displayed as a card, doesn't look that much as a card since we're not using pictures in this case. And I have a limited amount here. I display, I set the classes. I can set the classes for the button navigation buttons as well. So if you add more fields here, they will fill in. So, rather than to specify this one for a journey, a taxonomy is for the journey, you specify in your component which taxonomy you would like to use. So if a taxonomy table allows up to nine levels, that's the limitation of the system. I haven't made it that deep, but yeah, if you were to reach that limit, you will, I will create another journey. When you reach that far, after nine levels, it will also be hard to overlook for a content editor, I would say. If you don't have any questions, I guess you're just gonna leave it to count down here. And as I say, like, if you're coming up into any questions further down the track, feel free to hit me up. I'll be available in the morse code during the afternoon here, or at least someone will be there with you in contact with me. Yeah, I should have mentioned that this is built with a JSON API. JSON API is what's feeding it to, feeding it out to the React app. So that's why we can use it with the, with stock throughput. All we need to do is to enable a module. Running out of time here. So yeah, just picking up if you have any further questions. Keep.


Good morning, I'm Jay Fidel here in Hawai'ine. This is Sink Tech, Hawaii. We're talking about community matters, and we're talking about the larger community, the community, not Hawaii particularly, but nationally and internationally with Cynthia Farahat. Cynthia joins us from, I guess, Washington. She's associated with the Middle East Forum, and she's a fellow there, and it's really a delight to meet her. She has really been around, and I would like to, Cynthia, welcome to the show, Cynthia. Can you tell us a little about yourself? Thank you very much for having me, Jay. I'm very excited to be with you today. Well, I'm an Egyptian immigrant to the United States. I came here in 2011 after the so-called Arab Spring, and it almost killed me. It was a very tough experience, because in Egypt, after 9-11, a couple of years later, I co-founded the first classic liberal political party that was advocating for equal rights for everybody and separation of mosque and state, so you can imagine I wasn't very popular. And that, of course, just escalated to a lot of very, very bad things. It's under Mubarak's regime. A lot of people call it a moderate secular regime. It was not. People would say that, and I'd be in awe, because his regime terrorized me for a decade. I was under constant surveillance. My apartment was bugged, my house was, my phones were bugged, my computer. I was living a very, very tough life. Everything I did was under scrutiny. I felt like I was a robot when I under Mubarak's regime. All this because I advocated for secularism and not decapitating your neighbor if you don't like what he says. These were controversial views under Mubarak. People would lose their jobs if they joined our party. Life was tough. And of course, when the so-called Arab Spring, which was actually a coup d'etat, took place in February, it was more, things got so much worse very fast, because I knew even before Mubarak left that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to take over the country. The Muslim Brotherhood in the military called me and said, this time we're coming and you are going to call it a revolution and you're going to like it. I told him, okay, what is the model? What is the model you're aspiring to? Guess which country they said they were after. You're not going to believe it. Sudan. Amr al-Bashir's mass murdering regime that killed and displaced millions of people and split the Sudan into two countries and committed genocidal atrocities. He became the first sitting president to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. He is an operative in the Muslim Brotherhood. He's a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood and that was the model. Well, the Muslim Brotherhood, as you told me, was established in 1928 in Egypt and it had spawned a number of Jihad terrorist organizations that we are familiar with. As a matter of fact, I recall that Bin Laden came out of the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations, which we generally consider terrorist organizations, came out of Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. There's no innocence there. As a matter of fact, and this is why I'm interested in talking to you. As a matter of fact, they're in this country and they have specific agendas which they have been successful at in this country to advance the interest of terrorist groups. I put to you a question that was put to you in a video you made only two days ago entitled The Muslim Brotherhood's Successful Infiltration of America with Cynthia Farahad and this was on YouTube. Anybody wants to search for that, they'll find what you had to say that day. But I put to you this question, why has not the United States designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization? That's an excellent question, but unfortunately I've been trying to know the answer to this question for years now and I'm getting very dissatisfying answers. People tell me things like, because we do not want to offend the Turkish government, because Erdogan is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. We do not want to offend the Moroccans because they have a strong Muslim Brotherhood presence in the parliament. It's all very weak arguments to justify why they still have not designated this terrorist group that founded Al-Qaeda and ISIS and Al-Jama'a Islamic group and has been attacking America consistently since 1993, bombing the World Trade Center. This is the group that founded all these terrorist organizations. This is the incubator of terrorism. Hassan al-Banna said, we are war and he is right, they are war. They have vowed to destroy the West from within. This is something very interesting. In 2004, there was a police officer in Maryland who saw a woman taking pictures of the infrastructure of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and he stopped her to question her. It turns out she was married to a man called Ismail Abrasi. He was detained on an outstanding material witness warrant in Chicago for the Holy Land Foundation trial, which was the biggest terrorism financing trial. Washington DC's FBI field office decided to investigate and they searched his house in Dail, Virginia and they found an incredible amount of documents. Among the most important documents that were released was called the explanatory memorandum. It dates to 1991 and it was written by the Muslim Brotherhood's board of directors like Shura Council, which is the advisory council. This document in excruciating detail went into their plans for the United States. The major operation is called the Amaliyah jihadiya hadariyah, which is civilization jihad operation. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's in their documents. That's what they called it, civilization jihad operation.  That's a quote, destroy their miserable house from within. Are they anti-Israeli? I guess they are.  And are they associated with BDS? Oh yes, of course. BDS is on every college campus and very active in this country. Are they coordinating with the Muslim Brotherhood? Oh, of course. The Muslim Brotherhood is the entity that started it. They have a lot of front organizations in the United States because it's a clandestine group. The Brotherhood is when they were founding it, they said that they are founding the new assassins. Do you know the word assassin? From Al-Hashashun, from the assassins. A cult, a Shia murderous cult that existed in the late 11th century and 12th century. And it was so brutal that the word assassin comes from this group. That's what the Brotherhood, Ali Al-Ashmawi, the guy was a co-founder of the Brotherhood, said that they studied the assassins and modeled themselves after them. We are dealing with the modern assassins. Did you have to leave Egypt?  They were affiliated with the Supreme Council of Armed Forces that was governing the country at the time. They were planning on murdering me. I was supposed to get killed on October 9, 2011. And it was supposed to happen in a protest that I organized with other people, of course, for freedom of religion. In front of Egypt, state television and radio building. Because it was constantly spewing hatred and division and calls for genocide. So that would have been in this country? That was in Egypt. When I was in Egypt in October 2011, I got sick and I didn't go to the protest. But the friend I was going with got shot execution style and killed at the protest. And after that, someone called me and said we missed you today, but it's over. We're getting you. So two weeks later, I got on a plane, came to America. I didn't even know where I was going to spend the night. I literally fled for my life with a suitcase and just showed up in America. And I've never visited even. So it was quite daunting to just have to leave that way. But you learned English in school in Egypt, I suppose. You were in law school in Egypt. Although your real talent is in art, I always appreciate artists. And not everybody has the talent in art. But you went to law school in Egypt. I studied, I ended up studying journalism, but I still studied Islamic jurisprudence on my own time.  So I studied everything, the blind shape Omar Abdel Rahman studied everything. And it took 12 years. And I completed it to be able to predict the behavior. So what you've dedicated your life to dealing with this issue. I mean, indeed, if you say that the Muslim Brotherhood is here in the United States, and you're here in the United States, and you're a fellow with the Middle East Forum, you carry a certain amount of risk in making public statements, well, in beyond making public statements and being here. Why do you do this, Cynthia?  I lost Egypt used to be a beautiful country. It was among the freest and most civilized countries on earth, and it was destroyed in the most vile way, because the Muslim Brotherhood took control of the culture and society. And then when 9 11 happened and I saw the build the ideas that destroyed my country flying into your buildings, I made the decision right there that I had no role in destroying my own country, but I wasn't going to allow it to happen to America. Because it's all we have. If we lose America, where are we going to go? We don't have anywhere else to go. That's it. That's the last thought. Well, let's talk about two principle issues I would like to cover with you. One is, you know, exactly what is the mother, the Muslim Brotherhood doing here in Hawaii, to the extent we know, to the extent you know. And the second question, which I'll ask you later, is what can we do about it? So let's go to the first question first. What are they doing? Let's drill down on their activities here. We pretty much know their motivations, but their methodology is would like to know that. That's a fantastic question. So the main, what they discuss in the explanatory memorandum is infiltrating every aspect of the American life. So you're talking about media, you're talking about political lobbying, you talk about law enforcement, Hollywood, academia, they're in all that. They have agents in all these areas. And unfortunately, they've had a lot of successes on every single front. If we take, for example, academia, there is a program in Georgetown University established by professor, they're called John Esposito. And he is the embodiment of the subversion of American minds on behalf of Islamism. He's an Islamist apologist. I don't know if he's a card-carrying member in the Muslim Brotherhood or not, but he certainly never wastes a chance to defend them. In 2013, for example, Esposito went to Qatar to help found a Muslim Brotherhood think tank called the Think Tank Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, C-I-L-E. And he was involved there. And I guess who was with him in this founding event, the friend of Osama bin Laden, Hassan Al-Turabi was there. Al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood theologian and a convicted terrorist, another convicted, designated terrorist, Al-Raisouni. He was Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood's grandson, Tariq Ramadan was there. It was a hub for terrorists and very bad people. And he was there. And that's the guy who teaches your children political philosophy and Middle East studies at Georgetown University. When you say infiltration through the media, through college campuses, through courses like that and seminars, programs, what have you. It sounds to me like what the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to do in the United States is to make people think that it is an all right organization, that it is doing the right thing. Beyond that, is the Muslim Brotherhood also fomenting violence? Is it fomenting jihad? Is it fomenting activism in the sense of trying to get people to do destructive acts in the United States? Yes, of course. Absolutely they are. There is, and I'll give you another example that's very, very, so it's one of the most disturbing things that I've ever uncovered. Since 2015, the Muslim Brotherhood Front Organization, the Council on Islamic Relations, CARE, and the U.S. Council for Muslim Organizations, U.S. CMO, organized an event which they call Muslim Advocacy Day on the Hill. And they have hundreds of participants that go and push for Islamist causes. And one of the, the number two guy in U.S. CMO used to be Osama bin Laden's Webmaster. Oh, really? Yup, and he takes selfies with senators and politicians. What kind of message is this sending to the world? To Muslim Americans. He's making friends. So can you believe that? That Osama bin Laden's Webmaster. Don't they know? Don't they know? Yes, I got this information from the U.S. government, by the way. They are the ones who said that Mazen Muhtar, the number was operating a mirror site for azam.com, which was the official Al-Qaeda website. In the United States, he was affiliated, his website, with the terrorist who killed, who perpetrated the Bislan massacre, where 400 children were killed. Do you remember the Bislan massacre school in Russia for 100 children were slaughtered? He was affiliated with this animal. And this guy's lobbying your officials. But does it stop there? Of course not. It just gets worse if you can believe it. Among the delegates that roam the halls of the people's house, that roam the halls of the hallways of the people's house is another guy who is for years in communication with a key terrorist, a key ISIS terrorist in Egypt who tried to blow up the police academy in Cairo.  So the teacher of the ISIS terrorists is lobbying Congress. He's called Al-Yahi Al-Muntasr. And you could read this with screenshots, with pictures, evidence with pictures. It's not a conspiracy theory if they're saying it themselves. You could read it on the website of the Middle East forum. If you type Cynthia Farahad. What is the website of the Middle East forum? It's MEforum.org, something like that? Yes, .yes, MEforum.org. Or you can also see it on CynthiaFarahad.com, my website, justmyname.com. And you could read the full report. There's terrifying stuff in there. And these are the people that are roaming Congress. Muslim contact me and say, we are scared to death from these guys. We can't speak out. They beat them up in mosques if they speak out against these guys. So now they're terrorizing Muslim Americans. They're hijacking representation of Muslim Americans. They are pushing for destruction and war across the world. The death of people like me. That's what they're pushing for policies that would 100% result. You mentioned that they're terrorizing the Muslim community in the United States. Well, we know it's pretty big community and not every Muslim is a terrorist, obviously. But we do have too, on this lobbying issue, we do have at least two, maybe more Muslim members of Congress right now. As of the 2018 election. And I wonder if there's any connection there. Is the effort of the Muslim Brotherhood directed at them? Are they sympathetic with the Muslim Brotherhood? What do you know about that? Yes. I know that Elan Omar is received funding from Muslim Brotherhood Front organizations. And she's constantly in contact with them. She's even doing webinars with them right now with the corona thing going on. She's constantly doing webinars with the organization with Osama bin Laden's Webmaster. So yes, of course, they're supported by the Brotherhood because the Muslim Brotherhood, by the way, are incredibly selective and cautious about who they choose to back up. They do not randomly back up politicians. They do much better research than their opponents. The people who they deal with, the people who they select, can we say that those people know the story? The story you've been telling about what the Muslim Brotherhood really stands for, what it really does. Do they know? Do these Congress women in the Congress, do they know, do you think? 100% they know because this is how this works. First of all, these women, they understand Arabic. And anyone who speaks Arabic, that's not a secret anymore. It's done. It's over. This is not every, if you ask a 10 year old in Egypt, what is the Muslim Brotherhood, they will tell you.  Okay, so infiltrated the schools, infiltrated the Congress. Where does it all go? If the United States does not designate them as an organization of concern, a terrorist organization, and they continue the efforts described in those documents that were found in the Chesapeake Bay case, where does it take us? Where does it take them in this country? If you just unfold that without any constraint, what effect does it have on our democracy? So absolute destruction, that's what they're after. I know, I've interviewed the most important defector, whoever defected from the Muslim Brotherhood, it's called Tarwat al-Kherbawi. He's an astonishing character. And this man told me, I told him, what is the end game? He was their attorney, by the way, for like 20 years. So he knows where the bodies are buried, he knows all the secrets. And I told him, what is the end game? He said, the United Islamic States of America, that's the end game. That's what we call it among ourselves. That's what we called it for the past 60 years. And what does that look like? What is the United... It looks like the other oppressive regimes around the world. That's the end game. And it happens stealthily. And there are several types of ways. They don't only do it through infiltration and convincing people. There's a lot of money involved. I was offered millions of dollars to tweak what I'm saying, tweak it. Interesting. Yes, millions of dollars and I have proof. I have proof that I was offered this amount of money, an obscene amount of money every year. But you did not take that, you did not tweak it. What was the ramification of that, that you rejected those proposals? What happened? Nothing happened. I just told them in a very inappropriate language what they can do with this money. And I just left it to that. And now they... And it happened several times. So when you hear someone saying that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization, they've either received money or they're super ignorant about the topic. But there isn't anywhere... There's nothing else in between. And I think you mentioned at some point, maybe before the show, that they are responsible or rather they are parent organization too, or related to Hamas and Hezbollah, am I right? Hamas, yes. Hamas is actually the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's their chapter. Not Hezbollah. No, Hezbollah is Shi'it. So it's a different sect. Oh, this is Sunni, that's right. So what we have here in the Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni organization. Yes, but they also work with Iran. They also work with the Mullahs there because they have a very interesting relationship. Very, very interesting relationship. I'm writing about this extensively in my book. It's going to come out sometime hopefully this year. How can we follow you, Cynthia? I mean, how can we follow your books, your writings? Middle East Farm is one place. Any other places we can look at? Yes, you can find my work on my website, CynthiaFarahad.com. Okay. And you can follow me on my page, on Facebook also. Okay, you're easier to find actually. Yes, absolutely. I googled you and I got a whole bunch of stuff. All consistent with this discussion. So let me ask you one last question. We only have a minute left and I really want to ask this one. So right now, you know, we have a lot of degradation in the relationship between this administration, the Trump administration and the intelligence community in this country. It seems very dicey increasingly so as we go forward. And I would assume the intelligence community in this country knows what's going on, whether the country has in fact designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization or not. They know. They must know. So the question is, what are they doing? What can they do? And if all things be right, what can the country do? What can we do in order to deal with the threat that you described from the quote, infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into our media and our institutions? There are fantastic and mostly patriotic people working in intelligence communities. That's been my experience. Unfortunately, that's a political decision designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist group. That's a political decision. The Pentagon has a say in that as well, unfortunately, and they're not on board. So that's why I decided to take my fight in a book to the American people because you are guys, you're the ones who can change things, not the intelligence community. They're going to be pressured to do it. But the way to do it is talk to your congressional offices. Tell them there's a bill, there's a supported to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. Support that. You owe it to us as taxpayers and to vote as voters to do something. That bill is sitting in Congress right now. It is. Has that been sitting there for a while or is it recently?  So what political forces are holding it up? People are busy with other things. They're not interested. This is something else that people need to know. They think that we are beyond the 9-11 world and we are beyond Islamic terrorism. We are in the pre-9-11 era, not the post-9-11 era. And that's what people need to understand. One more thing comes to mind Cynthia. We're in the middle of a crisis right now over coronavirus. And it affects everything, everything in our world. It certainly affects the government. They're involved up to their eyeballs. It affects all my community. It certainly affects the media. It affects every country. I'm not sure what countries are dealing with it right now. I'm sure you're dealing with it personally. And the people in Middle East Forum aren't dealing with it. But the question is, does the coronavirus affect the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood? Has it slowed them down? Has it accelerated them? Did they see this as an opportunity? Yes. That's a great question because there's something called now Corona Jihad. Corona Jihad. Oh yes, yes, yes. There's a terrorist in New York called Begat Sabir. He's not in prison, but hopefully soon he will be. He's a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. And they said that the Brotherhood issued a fatwa that if anyone has the snivels, they should go and hug the infidels, especially the infidels. Really? Yeah, because in case you have coronavirus, that's why it's called Corona Jihad. And they said specifically for Egyptian government officials and policemen and military personnel, just hug them. That's what I call opportunism. Well, thank you, Cynthia. It's been wonderful to talk to you. Farahana with the Middle East Forum and the fellow there. And I hope we can circle back and talk with you again as all of these things unfold. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.