Okay, everyone, we're going to go ahead and get started. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this design community meeting. It's 105 so hopefully everyone who plans to join is here. Again, I've mentioned this a few times, but now that we're starting, please unmute yourself. If you can, if you have questions, feel free to unmute, but we try to ask everyone to stay muted during the presentation to avoid echoes and disturbances during the meeting. There's a chat box so that you can answer ask questions in the chat box and mark. I'm going to ask you to monitor the chat box for me. I'm not going to be able to do that. But if you could please monitor the chat box and let me know of any questions in there. And we can talk about those at the end of the meeting. And then also this meeting will be recorded. We're going to record it today and then we're going to have someone upload it to our project website on Monday. And I believe sometimes we get requests to have the meeting specifically emailed out, which is fine. We have a person who will be who can do that next week too. So, we're going to get started now. So, this is the design community meeting for the Trinity Boulevard and Eula South Main Street intersection improvement project. This is city project number 103311 the city project manager Seth could see. Unfortunately, Seth couldn't attend today. But instead I'm here to give the presentation. My name is Chad Allen. I'm the engineering manager for the mobility team at the city of Fort Worth. Also on the phone. We have our project engineer, Mark Bacard from Graham associates. So he's here to help me with any of the tough questions that get answered during the presentation. And then we have a couple of folks from the city in my in my group here. We have Fanta Kaba, who always is helpful to me and cigar met a set from our transportation management department. And he's our traffic signal experts. If we have any questions about traffic signals, traffic signals, he can help us. And then we also have Joshua from the council district 5 council members office here. So, Joshua, before we begin Joshua rivers, would you like to say anything to the folks who are attending the meeting? Yes, thank you. I just want to say, first off, thank you all for coming out to get some more information so much about this project. Generally, whether you're watching it now live with us on the way backs or recording, we genuinely get you feel free to share the recordings whenever you get them. This is your opportunity to ask questions. If you are live with this is your opportunity to ask questions. There's going to be a lot of topics covered. So, if you do have that you want to know more about these are the people to ask. So I do encourage you to get friends, families, anybody that might be close to this project, get them on so they might have an opportunity as well. So, thank you again for coming. Council councilwoman may approach him. Gina Bivens does thank you as well. We really do appreciate your time and I'll turn it back over to check. Thank you Joshua. I appreciate it. So this is the agenda for the presentation today. We're going to talk about the project location. We'll discuss the need for the project. We'll talk about the design phase process. We have performed a traffic study. So we'll go over the conclusions and recommendations from the traffic study. We'll show our preliminary design plans and talk about all legs of the intersection and what we're proposing out there. And then we'll review the project schedule and cost and provide contact information for the design team. This is the project location over here to the left. Sorry, this map is kind of small, but I wanted to show relatively where the project is in relation to downtown Fort Worth. So the project is located where this red symbol is. It is east and north of downtown Fort Worth. It's sort of at the southwest corner of the intersection of 183 and highway 360. And then over here on the right is a zoomed in image showing the intersection of U.S. South Main Street and Trinity Boulevard. And this is the intersection we'll be working in. This project is needed to improve traffic flow at the intersection during peak hours and reduce delays and improve the overall safety for all the users of the intersection. It's also needed to improve pedestrian safety at the intersection by installing pedestrian signals with push buttons and also new curb ramps that are ADA compliant. And then also this project was voted on and listed in the 2022 bond book. It's part of the 2022 bond program. It was officially approved. This intersection is specifically listed in the 2022 bond book. We're going to talk about we are in the design phase of the project. This is our typical design phase process. We have a 30, 60, 90% design process. Our 30% design usually consists of performing the traffic study, which we've done also during 30% we identify utilities that need to be relocated and right of way that needs to be required. Next, we do 60% design during the 60% design process. We do community outreach. So that's what we're doing now. We also do a constructability walk through where we take our entire design team and then we have experts at the city and traffic signals and storm drainage and paving construction and construction inspection. And we all go out in the field and we take the plans and we do our constructability walk and that's to make sure that what is shown on the plans is actually feasible to be built. So, and then at 90% we're basically we've resolved all the issues and we're just basically creating our final construction plans. We're between 60 and 90% design of the project right now. And that's why we're doing this community outreach. We have conducted the traffic study during the 30% design. The purpose of the traffic study was to evaluate improvements to increase capacity or improve mobility and improve operation out at this intersection. The existing conditions are out there that US South Main Street is an existing roadway. It has 93 foot of right of way. It's a two lane asphalt road with bar ditches. Trinity Boulevard has 120 foot of right of way and it's a six lane concrete roadway and it has an underground storm sewer system. Here are the conclusions and recommendations from the traffic study. We concluded that the existing intersection does require improvements to accommodate large trucks, cars and pedestrians. It's recommended that we do traffic signal upgrades and modifications and place them where they won't be hit by trucks right now. Some of the signals are in the media and so we'll remove those. And then also the traffic signals are old and they need to be upgraded to our current technology. They also have to be modified to accommodate the new lanes. We're going to build out there. We want to do pedestrian pedestrian improvements for safety. So we're going to be adding pedestrian signals and sidewalks and crosswalks. We're going to construct dedicated left turn lanes in US South Main Street. So right now, US South Main Street does not have left turn lanes. We're building left turn lanes at the intersection on the north and south side of the intersection US South Main Street so that large trucks and other vehicles can make that left turn without causing backups behind them. In Trinity Boulevard, we're going to relocate the left turn lanes to improve safety and make those movements more safe. Right now, the left turn lanes are positioned in a way that side distance is tough to you have to sort of look past the left turn lane on the other side of the intersection to make that left turn. And we're going to remove that need and we're going to improve the safety out there for those left turning movements. And then finally, we're going to add guardrails or excuse me, we're going to remove those guardrails out there and add a safer barrier between the existing drainage ditches and the roadway. So this image shows the preliminary design. This is sort of the overall plan for the project. And I'm going to discuss what we're doing at each leg of the intersection. So this is the left leg of the intersection on the west side of the intersection. This is in Trinity Boulevard. This key map over here kind of shows with this blue box what part of the intersection we're looking at. This is the east bound Trinity Boulevard left turn offset. So right now on the left side of the intersection, there is a left turn lane, but we're going to move it further up towards the center line of the roadway. We're going to push it into that median on the other side of the intersection. We're going to move that left turn lane down. So now they won't be looking at looking across each other when you try to make that left turn. Instead, you'll have better side distance, a better view. Also, that turning movement will be shorter for each of those movements. So that's what we're doing in Trinity Boulevard. We're improving the safety of those left turn lanes. We're also making them a bit longer. This is the south side of the intersection. I mean, excuse me, the north side of the intersection. You can see on the key map where this blue rectangle is. We're widening US south main street and we're adding a left turn lane that doesn't exist. We're also, there's an existing driveway right here on the northeast side. We're going to close that and we're currently coordinating with the property owner. And then just opposite of that, on the south side of the intersection, again, we're widening US south main. We're installing this left turn lane that doesn't exist. We're also, I forgot to mention, we're increasing the radius of these turning movements so that larger vehicles can make these turns better. We're making these radii larger. Again, I mentioned earlier, we're also improving the traffic signals out there and we're redoing all of the crosswalk strapping and the stop bar strapping. We're redoing all the strapping in the intersection. This is the project schedule and cost. We're currently in the design phase between 60, 90%. We're coordinating with existing utilities to get those relocated. We expect to execute the construction contract next summer and summer of 2024 and then 4 or 5 months after that in the fall, we'll be able to start construction of the project. So about this time next year, we'll be starting construction. We expect construction to take about 10 months and the construction cost is approximately $2 million. Here's our contact information for the design team. Mark McCart is on the phone. Mark is our design engineer. He's on the call today. If you have any questions, we're about to open it up for questions. He's with Graham Associates. His telephone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. His email address is EmberCard at GrahamCivil.com. That's M-B-U-R-C-K-H-A-R-D. Then the ad symbol in G-R-A-H-A-M-C-I-V-I-L.com. The city of Fort Worth project manager is Seth Cookey. His telephone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. His email address is Seth.Cookey at FortWorthTexas.gov. That's S-E-F-S-E-T-H. C-O-O-K-S-E-Y. Then the ad symbol in FortWorthTexas.gov. FortWorthTexas is all one word. F-O-R-T-W-O-R-T-H-T-E-X-A-S.G-O-V. Please feel free to contact these two individuals at any time or me. We'll be happy to tell you about the status of the project or answer any questions you have. These two folks are the experts regarding the work. Please reach out to Seth Cookey first and then he'll coordinate with Mark, but you can contact either one. And then at all of our community meetings, we like to direct folks towards the My Fort Worth app. If you haven't downloaded this app, it's a great tool to request services from the city of Fort Worth. The most common examples we hear at the city are if you have a pothole in your roadway, you can put a request in to the My Fort Worth app. And those folks have come out and fixed that pothole very quickly. Also, Street Lights is another example. If you have a purple streetlight in your neighborhood or a streetlight that's out, put a request in on the My Fort Worth app. And the good thing about the app is these requests go directly to the folks at the city who are responsible for doing that work. So the app sends those requests directly to those folks and then their leadership tells them they have a certain amount of time to get out there. So from everything I've heard, we have a really good response time regarding requests for service that are submitted on the app. You can also reach out to the city of Fort Worth by texting HELLO to 817-835-MYFW or 699-39. You can also call the city call center at<PHONE_NUMBER>. And then I believe there is also a chat box on the city of Fort Worth website where you can reach out for help. And then I just wanted to direct you to these two QR codes that are on this slide. I tried these before the meeting as far as I know they work. You can take your cell phone and point your camera at one of these QR codes and it will take you directly to the link to download the My Fort Worth app from either the Apple store or the Google store. So that concludes my presentations and now we can open it up for questions. Mark, I hope you were following the chat box. I'm not sure if we have any questions in the chat box, but if we do, can we start at the top and try to answer them? Mark, are you there? Yeah, I didn't see any actually pop up. Okay. Okay, no problem. Does anyone on the call and thank you all for participating today? Does anyone on the call have any questions? Let me go back to sort of the plans and we can see if there's any questions about the proposed improvements or the schedule. Yeah, this is Dave. I have a couple questions actually 37 if you'll let me. No, I'm just kidding. I won't do 37 questions. Just just a couple. Number, number one, was there given? Was there any thought given to actually expanding the ULIS main out all the way down to the Callaway Cemetery Road? Or is that I would imagine this is going to help quite a bit, but just wondering if that was any part of entity consideration to help alleviate some of the congestion. I'm sure that has been considered as part of this project. We were just directed with the bond program and as part of our scope and the budget. We have just to focus on the improvements of this intersection. So, we, we, with our traffic study, we haven't looked out outside of just the limits of this intersection cigar. Are you aware of any other studies in the area to, you know, further widen Trinity Boulevard like Steve. Steve, I'm sorry, I can't see Dave and I'm talking about ULIS main, especially south of Trinity all the way down. I'm not aware of any proposed improvements in this time. That's fair. I just just curious is because the second question kind of leads off of why I'm asking that because there was apparently quite a bit of work done at the. The railroad crossing at Callaway Cemetery Road where the trucks that used to not go. Towards ULIS main now all exclusively have to go to ULIS main, which is probably a good reason why this is happening because it's it's turned our intersection here into a bit of a craziness and curious for those trucks are still going to be. Directed to go towards ULIS main, or if they're going to be directed out towards the. West, which would be towards 157. I know it's hard. It's hard to conceptualize the question probably a little bit without any visuals, but that it's since that work has been done at Callaway Cemetery Road. We've noticed that pretty much every truck in the DFW Metroplex uses that particular intersection. That is joke is a little exaggeration, but. So, are you do you know about all of that? And if we consider all of that mark also mark while you're while you're here, I'm not able to take notes. So. Would you please make note of these questions and comments that we received during the meeting so that if we don't have good answers now that we can get back with these folks and provide answers later. And make sure Dave, it would be great if you could put your contact information into the chat box and we can grab it and we can try to respond to you later if we can't respond to you today. So, are you familiar with that situation he was talking about. So, um, Callaway Cemetery Road is a east to west roadway that's that's the balance parallel to San Diego water located south of this intersection. So, Dave, are you are you asking it that the traffic is going to be diverted to the traffic is going to be diverted to Callaway Cemetery instead of this intersection. Is that what you were asking for? No, so please I don't want to dominate the meeting so I can I can follow up with this through communication and email, but essentially what used to happen were the trucks that we're all using Callaway Cemetery Road were forced to go west towards 157. To exit out because there's a concrete plant back there. There's, you know, there's several, several things that require large trucks and there was work done at the railroad crossing there. That forced those trucks to now go east and use ULIS main as their exit point. And I'm wondering if that's going to continue to be the continue to be the traffic flow or we're going to go back to the way it used to be probably about a year ago to where those trucks had. They were supposed to go out towards 157. Yeah, I can find out more about that. Okay, great. Yeah. I didn't know, you know, I didn't know since we did our company did Viridian. The development there that's to the south of the railroad. It's in Arlington. I do know that that project was was kind of forced on developer. To improve that. And I think it was mainly a safety issue with the railroad. At the time, so I don't know all the detail of it, but I do know that. It was more of a privately done project with the city of Fort Worth with Viridian. So I can, I can ask our project manager about the details of. Of that, but I don't know. You know, I think the question is, does the city have a future project. Coming up that would improve that. Or improve, you know, ULIS main street like stated in the first. That's close. And again, I don't want to dominate the meeting. So if you guys reach out to me and I will kind of, I'll kind of lay it all out. I can put it into an email and explain kind of what I'm what I'm going for here. But again, just more just curious than anything. So I appreciate the time and thank you guys so much for doing this meeting. This is this intersection improvement is going to be huge for those of us that live in the Stone Creek addition. The safety is going to be paramount. So thank you guys very much for the information. Appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. We appreciate it. And I think I saw again, I can't see the chat box for some reason. I think I saw that you put your contact info in there. So Mark, please grab that.  So please make sure and grab all that info in the chat box. Are there any other questions from anyone on the call? I think I just saw no pop up Gary, Gary Turner would like to ask a question. Go ahead. Gary, you're muted if you're trying to talk or maybe you're entering something into the chat box. Okay, I'll try. I'll try this. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes, sir. Yeah. So, so my, my input would be that. I think that one solution to maybe handling the truck traffic. Would be to install a stop sign at Tarrant and. Uh, you'll a South Maine. First of all, the, the increase in traffic from Viridian and the speeds on South Maine.  So I hear it all the time. Um, I think maybe installing a stop sign at a three way stop at Tarrant and South Maine might be a solution. Maybe to to deter some of the, the truck traffic, they might be more willing to go over 157. But if nothing else, it would slow up the traffic that that is speeding down South Maine. I can regarding can can you use the South Maine? I can forward your concern to our task engineering to take a look at it. That would be great. Thanks. So you said it's parent and you. Okay, yes, I believe that's what I heard. Tarrant and South Maine, which is, I think this the intersection just south of the map that you have on your, on your screen there. So, like, if you are on Google maps and you scroll down, maybe, you know, a 10th of a mile, that's the intersection that I believe Gary is talking about. Okay. Oh, is it. Okay. So the entrance to Stone Creek is the first. Three way intersection and then. As the other speaker said about a 10th of a mile south of that is where Tarrant comes into Eula South Maine. It's not an easy interest. It doesn't have a very good visibility and with the increased speeds and some of the cars. Going down South Maine. To me, it seems like an accident waiting to happen. Okay. Okay, so guard, thanks for hearing that and for taking those notes mark, please take notes of these questions. What we need to do on our next community outreach is. We're going to, you know, provide the input that we receive this time and how we've looked into it and how we've addressed it. So, in our next presentation, when we go back to the community, we need to be bringing back up these issues. And effectively thought about it and provide any other information and responses. So we just need to make sure we gather all this. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Turner. We appreciate it. Does anyone else have any concerns or questions? I heard someone on the call talking to their dog and my dog's doing the same thing. She's whining here in my office floor. So I understand. Chad, I wanted to request the contact information to Mr. Gary Turner. Mr. Turner, if you could type in your contact information in the chat box, that would be great. Or if you don't want to do that, you can also. Email it you can reach out to our. Well, I was going to show you the contact information again and send it to Seth. You can either put your contact information in the chat box or you can email it to Seth cooksie. Okay. I've got his information there. So I will I'll send it to Seth. Okay. Thank you so much. Okay. Well, if there's. We're no hurry to leave. So if you have questions, please bring them up. Otherwise, we've, we've heard your concerns about all the truck traffic up here. And we're going to look into that and see if there are any current city projects that are trying to address that. And then we'll provide feedback to you. If there's any other questions, we're happy to stick around and address them. But if there are not. Um, you know, we can conclude the meeting, but again, we don't want to cut the meeting off if someone's wants to talk about this intersection. Okay. I guess we can go ahead and conclude the meeting. Thank you everyone for participating Joshua. Thanks for coming from the council members office. We appreciate it. And I'm thankful for the whole design team that helped me out today. And thanks for all the residents who are interested in this project. I think this is going to be a great project. And I'm really looking forward to getting it built. Thank you gentlemen guys. Have a great day. Bye.


Yeah, I mean there's a big fight going on, basically between the Supreme Court of Brazil and a particular Justice in the Supreme Court of Brazil, Justice Morales and Judge Alexandre de Morales, who is a, and Elon Musk and basically Twitter, Morales is again a judge in the Supreme Court of Brazil. The Supreme Court of Brazil has much more, you know, if you think about the American Supreme Court, it's quite passive, right? Stuff comes to it and it makes decisions and the process is slow, they take all arguments. In Brazil, I think following more of maybe of a French tradition, I'm not sure how it's done in Spain, maybe it's a Spanish tradition, a French tradition where judges are activists, investigative judges, they actually go and they actually search out facts and they can pass a judgment and in a sense be almost like an executive branch of government. So there's not a clear differentiation between the judiciary, the legislature and the executive as there is in the American system, which I think is the right kind of system, in Brazil and I think in some, also some European countries, there's less of those kind of distinctions. Anyway, this is a very activist judge who goes out there to seek what he considers justice. And this judge was primarily concerned about the attempts, according to him and according to many within Brazil, of overturning the last election in Brazil, that is the last election in Brazil, Bolsonaro lost and Lula won, somewhat paralleling, I guess, Trump losing and Biden winning in 2020. And just similar to what happened January 6th, there were riots in Brazil and there was some claim and attempted insurrection, at least that's the claim. Morales was very active in trying to secure what he considered securing democracy. So for example, an election, supposedly on election day, highway police began holding up buses full of voters so they wouldn't have an opportunity to vote. Morales stepped in and told them to stop and allowed the voting to continue when they were, when kind of the right wing made all these claims about an illegitimate election, election was stolen, just like in the United States. The difference is that in Brazil, he ordered the people arguing that the election was stolen, he ordered them banned from social media. He has that kind of power in Brazil. And then when, you know, thousands of protests to storm Brazil's cause of power in Brazil, he basically arrested many of the people who were involved or were involved in allowing the demonstrations to succeed and to go unchecked. He has kind of identified himself as the savior of democracy, you know, and I think many people on the left consider him a hero. Interestingly, this Morales, when he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017, he was opposed by the left because at the time he was considered a right of center candidate, a right of center judge. But he has definitely taken a kind of a fascist approach to what he is doing. He has jailed people without a trial for posting what he considers threats on social media but noticed without a trial. He's helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison and for supposedly threatening the court. He's ordered raids on businesses and businessmen with really very little evidence that they have done anything wrong. He suspended an elected governor from his job and he's unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media with virtually, you know, no transparency, no lists of who has been blocked. And, you know, he has basically become a mini-dictator in Brazil and my guess is that given that law enforcement and Lula, Lula is the president of Brazil is a, I don't know how would you describe Lula. It's kind of a mafia thug.   I remember when I was in Brazil, God, ten years ago, I can't tell you the year, but I was in Brazil and I was speaking at a conference and when my talk ended they turned on a big television, you know, behind the stage and they put on the television and on that big screen behind the stage you could see Lula being arrested, placed in handcuffs, put into a police car and driven away. And I think everybody in that room, me included, thought, yeah, I mean, he's going down for corruption, that's the end of Lula. He's finished, right? And indeed he was tried, he was convicted, he was sent to jail and everybody assumed that Lula was, that was the end of Lula. I mean, that was it. The left would have to find somebody else. Well, the Supreme Court reversed the sentencing and freed him even though he'd been accused and sentenced on corruption charges. And then he managed to run for president, get elected, right? Get elected and he is, he is a, he is the president of Brazil today. And Brazil is not a trivial country. Brazil is a 250 million population. It is a massive country geographically. It is by far the biggest country and the most populous country in Latin America. It is, it has immense natural resources. It has the potential to be an incredibly rich, successful prosperous country. Unfortunately, it's not at all. And a lot of that has to do with governance and maybe one can hope that maybe the energy behind the election of Milay will spill over to places like Brazil and Chile and get somebody, somebody more free market elected in these countries. But anyway, so Lula of course supports everything Morales has done. Morales is primary target and not only target, but primarily target has been what is perceived to be the right. And there's a big debate going on right now in Brazil about free speech. You know, I can tell you that somebody who's a friend of mine, somebody who's a big advocate for land and a big advocate for liberty and freedom and has been in the past very active in Brazil and elsewhere around the world in promoting freedom is kind of moving out of Brazil because he's afraid because he is going to be, you know, they're coming after him. They're coming after anybody who stood up to Lula, anybody who might have supported Bolsonaro, anybody who argues for liberty and freedom, anybody who's arguing that Lula is a corrupt thug is in trouble in Brazil.  That's how you get dictatorship and that's, I think, the direction Lula would like to go. Anyway, so this has led the moralists to basically ban a number of people from Twitter.  And you know, this is now, you know, the moralists, but also now the Supreme Court, the chief justice of the Brazilian court saying, look, you know, Twitter has to follow the rules. We set the rules. Twitter doesn't set the rules. And we want Twitter to silence these people, to de-platform these people. And Twitter has, under threat, threat of both massive fines and also threat of imprisoning Twitter employees in Brazil. Anyway, the last few days, Elon Musk has punched back and basically said, no, we are going to re-platform. We're going to put back all these accounts that you've asked us to dismiss. We're not going to be, we're not going to allow you to censor these people. The moralists has come back and threatened Twitter employees. So Elon Musk's latest is, he says he's going to do a full data dump, which means he's going to disclose everybody that's been banned, all the names, all the data, the letters that have been sent by Judge Morales to Twitter. But he's only going to do that after he has moved all his employees into a safe place where supposedly the authorities can get to them. I don't know what that will actually mean, but there's a real battle here over this. And what he wants is, he's trying to fight for freedom of speech in Brazil. And he's trying to say, I'm not going to let this happen. He tweeted that he'd be lifting all restrictions and that the judges applied massive fines, threatened to arrest employees. And massive fines, by the way, is $20,000 per day for each reactivated account. I don't know how many accounts there are, but I think the bigger issue is the threat to arrest employees of Twitter. That is something the CEO has to take very seriously. He also tweeted, and I wish he fully understood this. I wish Elon Musk fully understood this. But he did tweet, quote, principles matter more than profits. Of course, principles ultimately lead to profits, but good for him for standing on principle. Again, I wish he understood this more thoroughly. On Sunday, this last week, Morales blasted the CEO for obstruction of Brazilian justice, incitement of a crime, waging a disinformation campaign, and that he was going to open up an investigation of Musk himself. If you've seen a photo of this judge, he looks really spooky.  Anyway, back and forth, it's going to be interesting. Of course, in this kind of issue, I'm 100% behind Musk. I hope he finds a way to, at least he's bringing the issue to the attention of the world. The extent to which Morales is a little dictator, and to the extent to which Brazil's freedom of speech is really, really, really under threat. Again, Morales, to some other examples, it's not only what you'd call the so-called far right, whatever that means in this context, but he's also ordered 10 members of Congress to be completely silenced on the Internet. These are members of Congress. They haven't been found guilty of any crime. He's forced Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and every other social media to remove them, even though there's been no court. They haven't been judged. They haven't, as far as we know, violated the terms of service of any of these. This is just by fiat, the Brazilian authorities are demanding that these companies, that these countries, deplatform them. Of course, Twitter has a mixed record here. It has deplatformed people at the request of the Turkish government, at the request of the Indian government. So they have been accounts banned. I don't know exactly why this is the battle Elon Musk is waging, why he's picked this and not with the others. Maybe he feels like he's in a stronger position here. I don't know. But good for Musk. Let's hope he succeeds. Let's hope that this creates a real backlash within Brazil against the Lula regime and against this horrible judge. I'm not sure when the next election is. I think it's in 2026. I'm not sure who the opposition is going to put up, but hopefully it's somebody who's not named Bolsonaro. Hopefully they don't commit the same mistake the Americans are doing by presenting the alternative to Biden as Trump, and that they find somebody better. They find somebody more inspiring. They find somebody more committed to freedom, more committed to capitalism, more committed to any level of freedom than Bolsonaro or Lula. So Brazil is a country I really do love. I like the people. I think I've said this in the past. My wife and I love Rio de Janeiro. I think it's one of the most beautiful places on planet Earth. It's a vibrant, beautiful city. I've spent a lot of time in Brazil. I've lectured all over Brazil. Most of the major cities in Brazil, I've either visited or given a talk or both. Well, in order to give a talk, I have to visit. Again, it's the biggest, certainly most powerful country in Latin America. I'm very interested in what happens here and I think anybody who values freedom should be. I have a lot of friends in Brazil, objectivism. There's a very active, objectivist, pro-free market movement in Brazil. So there are lots of reasons to root for Elon Musk in this particular challenge. Elon, two days ago, tweeted, how did Alexander de Morales become the dictator of Brazil? He has Lula on a leash. Well, does he have Lula on a leash or is he just doing Lula's bidding? Lula is, ultimately, a dictator or has a dictator tendencies. So I'm not sure who has whom on a leash. But it is interesting to, it will be interesting to see what Morales' ambitions are. Another thing that's interesting is that a magazine like Wired, I've talked about this in the past, Wired, which used to be a tech magazine, very invested in technology, venture capital, Silicon Valley, very pro-tech has become, over the last, I don't know, five years or more, just a leftist rag, just a place that everything is tilted, tilted, tilted to war. Towards the leftist agenda, Wired's headline is, Elon Musk is platforming far-right activists in Brazil defying court order. So by Wired's definition, Elon Musk is the bad guy because he is standing up to a authoritarian court in Brazil that is clearly violating Brazilians free speech. And again, Brazilians are afraid. I mean, I talked to Brazilians, I met Brazilians at our conference in Buenos Aires, of course, was in Sao Paulo a week ago. And Brazilians are afraid, Brazilians are worried.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent virtual 2020. It's not an in-person event this year, it's remote, it's virtual, theCUBE is virtual and our guests and our interviews will be remote as well. And so we're here covering the event for the next three weeks. Throughout the next three weeks, we'll be weaving in commentary from theCUBE, check out theCUBE.net and all of our coverage. And here at AWS, we have special feature programming. We've got a great segment here, talking about big data in the cloud, governance, data lakes, all that good stuff. Rick Tamm Daniels, Vice President of Strategic Ecosystems and Technology for Informatica and Rick Turnoff, Head of Enterprise Data Services in Vesco, customer of Informatica. Welcome to theCUBE. Hey John, thanks for having us. So Rick with a K from Informatica, I want to ask you first, we've been covering the company journey for many, many years, always been impressed with the focus on data and specifically cloud and all the things that you guys have been announcing over the years have been spot on the mark. AI with Claire, making things cloud native, all that's kind of playing out. Now with the pandemic re-invent, that's the story here. Building blocks with high level services, cloud native, but data is the critical piece again. More machine learning, more AI, more data management. What's your take on this year's re-invent? Well, absolutely John. And again, we're always excited to be here at re-invent. We've been here since the very first one. You know, I think you tapped into a couple of key trends there, especially in the era of the global pandemic here. There's so many challenges that so many enterprises are experiencing. I think that the big surprise has been that has actually translated into a tremendous amount of demand for digital transformation and cloud modernization in particular. So we've seen a huge uptick in our cloud relationships with AWS when it comes to transformational architecture solutions around data and analytics and using data as a fundamental asset for digital transformation. And so some of those solution areas are things like data warehouse modernization of the cloud or end to end data governance. That's a huge topic as well for many enterprises today. Before coming in to re-invent, I had a chance to sit down exclusive interview with Andy Jassy. I just spoke with Matt Garmin, who's now heading up Sales and Marketing who ran EC2.  Their big talking point to me and validation to the trends is there's no excuse to go slow anymore because there's a reason to go fast because there's consequences and the pandemic has highlighted that you got to move faster.  Okay, great. I buy that, by the way. So I have no complaints on the talking point there from Amazon Web Services. The problem is you got to manage the data. It's to go fast. The gas in the tank is data. And if it's screwed up, it's not going to go well, right? It's like putting gas in a car. So this is where I see the data lake coming into the cloud and all the benefits. And look at the successes of companies. The cloud is a real enabler. What's your take on this? The importance of data governance because cloud scale is here. People want to go faster. Data is the key thing. Yeah, the data governance was a critical component when we started our enterprise data platform and looking at, you know, how can we build a modern day architecture with scale bringing our enterprise data but doing it in a government fashion? So when we did it, we kind of looked at, you know, what are critical partners? How can we apply data governance and the full catalog capabilities of knowing what data is coming in, identifying it and then really controlling the quality of it as to meet the needs of the organization. And it was a critical component for us because typically it's been difficult to get access to that right data. And as we look in the future and even current needs, we really need to understand our data, bring the right data in and make it easily accessible and governance and quality of that is a critical component of it. I want to just follow up with that, if you don't mind because, you know, I've done so many of these interviews I've been in the block for now 30 years in the industry I've seen the waves come and go and you see a lot of these mandates, you know data governance, we had even data governance from the ivory tower, are you here? Everything's got to be a service but when you peel back and look under the hood to make that happen, it's complicated. You got to have put things in place and it's got to be set up properly. You got to do your work. How important it is to have, and well, what's under the covers to this? Because governance, yeah, it's a talking point, I get that but to make it actually happen well is hard. We started really with the operating model from the start. So I kind of took over data governance seven years ago and had a government global architecture that's been around for 40 years and it was hard. So this was really our shot and time to get it right. So we did a operating model, a governance model and really ingrained it through the whole build and execution process. And so it was part with technology and it was foundational to the process to really deliver it. So it wasn't governance from a governance say it was really part of our operating model and process to build this out and really succeed at it. Rick on the Informatica side, got to get your take on the new solution you guys announced. The govern data lake, I think it was solution. Does this tie into that? How does, tell us first about, take a minute to explain the announcement and how does this tie in? Yeah, absolutely, John. So I think you take a step back and look at, we talked about some of the drivers of why companies are investing in cloud data lakes. And I think what comes down to is when you think about that core foundation of data analytics, you know, they're really looking at, how do we go ahead and create tremendous, a tremendous leap forward in terms of their ability to leverage data as an asset. And again, we talked about one of the biggest challenges is trust around the data. And what this solution does though, is it really looks to say, okay, first and foremost, let's create that foundation of trust, not just for the cloud data lake, but for the entire enterprise. To ensure that when we start to build this new architecture, when we understand the data assets that are coming in at the very get go, right? It's much harder to add data governance after the fact. But you put it in up front, you understand your existing data landscape. And once that data is there, you make sure you understand the quality of the information. You cleanse the data. You also make sure you put it under the right data management policies. There are so many policies that enterprises are subject to now like CCPA and GDPR. They have to be concerned about consumer privacy and being able as part of your governance foundational layer to make sure that you're in compliance as data moves through your new architectures, it's fundamental that having that end trust and confidence and be able to use that data downstream. So our solution looks to do that end to end across a cloud environment. And again, not just the cloud environment, but the full enterprise as well. One thing I do want to touch on, if you don't mind is on the AI side of things and the tooling side of things. Because I think data governance has been around a while. As you said, it's not that it's a new concept, but how do you do it efficiently in today's world? And this is where Informatica is focused on a concept of data 4.0, which is the use of metadata and AI and machine learning and intelligence to make this process much, much more efficient. You guys have a good point. Rick from, there's two Rick's here, so I got it. One's with a K, one is a C and a CK. So Rick CK and from Invesco Customer, I want to just check that with you because I was a year customer of Informatica, but they brought up a good point about governance. And I saw this movie before, we've all seen this before, people just slap on solutions or dueling to a pre-existing architecture. You see that with security.  Okay, cool, I get that. No debate there. Governance, same kind of thing. You know, you're hearing this over and over again. If you don't bake governance into the beginning of everything, you're going to be screwed. Okay, so how important is that foundation of trust for this piece? It's critical and to do it at the beginning, and right, so you're profiling the data, you're defining entitlements and who has access to it. You're defining data quality rules that you can validate that. You define the policies, is there PII data, all of that. As you do that from the start, then you have a well-governed and documented data catalog and taxonomy that has the policies and the controls in place to allow that to use. If you do it after the fact that then you're always really catching up. So a part of our process and policies and where the really informatic tools delivered for us is to make it part of that process and to use that as we continue to build out our data platform with the quality controls and all the governance processes built in. I got to ask you on your journey. You said seven years ago, you took over the practice. You were probably right in the middle of the sea change when everyone kind of woke up and said, hey, Amazon, you go back seven years, look at Amazon where they were to where they are today. Significantly strong then, total bellwether now, in terms of value opportunity. So how did you look at the cloud migration? How do you think about the cloud architecture? Because I'm sure, and I'd love to get your story here about how you thought about cloud in the midst of architecting the data foundational platform there. Yeah, we're a global company that had architecture and we grew by acquisition. So a lot of our data architecture was on-prem, difficult really to pull that enterprise data together to meet the business needs. So when we started this, we really wanted to leverage cloud technology. We wanted a modern stack. We wanted scale, flexibility, agility, security, all the things that the cloud brought us to. So we did a search and looking at that and looked at competitors, but really landed on Amazon just by core capabilities and scale they have innovation and just the services to bring a lot what we're looking at and really deliver on what we wanted from the platform. Why Informatica and AWS? Why the combination? Can you share some of the reasons why you went with Informatica with AWS? Yeah, we, again, when we started this off, we looked at the competitors, right? And we were using IDQ. So we had an Informatica product on-prem, but we looked at a lot of the different governance competitors. And really the integrated platform that Informatica brings to us was the key deliverer, right? So we can really have the technical metadata with EDC and enterprise data catalog, scan our sources, our file, understanding the data and lineage of what it is. And we can tie that into acts on the governance tools to really define business glossary terms. We're very critical of defining all our key data elements, business glossary. And then we can see where that is by linking that to the technical metadata. So we know where our PII data, where all our data and how it flows, both technically and from a business process. And then the IDQ. So when we define and understand the data we want to bring in the delay and how we want to conform it to make it easily accessible, we can define data quality rules within the governance tool and then execute that with IDQ and really have a well-defined data quality process that really takes it from governance in theory to governance and really execution. That's awesome. Hey, you're making, using the data, using the cloud, you're getting everything you need out of it. That's the whole idea, isn't it? Yeah. That's good stuff. Rick at Informatica, but tell us about what's going on. You mentioned data 4.0. I think people should pay attention to some of the interviews I've done with your team. They're online. Also, it's part of that next gen, next level thinking. Are it reinvent? What should customers pay attention to that you guys are doing? Great customer example here of cloud scale. What's the story for reinvent this year for Informatica? Well, John, I think it comes down to when customers think about their cloud journey, right? And the difference, especially with their data-centric workloads and priorities and initiatives, all the different hurdles that they need to overcome. I think Informatica, we're uniquely positioned to help customers address all those different challenges. And you heard Rick speak about a whole bunch of those along the way. And I think, and you participate in reinvent, first of all, it's welcome folks that want to learn more about our data governance solution. Please come by our virtual booth. We also have a great interactive experience that encourage folks to check out. One of the key components of our solution is our enterprise data catalog. And attendees at reinvent can actually get hands-on with our data catalog through the demo jam, the AWS demo jam as part of reinvent. So I'd encourage folks to check that out as well, just to see what we're talking about in action. Awesome. Final question for you guys. As reinvents going on, a lot of stores are popping up. We're seeing obviously the same trends, machine learning and you know, outposts is booming. So cloud operations is clearly here. Rick from Invesco, what do you think the most important story is for your peers as they're here? It's a learning conference. You guys have seven years in the cloud working together with Informatica. In your opinion, what should people be paying attention to as they look at this pandemic and what they got to get through and then coming out of it with the growth strategy. It's all going to be more about the data. There's more data coming in, more sources. IoT data, certainly the work at home. It's causing, it's workloads, workplace, workflows. Everything's changed, the future of work. What's your advice to peers out there on what to pay attention to and what to think about? We really started with a top-down strategy, right? To really the vision and the future. And what do we want to get out of our data? Data is just data, right? But it's the information, it's the analytics. It's really delivering value for our clients, shareholders and employees to really do their job, simplify our architecture. So really defining that vision of what you want and approach and then executing on it, right? So how do you build it in a way to make it flexible and scalable? And how do you build a operating and governance model really to deliver on it?  And you really got to have those processes, I think, to really get the full value of what you're building. Get the data out there at the right place at the right time, the right quality data. It's a lot more involved now and you need to be agile. And I think agile data is a way to go. And then there's tools and capabilities that makes it easier, right? It makes it doable. And I think that's what cloud and the informatic tools, right? We're in the past, you know, there's people hard coding and doing it right. And the capability that cloud and these tools give us makes it really achievable. You know, we've been all saying here in our CUBE team, you know, if there's a problem, you got to see if it's important and then look at the consequences of not solving that problem, quantify the value of solving or not solving that problem and look and deploy solutions to do it. I think now with the data, you can actually do that and say, the consequences of not doing this or doing this have a quantifiable value. And I just love that because it brings the whole ROI back to the table. And, you know, it's a dark heart. It used to be, you mentioned the old days, you know, you got to do all this custom work. It was like a dark heart. Oh yeah, the ROI calculation, the payback. I mean, it was a moving train. That's the way it used to be. Yeah. Not anymore. You got to do it to survive, really. If you're not doing it, you know, I don't know. Necessity is the mother of all inventions. I think now more than ever, data is going to be the key. Rick, final word from Informatica. What should people pay attention to? Yeah, I mean, I think as you mentioned there, data is obviously a critical asset, right? And to your point with cloud, you can not only realize ROI quickly, but you can actually iterate so much more quickly where you can get that ROI immediately or you can validate that ROI. You can adjust your approach. But again, from an Informatica standpoint, we are seeing such a huge uptake and demand for customers who want to go to the cloud, who are modernizing, and we're investing every day. We're investing heavily in how do we make sure that customers can get there quickly? They can maximize the ROI from their data assets. And we're doing it with all things data management from traditional data integration, all the way to the data governance, all the capabilities we talked about today. You know, congratulations. That's the benefit of investing in a platform and having a set of out-of-the-box tooling with SAS platform as a service, really it can enable success. And I think the pandemic, it's pretty obvious who's taking advantage of it. So congratulations and continued success. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Rick Turnock, Head of Data Service, Enterprise Data Service, InvestCo customer of Informatica, sharing his insight, great insight there. Necessities, the mother of all inventions, baking it in from the beginning, data governance foundational, it's not a bolt-on. That's the message. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


Hello, Hope. Thanks for the school for having me. Today, I will talk to you about how I focus on improving processes when I start in a new company. Improving processes is something you can always do. But especially when you're onboarding, you have the chance to see everything with a fresh eye and you recognize things easily. I thought it was a good topic, as everyone has been in the onboarding period at least once in the past or will do it in the future. And this is a great chance to make an impact as soon as you start. So a quick overview on the agenda. Today, I'm going to introduce myself and my experience, why I think we should be focused on processes during the onboarding period, what are the areas to focus on, mainly the product, the initiatives, the people and processes, and then some practical example. Let's start. I'm Sara, Italian, graduated in business and economics. I started my career in Italy working for Uxnet Apporter, a fashion e-commerce platform, where I spent almost five years. Then I moved to London, joining the body shop, the beauty brand, and I started being a product manager. And it's one year now that I'm in Farfetch as senior product manager. For the ones not knowing Farfetch, Farfetch is an online fashion luxury platform and in particular, I look after an internal tooling, a CRM, and I feel like I'm quite lucky as my customers are internally and I get to know more about them on a daily basis personally. So why is onboarding important and why should you focus on this period when thinking about what are the processes to change or to improve? Onboarding is one of the most important periods of your career in the new company. You have one and only chance to make the best first impression on your colleagues, understand what they do, what's the company culture and the structure and what are the things they want to keep and improve or like any processes that they have currently in place. MPM roles are all unique and they all depends on the company itself. So some of them have focused more on the delivery, some others on the strategy. In a small startup, you need to wear a lot of hats. So helping with the design, the training, the analytics, while in bigger companies, you have many more resources and people really to help you with their projects. And starting with a new company, it's a very stressful period. Lots of things to learn, like names to remember, the acronyms that everyone is super used to use and you need to understand the challenges that you have and what the company like expects from you. But at the same time, you feel refreshed. You finally finish to send all the CV to tons of companies and do hours of interviews. In the first days, you get to know what resources you have, what's your product about, what are the ongoing initiatives and what's the strategy of the entire company. You get to use your product, you get to meet your customers and understand what their pains point are. And this is the time when you can settle yours and your stakeholders habits. And when you can understand without the process working, the one that you are missing and what your customers want to improve. When you start, you see everything with an external eye. You don't know why things work in that way, but you always put things to improve. While if you are in a company for a long time, you get to use to see things working in the same old way, you get to use of all the politics and bureaucracy in place and it's even easier if it's not your first job. You know already what was not working on what you didn't like in the previous company and you can make an impact and spot areas to improve in the first weeks. So I think it's all interconnected. And if you watch some other talk about onboarding, they all tell you about people, product and processes. And I personally agree. And this is why I put together these pretty complicated sentences by involving people. You can understand what processes are currently in place. This will lead you to start initiatives to enhance your product that in return will affect people back again. Of course, it all starts with people. One of the first thing you usually do when starting in a new company is meeting your Dev and Design team. You have lots of want once where you explain what's your background and what you've understood so far about the company and in return, you get their opinion about the product, the projects and the processes going on. Do they feel they don't have context when they start developing? Did they understand what is the value of all the projects when they're working on? Do they directly get customer feedbacks? If you have like the feeling that some of those things are not clear to them, try to improve them and be part of the team. Maybe you are doing some good training as part of your onboarding or you're watching some insight through research. Share it. Share the knowledge that you're building and don't take for granted that everyone knows everything. Sometimes, and usually like if you are in the tech department, the Dev team doesn't have access to all the research that the business has put in place. And having a common idea and share the knowledge is always a good practice. Of course, like you don't work in silos and you get the chance to meet others, stakeholders, mainly the business. And here you have a bunch of departments to consider depending on your product and the company size. Usually there is the sales team, the marketing team, legal operation, analytics, project managers, research, product marketing. And of course, you have like other product managers covering different areas of the business. You should like try to meet them as soon as possible like dealing the first 30 to 60 days and ask how they are currently involved in the project you're working on, what they need to, when they need to be involved, how to raise requests to their teams and what's their understanding of your product. Then focus on the processes.  Things they think you should focus on, how they want to be involved. And in particular, you should now have a good understanding of how to ship a product. Who do you need to involve to decide what to do next? What's the ideation process? How to take requirements? What metrics to consider? The development process? How to update the stakeholders and how to deliver the initiative in general? And I don't know, maybe you can maybe test it or you have the SMEs that are ready to help you giving feedback along the way. You should try to understand if you usually release to all the customers or just a portion of them or perhaps a region or a market or anything similar. It's not really common, but sometimes you have the chance to have an end overdone by the former PM. Well, in that case, map out all the projects you need to work on, at what stage they are. What are your stakeholders per projects? What are the metrics they usually consider? How they update their stakeholders? And what are the impact and business dependency as you have and ask who's the most influential person to talk to in case of any need? See what has been promised already. What is, how is like the relationship with the business and why they think should be improved? Where did they fail and where did it succeed already? You should know kind of like the history of your product, understand what failed already and what are the ideas that didn't work and why. So you don't make the same mistakes. And then you have the product and the initiatives you're working on. So if you're lucky and it's a consumer product, you can start understanding what you will work for before actually starting in a new company. Maybe you'll be a PM for an app. So you can download it or your job is about a website. You can sign up or register and try the experience yourself. You should like search what people say about your product, read reviews, try to replicate the life cycle of a typical customer in general. Or for instance, you could also write to the customer service pretending that you are having like an issue with an order or a product or the website in general and see what's their approach. Or maybe you are going to work on an internal tooling or a system you don't have access to before entering the company. So in that case, as soon as you start, ask for all the type of user access. You want to have the admin and the user account. You want to keep track of your first impression being like an user. And this is like the first, the chance that you to see like what is the first impression of your product. Not kind of like the feelings you have. Maybe, I don't know, the blocking is too painful. You easily find all the areas and everything works perfectly. You should like put yourself in the customer shoes and remember what is your first impression. If you perhaps like have a training team that also cover your product, ask to be part of the next training. See how the team you explain your product and what's the usual life cycle of a customer like accessing your product is. What is their first impression and what do they do? What they do find like painful and what are the strengths of your product? Okay, let's be practical now. How can you make an impact and improve the processes straight away? I'm gonna start like with asynchronous work. Let's say that during the first meetings, you found that the business struggles to understand the timelines and deliverables you're working on and they don't have a good way to give you feedback on what you're building. Be an ambassador of asynchronous work. Surely like you use a messaging program or a messaging app, Slack, Teams or anything. You can create channels or conversation and regularly update the team on what the progress on your initiatives are. Cause like you can't pretend to always have everyone in a room and have the attention of everyone at all the times. Reduce the meeting as much as you can, be concise and write things down where everyone can see them. For instance, like they can understand why your project has been blocked or they can give you feedback straight away without having to wait for the next meeting and you don't have to schedule a meeting in the early morning and one in the late evening to be time zone friendly. If you work in a global company, like you will never have the right time to have everyone involved in the same room and you can't always wait for the next day to get an answer. Record videos. There are a bunch of tools to record a video and then with the progress of your project instead of finding the right time to have everyone in a room, maybe you need to give feedback on our design. You can write the comments on the design itself. Almost like all the tools designers use have a comment functionalities and you don't have to wait for the day after to give feedback in person. Are you working on presentation? Again, almost all the tools to create presentations have comments functionalities and you can also assign words to others. Asynchronous words to me is the best. So like use it as much as you can, be an ambassador of it and try to change the way everyone works by improving this process. Of course, like it's not something you can do all the times. I also think that being in the same room or Zoom meeting and share ideas is really powerful but try to free everyone's time as much as you can. And what's the best way to not lose focus and be sure that everyone understands what you're talking about? Well, with visual engagement. So you can create flows, use diagrams, build engaging presentations or whatever. I don't know if your initiative affecting a process that is currently in place, things will change massively. Use a whiteboard tool to show the new process, visually highlighting the main pain point and trying to focus on the conversation directly on those.  Who's the customer you're interviewing? What are the main feedback? Don't write too much, but show as much as you can. Do you want to engage better with stakeholders? Build a timeline visually where everyone can understand what happens when and of course make it available to everyone so they can check it out whenever they can. Whenever they can. Maybe you're building a one-pager. Don't be too wordy. Include screenshots, process tables, anything that can help with the understanding of your initiative and don't take for granted that everyone knows all the acronyms you're used to. About this point, I also always try to understand who I have in front of me when I'm in a meeting. And I try to have like definitions or to give definitions. I give you an example. Let's say that you work for an e-commerce. You are in a meeting talking about products in general. It could be that like the audience means that the product that you are selling, so whatever product that you're selling in terms of like one pair of shoes, for example, or that pair of shoes in that precise size and color, or it could be that they mean the precise pair of shoes that has been sent to the customer. Depending on the conversation, this could lead to a lot of misunderstanding. Definition, I think that makes the difference. And if you help yourself with visual representation is always a good starting point to have everyone understanding what you're talking about. It can also happen that during the onboarding period, your dev team is concerned because they got too many direct requests from the business. And in this case, you have the opportunity to start with the right foot. So you can establish your role, establish ways to get in touch with you and with your team and try to protect your team's time. Understand why the business goes directly to your dev team is it because of new requests, because they change their mind or because they want to get updated. Explain them why you need to protect your developers time, why it's important they focus on the right things and how long does it take to get to a new feature, how to solve a bug or et cetera. Create ways to get new requests about an initiative you're working on and make them accountable of what they're requesting. Did they check with other teams before coming to you? Do they know what's the value of the request they're making? Do they know what you're working on and how much this thing will affect your timeline? Explain then how they could access to your board. You can use like Gira Trello or anything that you use to track your work, but make them self-sufficient to see what is the status of a project you're working on and don't be scared about creating new processes, but at the same time, like be responsible for them. If you have meetings where you raise requirements, you get everyone to understand what are the main pain points of your initiative, you share a timeline and always update all your customer regularly, then they will trust you. They will know where to go to see what the next steps are and not what the stage your initiative is. They could see the videos of the demo you recorded and finally they can also see like visually what's the impact of an initiative. Also establish KPIs and create dashboard to track them. Are you in maybe improving the average order value or the click-through rate by doing this and that? Well, ask your analytics team to create a dashboard, give access to everyone and make themselves sufficient.  This leads me to my final point that is be self-sufficient. Try to remove all the possible bottlenecks and again, have all the teams able to self-serve and work asynchronously. An example with data, your analytics team needs access to some report that you just have in your tooling, give them access to it or create rules to send those reports automatically to the bright audience. Do you need data to see how it's going with one of your projects, create a dashboard, ask access for that precise table you need and learn how to use the data. So if someone is on holiday, you don't get stuck or you don't have to wait for the other teams to get to your request like prioritized. If your products integrate with other systems via API, ask to have them and check how long it takes to update them. You want to be able to troubleshoot any issue by yourself instead of relying on your team. And if your product has a UAT or a pre-prod environment where the development goes before eating production, ask access to it. Again, like as if you were any of the user, you want to be able to demo the product by yourself, see the progress by yourself and don't have always to ask your DAB team. So to recap, try to work asynchronously as much as you can, use visual engagement to explain things to your stakeholders, establish boundaries to protect your team's time and try to be self-sufficient and continuously reiterate the process you have in place. All those things can be done while you are in the onboarding period and also while you are in an established role. Change the ways of working and always improve and ask for feedback and see how to improve every day in your work. I hope you find it useful. Feel free to reach out over email or LinkedIn or write a comment down below and let me know if you think I missed anything. Thank you again for listening.


What are they after? They're after radically different things. A competitive player, someone like me and Scott, if you talk to us about games, we talk a lot about the mechanics, and I want the player with the highest skill to win, and I don't want some random nonsense hitting me. I don't want Thanos to be thrown out by ego when I didn't expect it, or something like that. That's not to say that we're any good. We just try to win, we care about winning. I'm happy to lose games. I just want a fair, serious competition. A lot of kids playing Fortnite, a lot of people playing Fortnite, they wanna hang out, have fun with their friends. They're doing things in Fortnite for fun. Winning Fortnite is just something that may or may not happen along the way. If we distill this further, this is what happened with that patch. Competitive players wanted the best player to win. That patch rewarded aggression, and thus did need the better players would win more often. Non-competitive players just got killed immediately because suddenly there's people like us running around the game killing kids as fast as possible.


I want to say a thank you to the Roberto Clemente family. Getting a chance to meet you guys, get a chance to spend some time with you guys in Pittsburgh this year was very special and dear to me. Just being a nominee is an incredible honor that a lot of players look forward to. And now getting a chance to be a Roberto Clemente award winner, it's tough to describe. The legacy your father left, he was, we can sit here and talk about the stats, what he did on the field. He was a generational talent on the field, but he was a generational ambassador for this game off the field. How he touched the lives of the youth, inspired the youth, inspired this next generation of all players that we see today. We see so many young players that represent the game the right way. They play the game the right way, and they give back to the kids. We spoke earlier when we were talking about the Little League World Series, and we're seeing all these kids going out there and replicating what a lot of our players are doing now, that's what it's about. He grew the game, and that's something I want to continue to do is continue to grow the game.