Hey everybody, Rob Greenfield here and this is everything I own. Everything I own is sitting on this table right here and fits into this one backpack. So today I'm going to show you what I own and share why I own these things and some lessons to go along with them. Now when I say this is everything I own, I truly mean it. It means there's nothing stored in other places, nothing stored at family or friends and I don't even actually have a bank account, a credit card, many other things. All of my money is also right here on this table. So this is literally everything I own and it's about 43 possessions. My net worth right now is about $5,500 to $6,000. There's $5,000 in this envelope and then everything here is worth substantially less than $1,000. So this is it and I'm going to show you the different things. So I'm going to go ahead and start with my clothes. First I'm wearing two articles of clothing. I have my shorts and I have my shirt on. Along with that I have four more shirts, all the same except one of them is long sleeve, the other four are short sleeve. These are bamboo cotton blend. One of my goals is to be basically biodegradable. My goals is that when I die, hopefully if I can be in the woods or out on the ocean and if I fall into the ocean or I die in the woods, I just simply return to the earth rather than littering as I die by wearing plastic clothing. So one of my goals is really for almost everything that I own to be biodegradable, to be a single or a multiple, a few simple ingredients straight from the earth. Bamboo and cotton is one example of that. My sweater is a wool sweater, thrift store, I think $10, $11. So that's my main source of warmth. I have two pairs of underwear which are plastic, not natural fibers. A second pair of shorts, also plastic. I have a pair of socks and these socks are actually my Boy Scout socks from when I was in high school or middle school, so these are 20 years old possibly, no 15 years old. My clothes fit into this little cotton bag, so this is my clothes bag, I don't think the sweater would fit in here but everything else fits into there. And that's it for clothes. So one thing to point out, I'm in a warm climate right now. I lived in Florida before while I was doing my year of growing and foraging all my food, so I designed my life to be where I am. I don't design my life to be in a cold climate because I'm not in a cold climate. Wherever you are, you have to do things that make sense, apply common sense, critical thinking, problem solving to wherever you are. So for example, a month from now I will be in Western Europe, I'll be in Germany where it's going to be cold, so I'm going to have to get some warm clothes. So right now I own 43 possessions, but that will fluctuate. My goal is one day to have no possessions, so 43 less possessions and at times I'm going to have more possessions. When I'm on a tour in Europe speaking, maybe it'll be doubled to 80 possessions. We'll see. But the point is that wherever you are, whatever climate you're in, you have to adapt to that climate. So my other item of clothing, as you could say, is my sandals. Very simple. I'm mostly barefoot. I try to be barefoot as much as I possibly can, which is a vast majority of the time. And these provide very simple cover to my feet. And these are the soles, but our feet naturally have soles. They're called calluses. And I won't go too deep into that, but to sum it up, I believe that the human body was designed over tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to really work. So all I do is I believe that my feet work. It's actually not that crazy. So let's see. What do I want to show next? So I have a little towel. If I have a cold, this works as a towel for that, a handkerchief. I use this for washing dishes and things like that. So multi-purpose. One of the keys is for things to be usable for many functions. A lot of the things that I have, I have maybe it's one possession, but I can use it in many different ways. This is probably one of the great possessions that I have. And this is my pot and it's my bowl and it's my to-go container. It's what I can put my leftovers in. So a lot of people who are striving for zero waste, they'll carry a reusable bowl. This is basically that except it's also a pot so that when I'm traveling, if I'm somewhere where there is no pot or pan, I can cook and I can also cook over a fire with it. I wash this with steel wool so it keeps it really shiny, but I've been using this for I'm not sure how long, but probably five to ten years. It's one of my oldest possessions right now. So this is a really important possession in my life. And when I say important, not a single thing here is irreplaceable. I actually don't own a single thing that is sentimental. Every single thing here has a purpose and has value to me in the sense that it allows me to live out things that I'm trying to do, but there is actually not a single item here that is sentimental. If I lost all of this tomorrow, there'd be some issues I'd have to deal with, but it would have no sentimental aspect to it. So another thing that I have is a reusable or sorry, yeah, I mean, this is rather than disposable bottles carrying this reusable water bottle. It's also a thermos so I can carry hot beverages or soup. So this is my cup wherever I go. One important possession. I often just have a simple glass jar too, which is better. Well, I got this because someone lost it and I found it and there was no owner to claim it. So that's why I have this, but usually I just have a jar, a Mason jar. Another eating utensil, spoon. Sometimes I have a spoon and a fork. You don't need awesome bamboo forks and spoons. They're cool, but go to a thrift store 25 cents or open your drawer. You have spoons and forks to travel with already. Normally one of my possessions is a Leatherman, a multi-tool, but I don't have that because this year I'm traveling using planes and everything's carry-on so I can't carry a knife. Otherwise that would absolutely be one of my key possessions. So next I will show, this is a reusable bag as well. I keep using the word reusable. Of course it's reusable, but what I mean is for a lot of people who are getting plastic bags at the store, you can use a reusable shopping bag. Now this can be used for grocery shopping, for day, this is basically like my day pack so that I don't have to take everything out of here, I have this small pack that I can carry as well. Both of these backpacks were given to me by a friend who gets backpacks that are going to be thrown away and he repurposes them and makes things out of them and instead I actually took these because they're still good. So I have my computer and computers can be expensive, this would be my most expensive item but I buy them used on Craigslist. So this was I think about $300, it's a 2014 so it's 6 years old and so if I break this or it gets stolen then I just need about $300 to get another used one of these. So there's the charger to go with that. I'm counting the charger and the computer as one possession at the advisement of many of my friends who say that is one possession, but if you want to call it two, you know the 43 is a little bit subjective. You can decide what you want. I'm going to show you one possession, my earplugs to help me with sleeping, there's six pairs in there. I'm going to call it one, part of me wants to call it six. So you could say I have anywhere between, depending on how you do it, you could say I have between 30 and 70 possessions, just depending on how you want to count it. And then my earplugs. So these are headphones. This is at this moment literally the only electronic items that I own. This is it. I usually have a headlamp as well, but right now I'm not carrying a headlamp because I'm really enjoying the simplicity of this being the only electronic items that I own. This is a little cotton bag that I put my headphones in the charger in and that is another possession. So I've got my notebook which is an important possession for me. I do a lot of writing and I try to minimize my time on technology on the computer. So this notebook is a great tool for me to be able to write by hand rather than on the computer. My goal is to move away from technology as much as I possibly can. But so lots in here, I have my to-do lists and things like that in there. So got this at a thrift store, I think it was a dollar and ten cents, which is a little expensive for a notebook actually. Let's see, reading. My goal is to generally be carrying one book at a time. Right now I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. One of my favorite authors, one of my favorite books, I'm reading it again. You can see in here just all these earmarks. There's just so much I'm learning from here, so much, so much important information. And then I have my bookmark. This is a postcard of Gandhi that I got at the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta four years ago, and I keep this with me. Just a nice remembrance of someone that I love very much. I also, oh, one thing I didn't count as a possession is on my computer. I always forget about this possession. It's a bumper sticker that says we must be the change that we wish to see in the world. And technically that's a possession. So I guess I'm up to 44. I always forget about that one. 44, actually that's a great number. Thanks Gandhi. Okay, so a couple other things. Let's see, I'm going to go into my hygiene now. For me, I practice a very simple hygiene. I think that this body functions, just like I think my feet function, I think my body functions. I don't believe old spice. I don't believe that I'm better off because of it, and I don't believe that I need it in order to be an important member of society. So I haven't used deodorant for about eight years now. And I hugged thousands of people a year, and sometimes I smell a little bit, but I also think a little bit of smell is just fine. So I won't go super deep into that, but all my personal hygiene items are on this table. I've very much simplified it. Again, as a man with very little hair, it's different than as a woman or a man with long flowing, beautiful hair. So everybody's different. But the point is that there's so many ways we can reduce. Do we need swag in order to be contributing members of society? I don't think so, whether we have long hair or short hair. And there's plenty of women out there who are examples of that, who have said, I don't need that system. I can stand outside of it as well. So we'll start with hair, actually. How do I cut my hair? So as I said, I try to use as few electronic items as possible. So I've got this old school vintage handheld buzzer. So how it works is I squeeze it, and then there's blades here. And then it cuts my hair. So I can do it as super short. But I actually took a plastic piece from a newer one. And that's how it works. It just squeezes just like that. And I will have a video on my channel about that, the Off the Grid Zero Waste Hair Cut. So that is a pretty sweet thing. I think this is about 50 years old. I can't find a... I don't think they're made anymore. You can only get vintage ones, and I got this online. And that goes inside of this bag. So that's another possession of the bag, which is hemp, I believe. So I also have these little scissors. These are coming handy so much, since I don't have my multi-tool anymore. These are probably one of my most commonly used possessions. I use it for trimming, you know, the beard, the ears, you know, the hairline. But I use it for so many different things. Just when I'm repairing things, repairing my clothes, things like that. So really great. Also grabbed this from my mom's house. She had like three or four of them. So I asked if I could have one of these pairs of scissors. So nice little memory of my mom. Hi, mom. I love you. So one of the ways that I use this is for my dental floss. So my dental floss doesn't have a plastic container surrounding it. Instead, it's just this little roll, and then I just cut it with the scissors. And now what's really great about this dental floss is this is made out of silk. So this is not plastic, and this goes right into the compost pile as well. So there's very few ways that I create trash. I minimize them ways that I create trash, and you'll see that is a big part of the possessions that I own. I'll turn it up to it. But for now, I'm sticking to this plastic, and to be honest, I don't feel bad about that. I'm not trying to be perfect. I'm just trying to do a really good job, and I think I'm doing pretty good. So I'm happy. So that's the toothbrush. For toothpaste, I also buy my toothpaste. I buy a brand called Jason Power Smile, not because I have any connection to them, just because I've been using it for five years, and I really love it. This... Oh, that's great. I love it. But what I do is I take it out and I put it into a glass jar for multiple reasons. I buy it in six ounces. I'm traveling right now, and you can't carry a six ounce thing. And then also because plastic, when it heats and cools, can release the plastic, and this way it's in glass for its life. So this is another one of those luxuries of life that I am sticking to. I could definitely make my own toothpaste. A lot of people do it, and they like it. I have made it, but it didn't beat this for me. I have my essential oil. This is something that I buy, and I generally have lavender or a blend that is very soothing, and that's what this is, and I use this to help myself relax, so often before sleep. But throughout the day, especially if I'm in stressful scenarios, just being able to smell this really is so helpful. This is a very important natural medicine for me. And the other essential oil that I'm often carrying is tea tree, which is an antimicrobial that I use as a disinfectant, and that's the other one that I'm usually carrying. But for now, I'm keeping life the simplest I've ever had it at 44 possessions, and so I just have the one essential oil. I have a moisturizer, basically you would call it a body butter. This is also store bought. I have friends who make this, I've loved some of their friend makes, but right now I have a store bought one for moisturization, keeping myself young, taking care of the skin, and that's all natural, biodegradable. And speaking of biodegradable, my soap. So most people, a lot of the people that I visit use toxic soap, toxic cleaning products, so I like to carry my own soap. This is pretty much just for washing my hands and my dishes. I actually don't almost ever use soap on my body, because our body has a naturally functioning system with trillions of bacteria that are living in harmony with our skin, and a lot of our soaps and our products actually destroy that, and make us dependent upon that. But my body really functions without that, I've been living without soap on my body for again about eight years, seven years-ish. But I do use it for dishes and for the hands, and it's biodegradable, it's plant-based, so this is greywater friendly, so this can go onto the plants rather than go into a waste-water treatment plant. I have earplugs, which I use for sleeping, or when I'm traveling for leaf blowers and lawn mowers and things like that, so those actually really improve my quality of life. It helps me get good sleep. I would love to exist completely without these, but I had to tricky one. I get much better sleep with these. I have my fingernail clippers, and so that's it for natural hygiene. This is this little bit right here, and it all fits into this natural fiber bag. So natural hygiene is mostly from the sun, from the water, from the elements of the earth, from eating good food. So speaking of food, I carry tea with me. I like to have tea every morning and every night, a nice morning tea and an evening tea. This is chamomile. I really like to have that, to just relax me at night, and I have a... This was a tea ball, but I lost half, so I just strain it. I make the tea in a pot, and then I just pour it through this to get the tea without the chunks in it. Some people, like my friend Cathy, they just love the chunks in their tea. I like a nice, smooth tea with no chunks. So last, but not least, I have my identification. So I have my passport here. I still travel internationally, so this is a very important possession for me. I don't have a driver's license. I don't have a Social Security card. I do have a birth certificate. So these are my only two forms of identification. So that means I don't need a wallet. I also don't have all these bonus cards and things like that. For me, if I had a wallet and it had a hundred different cards in it, that would be a hundred different possessions. But I don't have a wallet. I don't have any of those things. I got rid of all those things over the years. So these are my two forms of ID. The reason that I have these is because with these two forms of ID, I could get other ones if I decide to. I got rid of all the other ones about five years ago-ish. So my two forms of ID, my dream is to one day, again, literally have nothing including this, which would mean no longer being able to legally leave the country. There's ways around that. Maybe I have no experience with it, but I know I know there is. I believe that we are all human beings of this earth. First and foremost, the borders come second to that. Lastly, my most valuable possession is my money. Although I don't actually own this. Technically, the government owns the money. It's not my property. This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private. So that wasn't the exact words I was looking for, but I don't actually technically own this, but I do own this envelope, which I took out of the garbage can. So I'm counting this as one possession. So I have about $5,000 and I make the little bit of money that I make from public speaking for all of 2020. I'm actually not making any money. This is going to get me through the entire year. 100% of my speaking honorariums for 2020 are donated to indigenous and women led environmental nonprofits. So I literally mean this is all of my money. I have no bank account, no credit card. I have no savings account. I have no retirement fund, no Roth IRAs or mutual funds. I have no debt that I owe to anyone else and no debt is owed to me. So this is my financial life right here. And it's not a lot of money. But for me, this is actually a substantial amount of money. And I am very comfortable with this. Now, you can look at this and say, OK, well, what this really is, is he's just dependent upon other people, dependent upon humanity. And yes, I am dependent on other people. I am dependent on humanity. Money makes it appear that we're not dependent on other people. But I believe that is just one big illusion. Every time you spend money, there's someone behind that. There's other creatures behind that. There's our world behind that. But we're able to remove ourselves from that and consider ourselves independent. But the reality is we're not independent. We are completely dependent on our global humanity. And that is what I've chosen to embrace through this way of life, is that I want to stand out against this idea of radical independence and stand for radical connection to humanity. That's what I'm trying to show here, actually, is that we are dependent upon each other and we absolutely do need to work together. At the same time, I think that it is important as individuals that we have skills, that we are resourceful, that we have common sense, that we critically think. And those are all things that I've established in myself. So I know how to take care of my body. I'm not asking other people to do that. I've learned how to be able to take care of a lot of my own needs. So there is that form of independence, but only with the complete embracement, I think that's a word, of the reality that I am completely dependent on humanity.  All of those things are all dependent on global humanity working together and all of the creatures that we depend on and the environment, the earth that we depend on. So that's really, you know, I'm trying to shake things up a little bit here. I am extreme. There's no question about that. The way that I do things is extreme. But I think that our current way of living, the United States has five percent of the world's population but uses 25 percent of the world's resources. That is extreme. So what I am is I am a counterbalance to that extreme way of life. I only have to go this far because society has gone so far in the other direction. And that is why that is why I'm extreme so that I can stand out and and get people thinking and get people questioning their own lives. So I am extreme, but I also wasn't always this way. I used to be really focused on material possessions and financial wealth. My goal was to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. I wonder what the 23 year old me now would say to a guy who actually only has less than $6,000 as his full financial net worth. So I wasn't, you know, I wasn't always this way. So it was a transition in 2011. That's when I woke up. I lived in a three bedroom apartment at the time. I lived in the biggest bedroom because I had a lot of stuff. I moved to the smallest bedroom as I started to wake up and and and reduce the amount of stuff. I went from the smallest bedroom to living in the six by six closet of my tiny house, as well as having my friend park his camper in the driveway. And I stayed in the camper as well.  I eventually got rid of that apartment and I moved into a tiny house, a 50 square foot tiny house in San Diego. At that time, when I moved in there, I was able to bike over with everything that I owned on a bike trailer, the bike and the bike panier. So that was a new, a big step for me. Then I lived for a year in a 50 square foot tiny house off the grid in San Diego. At that time, I think I had around a thousand possessions. After that, I downsized to having just 111 possessions that all fit into my backpack, which I traveled with for about two years. So that was a bigger backpack than this substantially bigger, about twice as big, 111 possessions. And then I moved to Orlando, and that's where I decided that I was going to grow and forge 100 percent of my food for a year. That meant drastically increasing my possessions to be able to be self sufficient food wise. I had a lot of possessions, you know, just the shovels and the rakes. And I built a I built a 10 by 10 tiny house, so much bigger than the last one. And I filled it with a lot of stuff, mostly useful stuff, things that I could use for sustainability, for gardening and such. And then I left Sandy. I left Orlando after two years there. I gave away the tiny house. I gave away most of my possessions, sold some of them, and then have down and then it took me months to downsize my life again.  They eventually got that down to 80 possessions. And then a few weeks ago in Montreal, I was at a school speaking and I turned that 80 possessions into 40 possessions. I gave away half of the things I owned that day to kids. I was leaving Montreal and coming to Costa Rica, where I didn't need my jacket and my pants. And I wanted to get rid of those things as I'm going to be shifting only to natural fibers instead. So from 80 down to now 44, you can see there was a long transition. It was to get to this point, you know, the most minimalist I've been took from 2011. So nine years. So it was a long transition process. And I know a lot of you might be overwhelmed with the idea of where you are today, maybe you have a lot of stuff, maybe a five bedroom house full of stuff. But just remember that I was there in a similar situation 11 years ago and it was a transition. So again, the way that I've done things is extreme, but you don't have to go that far. And I know a lot of you probably would like, you know, you might be inspired. You might want to reduce the number of possessions you have. You might want to shrink the size of your house. You might want to live in a tiny house. You might want everything you want to fit in the backpack. So I've actually created another video for that, tips on how to downsize your life that goes into that and shares my transition and gives you a lot of the tools and the guides on how to be able to do that. But just keep in mind, it's a process and you don't have to go to this extreme by any means to drastically increase happiness and healthiness and be living in a way that is indeed more harmonious with the earth. And another thing for me is, you know, this is life. Life is complicated. And I can't possibly go into all of the reasons behind this, but it's all based on a deeply thought-out way of trying to live and examine life, live with my actions being in alignment with my beliefs. So for me, this is a practice of non-ownership and instead sharing and being a part of humanity. It's a practice of non-materialism, not focusing my life on what other people think about me based on material possessions or getting my health, getting my happiness from possessions. It is a practice of my impermanence embracing that I am an impermanent person here for which it's just a very short period of time and understanding that's okay. The less that I have, the more okay I am with the fact that I am just one human among over seven billion and that's just one species among millions of species and just embracing that I'm just here for a very short period of time and I'll be gone and being okay with that. So non-materialism, non-attachment, non-ownership and embracing my impermanence. So if you got a lot out of this video and you know you're inspired, then I would encourage you to subscribe if you aren't already, if this is your first time here and if you think this is information that other people need then let's help it get out there. Comment and like this, that's what YouTube loves, that's what helps it get into that algorithm so let's spread this stuff. And then of course share it, share it with friends and family that you think that this would be helpful for. Anyone who's been talking about this sort of thing, wanting it, share this with some information and some practical, some inspiration and practical information. So yeah, I love you all very much and I hope to see you in real life one of these days and get a big hug.


Look at that. Do you see that?  Where am I?  It's I'm Corbin I'm Rick and I'm Ashley and false on Instagram and Twitter. I'm all juicy Compton It's so juicy Thank you. We're also some patreon fellas. We should turn it down ring the bell. We hardly want to case squad And today in We're on a your front con marathon So it's true. We told you that's what was gonna happen But we find well, I finally watched they saw it when it came out. I finally watched life of pot with your fun con and directed by Ang Lee So You was obviously this is gonna be a spoiler of you the film came out a long time ago Yeah, and if you haven't seen it just stop go watch come back But yeah, the star and Ang Lee who I'm a huge I was a huge fan of already Because of broke back mountain he if you haven't seen that film what he does With that film and how he how how he works From what I've heard is very he doesn't give a lot of Direction he's one of those. He's one of those directors. He's one of those It's pretty extraordinary just in the comparison of those two films They're both brilliant, but so Extraordinarily different you would think it's actually two different directors. Yeah 100% like this is almost like Avatar light Yeah as far as visuals are concerned in terms of visuals But yes, so yeah, you haven't seen it go watch it. So I liked it I Just just let y'all know I liked it. I do wish Hold on Okay, cool. I froze for a second. I do wish Irfan Khan was in it more I was missing that But I want to talk about his performance right now Because it was so so different From everything else and obviously I'd seen Bits and pieces of his scenes because it's it's a pretty famous especially with Him passing that one scene of him saying never saying goodbye has been going around You know all over the place. So I I'd seen that before And and some other visuals from it, but his character is so different than his normal characters Which is another thing I'm loving The more we're exploring Irfan Khan Because at the beginning we saw him in what is it Piku and obviously we knew him from Hollywood a little bit but we we saw him in Piku and then we saw him in as The ghost and we saw him in a couple of those roles The past couple roles have been very different and this is not a role like the one that we just saw pan sing Where he's obviously playing almost a villain type thing He's playing a pretty straight man, but he almost didn't look like Irfan here Yeah, that's what it felt like to me. It didn't it felt like I Know he was much much younger in this but this felt like old like an old 60s 65 year old Irfan Khan almost Look like that, but he felt like Like almost like an amatuck bok chan character That's what it felt like to me, which is very different than what I'm normally used to from him and I loved it. Obviously he was So good and so flawless And I was cherishing every moment. I saw him on screen But yeah Especially because there's not a lot he's in it and it's like he's a big part of it But he's not seen very much Yeah, since it's one of those ones that obviously he's playing the older character that's telling this story He's basically like the rose from titanic except not 95 years old But yeah, like this can't just be me reviewing this Everybody hears from me. What are your thoughts? I mean you see we saw Multiple times when it when it came out. We loved it. And I think we saw it like three or four times When it first came out. Yeah, so but this was your first time seeing it since we saw in theaters. Yeah Maybe second time. I don't know. Maybe it's been years. It's been years since we've seen like I didn't watch it last week If that's what you're at. That's what I meant. Yeah, I did not watched it today Um, but I love it. I love all the visuals of it. I think it's so pretty. Oh my goodness and I think Just because there's so much time spent on the boat. There's so much that I don't think a lot of movies show about just like the ocean It was almost like you're watching a nature video, you know On national geographic or something where it's like, this is what can happen when you're on the ocean Yeah, the visuals were beautiful. A lot of that stuff was not how animals act in the ocean, but Uh Animals don't just swim at the top of the ocean like that In the can in the in the oh the whales. Yeah But just the regular fish that are just there the mahi mahi. There's birds. Those are prey They don't just sit on the top of the water like that And I know Obviously, I know what he was doing. Obviously. This is a guy telling a story So the the writer himself is visualizing what's happening. And so he's creating a grander picture, obviously Right So I knew that's what was going on. Uh, but yeah, the visuals were So so beautiful, uh with all the, uh, luminescence of the water Yeah, I love that. Oh my gosh I loved how sometimes he made the pacific ocean look like it was a pond I know I was like the pacific ocean is never that calm. Okay, just letting you know Like where in the pacific ocean are you? Uh But yeah, the uh, uh, love the visuals, uh, the the main actor I thought was good. I didn't love him all the time Uh, not my favorite, but he wasn't bad He was he was fine. He did fine, but I was much more looking forward to ear fond Playing that character than I was him. Yeah Yeah, and I like watching the tiger, which was completely not real Well, what story do you think was real? Oh, I mean, obviously the one with the tiger. Yeah, yeah, of course, right Obviously, why would you even think about anything else? Yeah, because that makes so much sense Hey, they owned a zoo Well, the thing that told me it was dumb is right at the beginning when the orangutan was floating in, right? Um, not that the bananas don't float. He didn't take any bananas. Didn't we do that? We did Everybody did everybody did That movie came out took bananas and tried to make them and threw them in pools to see if they would float or not They do Yeah, bananas do float. Yeah, bananas float, but that's not what I'm saying It's no, I know he was in a raft and he knew he didn't have anywhere to go and there was a 20 bundles of bananas and he didn't take any of them Do you have an orangutan? No, him He's it.  I like angly a lot. I've always Been an admirer of his work because he's so so different Uh in how he he directs movies and his own style. He doesn't really Go with the flow. What's popular in movies? He doesn't do anything to make money.  It it wasn't a marketable movie and then Yeah, we got this great idea And then he took two actors who weren't really in there. Nobody thought that they could do Oscar level performances at that time Uh in jake jillen hall and and he pledger and just trusted him and but he he also I don't know if you saw any behind the scenes of broke back mountain. He all he was All the notes he ever gave was just he told Heath Ledger just Smaller And that's the only note he ever gave he didn't he he was never like like he was like cut He didn't come over to give notes and then he just asked if you were ready again And then only ever he would come over and say smaller And so I'm assuming that's the exact time. That's probably why he loved earphone I mean, yeah, no one's as small as One tear Yeah, he he did so brilliant in that in that one scene. Um, that the one where he was saying To say goodbye But I I I don't think I like the white guy and I know this is a Hollywood film and I didn't even like the white guy in it Um, where have I seen that guy before? I don't know. I think in like tv. I don't know I'm sure that it was something like that He wasn't as bad as some of the white people in bollywood, but I didn't I wasn't blown. I wasn't I wasn't blown away by anybody's performance except for earphone in this Um, and I guess it's not that type of film. You're more going for the visuals.  There wasn't room for anybody to shine I guess um But I I did really enjoy the film. Um, I thought it was Really really pretty and He he definitely he definitely murdered some people which was cool No, what are you talking about?  I was I was trying to do the whole time. I was like, so what's the real story here? This is not believable That's not given how old was I when this came out So I was like, this is imagination. Oh, yeah I'm sorry if you believe you can live on a boat with a tiger.  I've been telling you that for years No, I think it could happen. I could train a tiger. No, sure No, but the thing that made sense was the hyena That made sense Hyena killing everybody Because he's a hyena but then the tiger he did I don't know what I think I because I was trying to figure out ang Lee's message in in about religion and and worldview and all that and I think it was mostly summed up in the end by earphone He said same as with god in terms of the fake story with the tiger He said that's the one that I like to believe more and so Both I think so I was trying to figure out what exactly he was saying because he's a hindu christian Muslim buddhist Jew And so he was obviously saying something about all the religions And and and god as a whole and so But obviously he wasn't being preachy about it and he wasn't saying exactly what he believed He left it open to the audience for their interpretation of what You think This means About religion god and and and all that. Um, and so I thought that was a really beautiful thing he did with the film I agree. Yeah, how did you feel? How did you feel looking at it in in? light of the experience we've had over the past better part of a year now and seeing representation of indian culture and taboo and A couple of people whose faces we recognize because now we've seen them in in motion pictures there and Even something like she's talking at the dinner table and she said well, he has his beliefs and you have your cricket Was it just like kind of yeah, I'm used to seeing this now or was it interesting to you that this was all that this Had that much in it? It was Nice, uh, yeah that it was kind of almost normal Um, obviously i'm seeing it very different So it did sometimes feel like an indian film But it also sometimes felt like a hollywood film in the terms of but it also could have been the visuals He was going for everything was um Like when he was in india it it looked like india, but it didn't feel like india Uh, when like when they were out on the streets At certain points, uh, but I think that was once again the storytelling thing of I think it was the rider's head Yeah, I did I did too. I also felt like it may have been intentional. It was almost like, um Not that he meant to do this himself, but it for me in many respects as far as the representation It's the anti slum dog. Yeah, um it it it depicts It depicts india and indians in ways that they're typically not Portrayed here in america all the stereotypes or there's there are no stereotypes In this in fact when it is brought up it's derived to produce character the cook Calling them curry eaters which understandably causes the dad to flip out and want to kick his ass. Yeah, um I I just in retrospect looking back at it. I've been amazed when when the movie came out it it deeply touched me I adored this movie when it came out And as there's just been this through line throughout my life that I look back on like oh wow, I didn't there's india There's india. Hey, I forgot There's india Yeah, and and um as far as as far as air fun You know, we have been playing that clip a lot and everyone's been playing that clip about the goodbyes There was something even more profound for me Uh in that same speech, but it's at the very end where He gets to that place where he says to him which of the two stories do you prefer And he says I prefer the one with the tiger and then he says Kai says his wife has arrived and he says your wife. He says, yes, I have a wife and I have two children Don't get caught on a car And the reporter smiles and says to him. So your story does have a happy ending and Irfan says this That's up to you. It's yours now And I thought how fitting is that in terms of what we've been saying in the past couple days about His legacy and our remembering of him and how we've been choosing to celebrate And and focus on the joy. He's brought us and he's left behind for the world to see versus The the the sadness that we understandably feel and it was almost as if he was saying um You know the reporter saying so your Irfan your story This was a very sad and we've only been thinking about it in terms of how sad it is that you're gone but Is can we somehow see your story as having a happy ending and He looks at you and says yeah, that's up to you. My story is yours now. I'm not here to tell my story anymore guys My story has to be told by you anybody who hears about me from now on. It's up to you To preach the gospel of Irfan I Yeah, I would like to go to that island though Same I googled it. It's not real. It. Yeah. No, it's not. Yeah. No A man eating island Well, it is it is real on a certain level of metaphysics. Oh, well, yes, but if we're gonna get metaphysical This is gonna be a much longer But I actually thought it was could be like Plants going on the trash island basically that's what I thought Are they gonna are they gonna get like uh, clean up the clean up the planet with this? Um, because Then I agree with you you said you you jokingly said, you know avatar light and I I actually I prefer in the same way that I prefer small makeup effects I prefer smaller visual effects not to say that This was that small because there were some massive visual effects in this but like comparing it to avatar Um avatar is nothing but a visual effect spectacle every frame of film pretty much and what um I I just marvel at Not just the beauty The beauty of it But how how that tiger is not real that that tiger is a cgi creation and it's just a flawless CGI creation as is everything else visually in in the film and it reminded me as well as you know, we're watching it on the screen I'm really happy we can watch movies on tv's and stuff that's made straight for streaming But the two aspects of a movie experience in a theater that are irreplaceable Are the common experience of everyone together sharing that experience The laughter the crying and you're doing it as a collective humanity But like a film like this the immersion you cannot You don't get immersed in life of pie It would this film was made for the big screen for you to get utterly lost in these visuals It it does lose its majesty when it's lowered to a small screen Unless you have a home theater. Yeah, unless you had a massive home theater One day one day one day Yeah, but yeah, your fun was beautiful. Let me as usual. Yeah It was yeah, it was a fantastic performance and a very like I said It felt it didn't almost feel like your fun In terms of it didn't look like him Uh, especially for knowing how young he was during this Uh, he didn't he didn't feel like him. Uh, he looks so so different than uh, what His other roles which is a testament to I guess him and the makeup Because I think they did something with his face Or maybe it was just his hair and he didn't have a beard and that that's that was enough Yeah, and he looked and he looked and he looked younger and in all honesty for the past couple years when we have seen him in some things Um, it's been post not not feeling well. Yeah so, um But yeah, it was it was it was um Bittersweet to watch him in that today. Yeah, I was uh, it was cherishing every moment. Uh, Watching it. Um, but yeah, so I finally watched it. You're welcome guys Yay for Corbin. It's only How long's it been out? Uh, I think I'm gonna guess that life of pie came out sometime in 2014 That's my guess 2014 Oh, I was close Pond sing uh, uh, was that same? Yeah Yep, I wonder how many films he That was a freaking great year. There's a lot of great movies that came out in 2012. Yeah, dang. Anyway Well, let us know what other earphone cons we should watch next Uh, because we will watch them all namesake namesake I don't I haven't checked to see if it's available anywhere. So namesake I once again still haven't checked if it's anywhere.


Okay so in this session we're here to talk about becoming a technical project manager. Now we've got a nice full room today so if you do have any questions we're going to have a spot at the end where we can do some Q&A but before then if you do have anything you can go on to Twitter and just type the question and put the hashtag Drupal TPM. Jason he's our scrum master today so he's going to be shouting out questions so feel free to be engaged during this. We're also going to have be taking collaborative notes that are going up. There are going to be a lot of resources and different tools that we're talking about. Don't worry too much about writing every single one of them down because we're going to give you a full list with like notes and links and everything else that you're going to need. All right so my name is Jessie Fisher. I work in kind of technical client services at Pampion. A lot of my work is around kind of onboarding projects and getting people set up. I've been with Drupal since 2011 and I moved in from a pretty non-tactical role into doing some pretty kind of like highly technical stuff. Cool and my name's Ann Stefanieg. I currently own and run a Drupal shop called Canopy Studios and I've been working in Drupal since 2007 back in the days of 4.6 and Flexi Note. It's dark dark time but here we are today and I came from a very non-technical place and I get teased because I sometimes say I'm non-technical but I tend to do most of the scopes of work and a lot of sales proposals so here we are. Jessie and I are here to share our tips and tricks and help everybody learn more about technical project management. Cool so we're going to start off with the definition of a technical project manager and originally I wanted to title this talk superhero cat herding. Project management is usually called herding cats because you have a lot of different people and you have to get them all in the right place. When you add in the technical aspect of that that's when it gets to the level of being superhero cat herding so you're going to see a lot of cats on all of our slides today and that's kind of what we're going to be referencing. So starting off with what a technical or a project manager at that level does you're really just responsible for the planning and the execution and the monitoring and the control and kind of the closure of a project. There are four basic aspects to go into this and we're going to be referencing a lot of these aspects in our talk today. The first one is being a bridge. You are going to be the bridge between kind of the the client's problem and what the ultimate solution to that problem is and also kind of bridging in between your client and your developers. You're also going to be gatekeeping a lot. You need to protect your developers protect their time protect kind of the scope of the project and everything that's going on and you're going to be doing a lot of education for the client telling them what the process is and kind of like what is and isn't possible in this world and then the even trickier thing that you have to learn how to do is to kind of see ahead in the future and anticipate issues before they bubble up into an explosion and a bad situation and you want to do all this so in the end you can deliver a project that everybody really feels good about. So when I talk about bridging there are kind of two lions that you're going to be bridging in between and these two lions are very different creatures with very very different needs. So the first line we have this is your client. This is your business partner. The needs that this client have clients need meetings. They need a lot of updates about progress about blockers and other issues. You're going to spend a lot of the time on the phone with them and doing Google Hangouts and chats and things like that. They also need really well-defined expectations and they need to be educated about this process so that they have proper expectations and they don't feel like they're surprised or that they've been kind of lied to in any way and they also need to have some of their big ambitions and dreams brought down into reality and the way to do this and what they really really need is kind of firm empathy. Don't be afraid to tell a client no. You just need to do it in kind of a kind and understanding way. So your developer lion has very different needs from the client lion. They need to be heads down to get the work done. They don't need a lot of distractions around them.  They need a lot of help being able to communicate kind of what the technical problem is or what what issues are going on and communicating out to the client and also communicating kind of those red flags that can come up. You need to feed them and you need to feed them with properly defined tasks. You don't want to go to a developer and just say hey build me a website. See you in a month. You want to be able to break it down into bite-sized tasks. You can continually feed them to get the project to the endpoint. And finally they need to be fed also with lots of words of encouragement both in failure and also in successes. Okay so we're going to talk a little bit now about the definition of a technical project manager and how that differs a little bit from an actual project manager. So let me see if I can do this. So TPM is one of those competent folks who grew up through the technical ranks and really took his or her place through wit skill and the ability to communicate clearly to non-technical audiences. These people clearly understand the full stack and know how to walk the walk and most often talk the talk. Oh made that backwards. They can talk the talk and most often walk the walk. These people are the really key defining factor between a technical project manager and a project manager is that they can communicate effectively with a non-technical audience. They're usually very able to estimate and troubleshoot because they have been there and done that. Now remember you don't have to be a developer to be a good technical project manager but sure does give you a step in the right direction. So every project has time, money and features as the three pillars and only one gets to win. If you have a very busy project and the timelines are the most important thing you may have to sacrifice some features or maybe the client has to pay overtime to get it done. But either way there's only one pillar that wins. The difference on the perspective from a technical project manager is that you weren't hyper focused on features and you somehow you magically have to make all of these features work within a certain number of budget or a certain amount of time. So that's really the focus of a technical project manager is they're trying to figure out the actual solution to get the job done within the constraints that they're being forced to play with. Let's talk a little bit about day to day of a technical project manager. And a lot of this does sound a lot the same as a project manager but one of the big things is that you're going to write a lot of reports. And if you're coming from a developer it means that really writing things down in real time thinking about how to document it and that could be really challenging. But it's something that's going to become your best friend. Essentially you want to become a really good firefighter and you want to actually take away the kindling in matches from your clients and even your developers and good documentation is a great place to start.  Another thing a technical project manager does is they help prioritize issues. And that goes as identifying the problem that's potentially at the root of several problems. So as a technical project manager you're in charge of employing strategies for risk mitigation. And this is on the technical level. And I got to say the most common thing that a technical project manager does that's different from a project manager is they pull at least one person per day out of a tempting rabbit hole otherwise known as an unrelated technical problem. There are kind of two tracks to getting into technical project management that we're going to outline today. The first one is going to be talking about a project manager to technical project manager and then also from going from a dev to a TPM. If you're starting from ground zero and you want to get into this world like the next few slides you're just going to have to learn kind of all of it. So as a project manager to get to a technical project manager you have to become technical. This can be a little bit overwhelming when you start to get into this world. And I think it's really better to think about it in these three major categories when you're starting out. One you need to understand the structure of Drupal. You need to understand the lingo that people are using. If you check out Drupal.org there's a glossary that's on there. Read it understand it. Get the language and the words that people are using. And you also want to kind of deconstruct a finished project. It's kind of like doing reverse engineering when you were a kid and you wanted to be like how does this phone work. You get a screwdriver. You open it up and then get yelled out by your parents. You also want to kind of understand the stack for Drupal basics. You know you have a server. You have the operating system that's on that and then you have the application. Of course it's far far far more complicated than that. But at a really base level that's kind of how you want to start conceptualizing it. Now once you understand the structure you want to understand the tools to manipulate that structure. How do you get in? How do you build these things? How do you take something that's already been built and start to manipulate it further? What are the tools that you'll be using? And don't worry we're going to give you a little list of all this. Outside of that once it's built it's been manipulated. You know all this stuff. How do you investigate what a problem is? Because the set of tools that you use for testing and kind of investigating and debugging are different than the tools that you're going to really be using to build. There are a lot of Drupal training resources that are out there. And again on the notes we're going to give you a huge old big list. And you're also a Drupal comp so there are a few other resources here as well.  So like Jesse said you know go and connect with your community. But taking something apart is so much easier to understand because it also gives you a foundation to which you can ask questions with. Yeah when I started getting into this people were telling me like people who knew this really well were like well it's easy you just go in and you like spin up like you know lamp stack and you just start building a site. But when you come at it from that angle it can be really overwhelming because you don't know what modules you need to be picking out. Like there are just so many options you don't even know where to begin. So what I recommend doing is to actually see if you can get somebody here and and we'll try to get you like a repository of something that you could pull down because if you can look at a finished project and you can look at something that's already been built out instead of just a skeleton bare bones Drupal site you can start to get a sense of all the different components that can be in there and then you could take it and also start breaking a little bit to see what happens when you change like a small line of code here. Play around with it and start investigating it that way. Another thing you should get really familiar with are things like Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, reading through Drupal.org. If you have a problem somebody else has already had that problem as well most likely. So when you go in here like you can go read and see what issues people are having in different areas and just like be curious check out threads that have been on like views and different kinds of integrations and stuff like that. And it's kind of a pro tip about Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow. The top voted answer is not always the best answer. Sometimes it's just been sitting there for a while and it's just gathered a bunch of upvotes on it and then that thread has kind of been abandoned and nobody's looking at it and somebody else comes along that actually has a much better answer and you don't see it.  Another thing is learning the fine art of Boolean searching. I work kind of more in the technical support space and people love to make this joke of haha let me Google that for you. It's surprisingly hard to be able to use a search engine effectively beyond just like Boolean search operators will give you a little link for the search operators that you can specifically use with Google to be able to kind of drill down because you're trying to find like this tiny little answer that's needle in a digital haystack. And also don't be afraid to kind of play around with what your search terms are. You can try one tack of like you know this piece of the error code and like not including Drupal in there but if you include the word Drupal in there you make it a very different set of answers. So always be refining your search terms and learn how to be able to use search operators to kind of narrow it down and keep going through the pages until you start to see the results you're looking for. Just on that note we I worked with a very senior developer who was one of my inspirations. His name is Nick Lewis. He's super awesome. And when I asked how did you how did you learn all this. He's like I learned how to use Google. So step one. Learn to Google. And the last piece in here like outside of having an internet connection and being able to like read all these forums that are in here. Go to meetups. Smart people love talking about what they're passionate about. If you show up and you ask questions like don't be afraid to say so what is this PHP thing like what is JavaScript. Just start asking them questions and they'll usually be really happy to give you answers possibly more answers than you thought you were going to get out of that question. So once you've done your research start to get into hands on learning. This stuff is going to be a lot easier if you are a project manager already at a company. Start getting into support like go back read the support tickets you'll start to get a sense and this will help you build up your sense of being able to anticipate. You can look at the history of what's in there the problems that have come up and then kind of the resolutions and the answers that are in there. And don't be afraid to start offering yourself up and be like I will take those low level tickets because you can always ask somebody on your team for a little bit of help and they'll be really happy and thankful that you came in to take some of the work that's coming in. Also creating documentation. Nobody likes creating documentation.  Can you write me an outline and if they can just write you a small outline you can start working on it and use those things like stack exchange stack overflow searching to if you don't know what a term is just look it up. And you can start to write a draft for it and then pass it on to them and then you know get their edits and their feedback and everything. And this is really going to help you one feel comfortable being an authority and talking about this stuff to clients. And then also really you know learning it and learning all these components and pieces. If your company has emergency on call get on that. Volunteer yourself to go work communications. 2 a.m. emergency alert is a pretty lonely place to be when you're all by yourself. And having somebody there to be able to run communications is really really helpful. And you get to watch in real time as like a website or something is going down. Somebody is going in debugging figuring out what the problem is and then offering a solution to that problem. And it's going to teach you kind of like what can go wrong where these fires can come up and again going to teach you the technical aspects and how to anticipate. And the big thing of this is take notes ask questions and like take on as many tiny tasks as you can and especially take on the tasks that you don't think are going to be overwhelming but you're slightly uncomfortable and unprepared to take on because those are the moments where you're going to have to push yourself to really learn and really figure out what's going on. And just to augment on that I know with some of our project managers that are keen to become more technical we get them to start doing the QA which is quality assurance or user acceptance testing to the more technical tickets and the developer will actually take the time and write very clear acceptance criteria which is part of our process but then it helps the project manager go through step by step. And sometimes you have to open up Firebug and actually look at CSS and just starting to repetitively look at CSS or whatever the structure is starts to you get more familiar and you kind of know what to start looking for. Yeah, exactly. So build confidence, build your knowledge at the same time. Don't be afraid to kind of jump into this stuff. So on the other side of this, if you want to go from being a developer to a technical project manager, you know the tech part. There's kind of a different host of skills that you're going to have to start learning if you've never done project management before. The first one of these is there's going to be a really big shift in what your workday looks like. You need to stop thinking about the code that will solve the problem and you need to start thinking about the person who knows the code that will solve the problem. So stop thinking about how and start thinking about what. You need to keep a catalog in your head of this person is really good at the front end. Like this person knows, you know, how to set up these really awesome like views and give them the tasks accordingly to what needs to be done. So delegate. You've got to learn to start delegating instead of being tempted to get in there and be like, I know how to do this. I can do this in five minutes and fix it. Give it to a developer. It may take them 15 minutes to do it, but they'll get faster and faster at it. So always delegate, get out of the code. But I say that with a caveat. If you get too far out of the code and the technology starts passing you by, that T and TPM is going to start shrinking and your ability to really kind of manage and help your developers and kind of work with them as a team, you start losing the language, you start kind of losing, you lose the plot a little bit about what's going on. So be there to test and sort of always still be able to debug and know what's happening. The other two parts on here around kind of, I'll talk a bit about empathy and interpersonal skills. I think these are always presented as these, you know, hardwired characteristic, like a person is born empathetic and they're just empathetic and they're going to be that way. I really disagree with this. I think this is a characteristic that people can cultivate over time. There was a study that was done a few years ago by these two researchers named Kid and Costano. And they looked at what happened when they had people read these short bits of fiction and kind of tested them on these levels of empathy. And something that they found is being exposed to a lot of fiction writing. So people who are very different from them, it started to shift their perspective and like their ability to be empathetic and their ability to think from another person's perspective. And so this might sound a little bit wonky, but if you want to learn empathy, start reading fiction books, follow blogs like is everyone familiar with humans in New York? Yeah, we have a link to it. Start following things like that.  So try to step outside of that if you really want to cultivate these characteristics. The last piece on here is verbal judo. So there is a retired police officer named George Thompson. And he's kind of written the book on verbal judo. And verbal judo is the art of deescalating a violent situation through kind of words and like the way you stand. We have some links up on there as well. He has big long talks that you can read through. And you have to figure, you know, if somebody who was in the NYPD was able to use these tactics to stop someone who was pointing a gun at them when you're on the phone with an angry client, these tactics can probably work just as well. All right. So some really specific challenges that you're going to run into if you're coming from the developer role into a technical project management role. The first thing is you're probably really used to communicating technically all the time. You're not just going to be speaking to other developers, so you need to explain things to clients. The best hack for doing this is to use analogies, like sit down and think about, OK, if I want to explain cookies to a client, how can I use a real world example of something that they're familiar with that's going to help them really conceptualize it and understand it better? Another thing you need to get used to is documenting everything. Every conversation you have, every agreement that goes on, you need to document it. Start building like a secondary brain. And you can do this through emails. You can do it through your project management apps and all this other stuff. But you always want to have that secondary brain kind of running because you can go back and you can reference it. You may think you're going to remember that conversation that you had in another week. Promise me with everything that goes on these projects, you definitely will not. That goes for like one of the tricky things is that as you will become a project manager from being a dev is that you're going to spend a lot of time on the phone and clients will accidentally and maybe not intentionally twist things around. So one of the most skillful things you can do is once you get off the phone, hang up and send a reverse confirmation email like based on our understanding of our conversation, we're going to action this by this timeline and you're responsible for getting me content by that date. And you don't even have to ask for their confirmation to say this is a confirmation of the conversation we had. And if they don't think it's right, they're going to reply right away and say, no, you said Tuesday, not Monday. So having those moments, it's really tricky sometimes to do that. And what has really been hard is just going to go into this but not booking meetings back to back because you need that thinking time right after. Because one thing that's different from being a developer to being a TPM is that you're going to have multiple competing priorities and it's all going to be happening at once. Yep. Usually I like to say you want to keep your calendar where you are about 30, 70 or 40, 60 of meetings to like the followup work that needs to be done. Every half hour meeting you have is going to generate anything from like another 30 minutes of work to two hours of work.  And the last thing in here, people coaching skills. Something I like to recommend is doing a compliment sandwich. So let's say your developer kind of messed up a little bit. You don't want to just go to them and be like, come on, really? Because they're going to get defensive, rightfully so. The better way to approach it is, hey, you know, you're normally really good at being able to talk to clients and kind of understanding what they need. But they needed it done by Monday and it wasn't finished until Friday. They're a little upset. I know that you can do better. I've seen you do better than this. So next time around, let's keep it on track.  The bad news you want to give them and then a compliment after and it'll help them really hear it and be more accepted of it. So compliment sandwiches for everyone. Okay, so being a TPM is hard. Writing code is hard. Managing people is hard. So now we're going to put it all together and now we're going to share some more tips and tricks and best practices in being how you can be a rock star technical project manager. So we have some quick tips here.  This makes for a fresher morning and you'll also have a clearer picture on what your priorities are. I think someone's managing the factual. So you also want to understand your priorities and this means like understanding what can be pushed and what can't because some things that can actually be pushed and I know we always try to stick to our regiment and timeline and schedule but the reality is when you have competing things, it's important to know what can actually be moved around. Another thing that we mentioned here is we've said this before but stay close to the code and that means staying up on technology and processes. If you're not working, if you're working as a technical project manager already and you haven't touched D8 maybe it's something it's time to go and play around with.  One of our TPMs at work brought up when I asked him to look at this was really important in its own your mistakes and own your team's mistakes. If one falls, you all fall and the most important thing about learning from mistakes is the learning part. It's okay to mess up and we all will and clients can totally see through when you're like, well, I don't know what happened, right? So if you can take accountability for the mistake and work together as a team and learn from it, the process around it, you become a stronger manager. Yeah, and this really helps kind of building trust with your end client because they don't understand the technical side of this and what you're doing and they're just giving you a bunch of money and trusting that you are going to deliver on what you said you did even though they don't really have visibility and they may not completely get it. So being able to tell them like, hey, this is what happened. You know, we learned from it. We're not going to do it again. It starts to establish trust. It establishes a sense of like we're kind of all in this together and we're all working together and we're all going to be super honest with each other. And another thing I've noticed, especially around the people that I work with, is the TPMs that really shine is that, again, they have really good abilities to communicate non-technically, but even more so importantly to the team is they're available. They sometimes as a developer, you would usually go dark. Maybe we have a team members that, hey, I don't take meetings or calls on Fridays. I need heads down time. Well, that doesn't happen as a TPM anymore and it's really, really, really important to be available to your team members. You may have team members that are night owls and they work really constructively at night. And even though, yes, we encourage you to turn it off as a TPM, the more connected that you can stay with the project and the team, the closer you can keep an eye on things. And even if you're on Slack late night and you notice your team members online just saying, hey, how's it going? And you would be surprised that sometimes they're really stressed out because they're working on something and just a little friendly hello. They're like, oh man, I'm really cranking on this code but I'm having a problem. Are you around? I'm like, yeah. Taking five or 10 minutes out of your evening to help unblock a developer who's chosen because it's quiet time to think at night makes him or her feel really supported and they can keep the momentum. It will railroad your life a little bit from going into a developer into a TPM role. Your life will change. You will have some lifestyle flexibility around some of the things because it may be quiet at times. Take advantage of the quiet times because it varies in noisy role. Yeah. Okay, a couple more quick tips. This might be not so quick but we've got some more tips here. So another thing is estimating is really hard and it doesn't matter who you are but as a technical PM it'll be put on your shoulders a lot to actually estimate things. So the first thing about estimating is that whether you're close or not to the project you always wanna really involve the key developer or the person who's gonna be executing the solution so they can have buy-in to what that solution is. Now they're probably gonna give you an estimate of time or money or hours. Double, triple, triple it. By Drupal. By Drupal. So you have to take into account that if you are someone that can do this and let's say a task in four hours most likely your development team you think 12 hours, it's crazy. I can't even believe they'll need that time. But the time that it takes to talk to them about the issue, to walk through the solution, to execute, to test, to implement the changes, to send to the client all of a sudden that time gets eaten up. All the windows are gonna open up. The microphones are all gonna explode. It's sucked outside under the street. I do not know what's happening. The monster that might be under the stage is just gonna rise up against us. Okay. So and no one to ask for help. I mean this is a really important one as a non-technical person coming into this role. It's really, it's important to create time in your calendar to actually get some help. And this is also another one is to be humble and curious. It's really important for a non-technical person as you're learning to ask strategic questions and sometimes what you don't know is what you don't know. So it's hard to know what to ask. But being curious and saying, would you take five minutes to help me understand this? And then writing it down like verbatim and then going back and say, based on my understanding, is this what this means? And then because things are so fast in this world, it's often skillful to find some time in your evenings and weekends to review your notes and come up with more thoughtful questions, to do more of that searching and that's really gonna help deepen your understanding. And of course, always know when to turn it off. I think the big thing is that you'll bring the best to your table when you do turn it off. You will have a lot of noise. It's kind of a contradiction to what I just said about being available, but there is an element of actually being able to just take a phone call versus being fully on your computer. And the slide has been completely white. No, it goes, it goes. Okay, so we have three things. We're excited about this slide because I did a lot of quick tips and it wasn't quick at all. So, the first off. I wanna click. Ah, I see what you've done. You got sneaky with it. Oh, I got it. Yeah, so trust your guts. So the first thing is your gut will always be right. Doesn't matter if you're technical or non-technical.  Is that actually the case? Because it's okay if you're not and I'll figure it out, but let's talk about it now because it's gonna become really hard on Tuesday morning because Monday's a holiday or whatever you know because your gut is gonna be right. So follow that intuition. Another one is that get to know people. Like really get to know read people and this getting to know reading people comes from reading your developers, reading your clients, reading the other managers. And this is where if you're a distributed team, turn on your video, watch their body language, watch them, watch themselves. Yeah, always like it's best to always try and have like face-to-face meetings with your clients. Being a disembodied voice. I mean, if you just heard our voices over these speakers right now in the room with slides going, it would be a lot less engaging. You'd feel like there were kind of robots going and it might be a little bit creepy. In terms of being able to kind of read people, this goes back to this, I believe, is a skill that you can develop. Start getting into the habit of when you are talking to people, don't just think about the next thing that you're going to say.  Are they kind of tapping a little bit? Are they kind of pitching up their voice and seeming like they're a bit tense? Watch people when you're out. Like really start cultivating and learning how to read other people's body language. You can get really good at this. Yeah, and just a last thing on that is that often sometimes people drop balls not because they're stressed out at work, but because they're stressed out at home. And there's something going on in their personal life and it's not their responsibility or their obligation to tell you what's happening in their personal life, but they could be potentially dropping a lot of balls. So before coming to any concrete conclusions as to why things are F'd up, talk to them, ask them questions, how you do it and everything. You know, it's just a little bit of a friendly human touch to things. Really helps people, you can relate to them and then help them work through their stuff to say, okay, you need another week, I'll go find another week. You know, and that's your job is to go on your warrior path to get more time or money. And the last thing is about balance. And balance is not life work balance. I'm talking about the balance of understanding how to balance the client's needs with the developer skill set and make that magic happen. And that's a really, really key thing that I learned from Ricky is that what he does all day is magic. Because he's literally figuring out what the client wants, pairing it with the development team and then making it all happen and the client and the developer are both happy. Cool, so a lot of this stuff has been high level of like, how you can learn these things, the things that you need to learn. And we went over a little bit about like day in the life, but we wanna kinda get into the weeds of some of this stuff. What are the specific tasks and like types of work that you're gonna have to do when you're working as a technical project manager? So the first one is creating tasks. Well, you're gonna create documentation, you're gonna help lead your team through all of the things most likely with tasks. And we can task out how to fix this reverb. But first thing is, I mean, it's fairly straightforward. This one? Yeah, this is the solution. Write testing criteria to define done, because that's documentation. It defines in non-technical terms, your non-technical right, your writing skills, and then defining the estimate. And then the most important part of actually sending off a person to do a task is to check in on them. If they have an eight hour task that's gonna take them all day, ask them to do an hour and then come back and check in with you so you can make sure they're going on the right direction. So if we're looking at, we use a lot of user stories because we're trying to blend our clients with our team members and everybody to be on the same page. So we use a lot of user stories for functionality testing. And humans are very into narratives. They can relate and they can understand to user stories. So in addition, not only to user stories, is that again, these narratives or these stories, you're able to relate and you're able to kind of figure out what the client wants and ultimately deliver on that. Yeah, and this goes beyond just like trying to break out tasks by putting them in the framework of like a story. If you are talking to your clients, a good way to preface things is like, okay, tell me the story of your problem. If you're talking to your developer, like tell me the story of the issue that you're having right now. It gives people a good frame to start kind of talking to you about it. All right, so estimation. This is one of those things. There's no calculator that's out there where you can input the task that needs to be done and get an output of hours required because there are so many individual factors that go into it. So the unfortunate thing about it is you just have to fumble your way through it. Sometimes you're gonna have really bad estimations when you start out. If you're a developer, this is gonna be a lot easier for you because you've done it. You know it. You have all the experiences going on in there. If you're not technical and you're getting into this for the first time, you're gonna mess up a lot. It's okay, we forgive you. A way to kind of get around this is every time you have to start estimating out, get your develop, get a technical person involved and ask them like what do you think this is gonna take? And then you can start to learn like the parameters of how long different types of tasks can take. Starting to get a little anxious that it's gonna rise up again. Oh, no? Okay, if I just hold on to this for the rest of the time, I think we're gonna be okay. These might be ungrounded so I'm just gonna grip on to this for dear life. All right, okay. So you're gonna have a tool belt that you need to get together. Beyond having a laptop and an internet connection, there's some really specific tools and like suites of tools that you have to start looking at. The first of these is of course, communication tools.  There are a lot of different ways you can do this. Slack, join me, go to meetings, Skype for business, Zoom, using Google Hangouts. Pick one and standardize it and like just go with that. Another thing you're gonna have to look at are development methodologies. You've probably heard of things like agile and waterfall and we could do an entire session on either or both of those. But the quick way to think about these is any project where there's a lot of lay of the land that's unknown and you're kind of going to be exploring while you're doing development, it needs to be agile because you're gonna have to build kind of the skeleton or the ghost of the minimum viable product. Evaluate it before you keep moving on and this is why you're gonna kind of be reevaluating and reiterating and kind of changing your direction as you're building the project out. If you're doing something that's more like short wear and you have the same kind of modules that you're putting in every time, it's the same basic work and maybe it's just like the content in the field that's a little bit different. It's an iterative process. It can be done over and over again in pretty much the same way. That's gonna be waterfall and it just depends on like what the end product is that you're gonna be building out. And then outside of that, you should be looking at project management kind of tools that are out there. There's so many different types of software and ways to do this from like sticky notes to something like Jira and they exist on kind of the spectrum. On one hand, you have something like Basecamp where it's really pretty and it's got this nice UI which can't change anything around at all. So it's very rigid and you're stuck in what it can do but if you don't wanna have to think about building, like managing the project of getting your project management tools working, then you could go with something like that. On the other end of the spectrum, you have things that are so customizable that you need like a specialist person to be able to build it out so you can start using it. I'm looking at you Jira. And we'll have like kind of a, there's Asana, there's Jira, there's Basecamp, there's Reich, there's like Teamwork, PivotalTrack or Redmine. There's so much out there and my recommendation is to just evaluate them on your own. They usually have free trials, go sign up, see what it looks like, build like a little fakie project in there, try to port things in and see how it feels to you and how it works. The other thing that you need, we've talked a little bit about building out that kind of secondary brain that you're gonna need to have. You may also want to put automated reminders in. When you send an email to your client and you say, I am going to follow up with you on this thing in two weeks. At the moment that you do that, set a reminder for yourself. You can use things like email tracking software, you can use Google Calendar. And what I try to do is to go in there and have a specific block of time in the day where all of my reminders are gonna start flooding in and I just set aside time then and my phone will start ringing and I'm like, okay, two weeks ago I promised this, eight days ago I promised this and on and on and on and you can just start banging it out and your clients will think that you have the most amazing memory on earth. Surprise, you just use automated reminders. And the last little bit in here is testing. We've talked about kind of when you're estimating, you need to put a lot of time in there to be able to test and then to also do revisions. This is, again, kind of a talk in and of itself when we're thinking about what testing looks like. On the left hand side of this V, you can see kind of the process of getting a contract in place, doing all of these, like getting all of these different pieces together and defining them what they are, run through the coding and then going back through and testing all of them. Unit testing is a lot smaller and more at a granular level. Once you've unit tested, you want to look at all of these parts that you know function individually and independently and make sure that they all work kind of together. And then from there, you want to say, all right, well, it worked on my local machine. How does it work on this other server? And then there's also the acceptance testing that's in here. This should be a much, much, much bigger square because it's a really huge category. There are so many different types of, like user acceptance tests that you can do, does it scale, can it handle like really big stress? There's, I can actually put in a really, really good stack overflow article that I found on this where I pulled this image from and it's actually the second answer on there, don't trust the top one. And that can kind of go deeper into it. Like doing testing and all the tools that are out there is a pretty big rabbit hole that we could start going into, but we just kind of wanted to give you a little overview of what that can look like and what you're gonna have to start learning. And then the final thing on here, this job is stressful. You are going to be kind of working as a firefighter. The best laid plans of mice and project managers almost always go awry. So you're gonna have really intense client situations.  You don't have that luxury in this role.  You also want to employ magic words. And I don't mean this in some cynical way if you need to say these words to make it seem like you care. Like you should care. You should say things like, I understand, I can see this thing. What you're saying, repeating it back and saying, is this what you're telling me? I want to make sure. Like be empathetic, be understanding, and above all, be calm. People can get really hyped up and really frustrated, but in the end of the day, nobody's gonna die, it's just a website. I know that people's like reputations and their careers can feel kind of threatened, but it is just a website. And if you can remain the calm one, because it's really tempting, when somebody is yelling at you, your adrenaline starts to go up too and you're like, oh, yelling now, I'm gonna yell. Try to be the calm one. If you can be calm in this situation, you're gonna be able to herd these cats in a superhero way and make sure everybody stays together and everybody stays calm and even in the tense moments you'll be able to kind of work together on this project. Do you have anything else to add? Oh, I just think again, taking away the kindling in matches prevents you from fighting fires as best as possible, which again, for technical folks, writing good documentation that humans can understand and maybe even physically sign off on to create checklists. Like if you have a pre-launch checklist that goes through all of the things you need to do before you launch, then you can set it and forget it. And the more systems as a technical project manager that you know where people tend to fall in those holes, if you can try to figure out where those holes are and prevent them from even stepping in them, saves yourself a lot of time. Yep, and that is all we have for you now and we are happy to take on questions. Jason, have you been watching the Twitter feed? Okay, well, we can just take your questions now. Hashtag Drupal TPM. As soon as I took it out of this, it stopped humming. Problem solving. Eventually I figured it out. Oh, do we have a, I have a camera up here, if we could, do you wanna hold on to that? So do we have any other questions? Yeah, that's a great thing. It's like, what does success look like? Do you wanna take that one? I don't know if you ever know that you've made it. There's, I mean, you're making money off of it. You feel your ability and your flow to kind of handle tense situations without letting it get to you is one of them. Being able to kind of direct the traffic is where you know you start to make it. But I think all of us have some level of imposter syndrome. I'm constantly sitting there. I'm like, they're gonna figure it out one day.  Yeah, and I would say defining what success looks like is finding a good mentor who can help what that path looks like. And there comes a point in time, like I came from a marketing background and what I would do is I would write the scope of work and I would have the developer go in and edit it and not just edit it, but like Google like comment on it so I can see where the changes were. And the thing was, as I realized, I was, my estimates are now more close to accurate. My scope of works are deeper technically. I might not be able to write up exactly everything, but I can write a good paragraph and at least write it in non-technical terms. And what I realized is when other people, why I said, well, I'm not technical, they're like, but you just wrote a scope of work for a 3,000 hour project and I barely edited it. And I was like, oh, right. And you wrote all of the infrastructure. Oh, so okay, all right.  It's almost like the more you know, the less you know, right? The more you know, you go, oh my goodness, there's so much more to learn, right? And if you can stay humble and stay curious and to know that the really good technical project manager is one that can anticipate what's gonna happen and help redirect. Yeah, and I think curiosity is also like a really big thing of this. The best developers I have ever seen are the developers that are curious. Something is broken, something is going wrong and they don't panic and go, I did all the steps.  They look at it and they say, interesting. And if you can start to develop that kind of attitude and approach to it, remember it is just a website. And it is kind of interesting when things break and start kind of freaking out. I mean, it's not as interesting when you need to have it fixed within 12 hours, but if you can remain curious, it'll help you stay a lot less stressed about it and it's nice to have a curious attitude around the world. Yes, yes. Okay. Yeah, and so this is part of the kind of acceptance testing in there, then that's why I was saying this is a huge category outside of the things that you can do with just automating, like acceptance testing part of that is like user experience testing is I would put it in that kind of category and that's why I say that one's kind of so huge and so big because it's not just reliability or scalability or anything like that, but how getting it to an actual person and making sure that they can use it and it functions kind of as needed. So we do a lot of web development, obviously building lots of websites and we do user experience testing as early as possible. If we can do early research, we'd like to help our clients make good data-driven decisions and if you have a technical mindset, going in and diving into the data and coming up as to why they should not have the CEO's face on the homepage and being able to go into that with a lot of ammo from a technical side of things as well as from a user experience side of things. I mean, data is power. I always try to build in wiggle room. Wiggle room is actually a technical person's best friend because they're very used to making things very concrete and solid and it's really important to build that wiggle room. So on a 3000 hour project, a lot of it starts off with discovery. We need to actually learn, how do I know from a five page RFP that I'm gonna be able to actually deliver on the scope of work? So having that discovery, but then it's taking also bite-sized pieces because it's a huge undertaking to understand the scope of that size of project. So you're like, okay, I'm gonna talk about this specific thing and kind of dividing it up into pieces that you can then further break down. And sometimes and often it means saying, okay, there's a huge solar component to this and they want all this craziness. I'm gonna talk to our solar expert and ask four or five bullet points on what we're like a paragraph from him and then okay, they're really stuck on using Bootstrap. They won't use anything else. Do we want to talk about whether we use SAS or less to build that?  You gotta figure out the solution but then if or then what? Or you know, all the different variations so that cause the clients will inevitably come up with things that weren't even thought of then. So, yeah, scoping is a really hard thing to do in general and I do think it's just time, lots of time, lots of mistakes. Yeah. One, two, one, thank you everyone. Thank you. And if you want to find us, we have another one here. Yeah, so if you go to the like con site or we'll be up on there, like we have a link to it and you can go and you can provide feedback. You'll also be able to get all of our slides and we will pop in our contact info and you can access our Drupal.org like usernames and profiles in there. We're fine. We'll post it using the TPM hashtag by end of day so you can keep an eye out. And we also, I have a booth at 701 with Canopy Studios. You're welcome to pop by there and or grab my card after and I can connect you afterwards. And I'll be chained to the Pantheon booth giving demos all week. So I will be super easy to find, look for the bright yellow B-like t-shirts that we'll all be wearing. I'm sure you've seen them. Very flattering. Cool. Any other questions? No. No. It's a very funny thing. I am not, I went to school to be an entrepreneur and I never thought I would do that and I never thought I'd work in technology. I was the girl who didn't know how to get into my website and was like, five different steps to upload an image in Drupal. This thing's so dumb. I came out of the world of flash and I thought flash was like the coolest thing and then we had to move into this content management system. So all of my training is come from the School of Hard Knocks. So. Likewise. Yeah. And there were a lot of hard knocks but fortunately to the smart people and I gotta say the community has been absolutely a huge part of that experience and learning. Going to sessions. I remember when I was going to those sessions in 2008 I would go into the most technical thing and just write everything they would say down and then I would be like, I don't understand any of this and then spend time with my community asking questions because Drupal's got this weird language. It seems so much different. Like we don't really build Gantt charts at work. We really don't. I keep thinking, oh we should build this Gantt chart. No, we're just in our whatever process. Yeah, there is a really cool digital, what is it called, the digital bureau and they offer a technical project management training and we'll be attending that this year. So I think that anybody who wanted to go outside of the Drupal community get training. I think it's called the digital bureau summit and there's one specifically for people. It's gonna be in the links. We have that in there as well for the resources that we're gonna share with everybody later. Cool. One last question. One, I can actually post up this really cool kind of world clock where you can find things that are within people's working hours. I think you can add in like up to four or five time zones. For time zones scheduling, there is also like a little kind of widget that's in Google calendar where you can select a bunch of different time zones to display and when you're scheduling a meeting, you can see the time that it's gonna be in every single one of those time zones. Cultural barriers, like again, this is why it's really important to get people's faces on a hangout because if there's a barrier for language, it's really, really difficult to understand like a secondary or a tertiary language if you can't see somebody's face and you can't see the way that their hands are moving. It gives you a lot of context. Cultural, I don't know. That can be a really thorny question. Maybe don't talk about politics or religion or... I would say that for time zones, make it equally uncomfortable for everybody. That's a really good tip. Get equally uncomfortable. So we're primarily West Coast. Some of our East Coasters have to stay out to eight or seven or eight with us. Some of our West Coasters have to start at six sometimes. We have one of our friends who lives in Turkey and he is, he's a wonderful developer. He's super strong, but sometimes his directness comes off really, really strong with clients. And honestly, we're very honest with our clients to say, hey, our friend Bakir here, developer Bakir. He tends to be very direct. He means it in the best form possible so to preface your clients so they know that. Or as Danae always says, she's gonna be the meat shield. She's gonna stand in between that and help be that barrier and that communication. So definitely interesting in our global world and it's getting smaller. If you have any questions kind of after this, you'll know where to come find us, to reiterate, this is who we are and kind of where we work. And then if you wanna follow up later, I think we put, yeah, this is gonna be the link for the session. You can also just kind of search within the sessions and find us there. Thanks everybody so much for coming. We really appreciate it. Thank you.