Hello everyone thanks for joining us. We'll continue the dialogue that started at the keynote. We got off to a really great start this morning at Sapphire in 2013 here. I am honored to be joined sitting to my immediate left, Adam Silver, the deputy commissioner and co and COO of the MBA. I've got Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP. I've got Jed York, the CEO of the 49ers and I've also got Kevin Plank of under Armour. I'm the only one who's out of CEO. You're working on it. Incoming. So we thought we'd put this session together for everyone and give you a chance to ask some questions directly to our special guests today. As I said we're off to a pretty exciting start seeing where technology and sports and sports gear and how that all touches us as employees and athletes and consumers and fans all comes together and I think that we've had some really good ideas thrown out there and we hope that you have a chance to ask some good questions to our panelists. I'd like to start it off by asking Bill just you know this was a pretty high-energy morning for you. We could tell out there the energy came across. What kind of takeaways over the highlights that you thought came across today? Well I think we redefined SAP as a business-to-business-to-consumer company. We're capitalizing on the trend for the millennials. You've got a couple of billion folks out there between 18 and 33 years old representing the largest demographic and target market on the planet Earth and I am fortunate enough to be with great leaders like Jed York, Adam Silver and Kevin Plank and I think it underscores the power of digitizing the relationship with your consumer, managing big data in a far more creative way than ever before with the power of HANA and really on an end-to-end basis creating an unmatched value chain which these guys have all done for their businesses and I'm truly honored to be in their company and their friendship. That's what I take away. Excellent, excellent. So to our audience here, let's start off with the first question. We're going to go to the back to my left. We may try the right. I'm sorry I thought we have one teed up. There we are to the right, right here. Thank you. Hi, I'm Michael Craigsman and a question for either Adam Silver or Jed York. What do you hope to get out of your relationship with SAP? What are the key bullet point highlights? Michael, I'll start. What we're hoping to get out of our relationship, we're beginning to realize already and that is making the rich statistics, the rich data of the NBA available to consumers on a global basis. So we're looking at a two-fold. First and foremost, we want better analytics when we're evaluating players, when we are building out our scouting and training regiments, those types of things and SAP has been able to help us develop that. We're only in our second year but I think we are light years ahead of where other teams are. Then when you're looking at building a new football stadium which will be open in 2014, you want to make sure that you can build out a technology stack in your building so you can be a software-driven stadium as opposed to a hardware-driven stadium. If you don't have the right back end, you can't allow your fans to get into the game the way we want them to get into the game. I think as Adam was saying, whether it's statistics, whether it's different camera angles, whether it's a ticketless stadium, a cashless stadium, whatever it is, whatever unique individual experience our 68,000 season ticket holders want, we want to be able to provide. I think SAP has been a fantastic partner in building out that infrastructure and allowing our consumers to choose their hardware and come to the building and then plug into the game. Thank you. We've got our next question. Now we'll go back. Hi, Laurie McCabe from SMB Group and great panel this morning. My question is for Kevin. Kevin, you said you had deployed SAP in about six weeks with no glitches, which seems like an enormous accomplishment. So I'm wondering what did you do? What helped you get through all that without any glitches? Yeah. Well, there was about two years of work on the front end of that that began with the process of a selection, making sure we had the right team, implementation, hiring. So we went public in mid-November of 2005 and then we flipped the switch in January 2006. And I mean, you've got to understand, again, the apprehension of a company that in our first reporting quarter, we're going to start by flipping this new switch. So I think that really speaks to the confidence that our team had in our own ability to execute. But that started with the partnership, the relationship from SAP of giving us the confidence to say, this is something that will work. So I think probably, I know a large part of the audience that we're speaking to today, are those entrepreneurs that are sitting there with saying, what's it going to mean for me to implement SAP?  The decision to say, you know what, we believe that one thing. And again, the discussion that Bill and I had was, I never wanted to limit my company is because we had been through that process of implementation after implementation and kept outgrowing it. And so looking and saying, within our industry, SAP was clearly the leader. And then more importantly, their ability to grow with us. Because, you know, our business is very different.  Today, it's nearly a third of our business and we've added a billion and a half in revenues. And people told us we couldn't be a women's brand. You know, footwear, we didn't even make footwear, we went public in 2005. And today, footwear, we continue to grow about 15%. We see footwear exceeding the size of our apparel business someday. So, you know, we're staying within our space. And again, this new world of digital sports, Armor 39 and reading and giving the feedback of biometric data and technology, you know, we could be a technology company in 10 years. And I mean that based off of, again, I use the word backbone that SAP gives us and all the other pieces from success factors to what we're doing with HANA and the other elements of SAP. And this isn't just a sell. This is we're a better business, we're a better company, because we don't have to worry about what's the next system, what's the new one coming in. And again, having that confidence with continuity of partnership, relationship, and frankly, of systems. Great. Thank you. Next question will go over here. Good morning, I'm Alan Bondi from Digital Clarity Group in the Pulse Network. A theme this morning in your panel was the power of data to change the experience, to change the look and feel of your products. This is a question for the whole panel. At what point do you think of yourselves as data companies? And if you're thinking about it right now, how is how are you looking at monetizing not just your experiences and your products that you're delivering, but that data? Yeah, maybe I could just start off on the data side. I also said this morning that 99% of the data in enterprises today is locked up in some corporate vault, and we call it dark data, because it's not adding any value back to the business. So the power of HANA is that it can get at that dark data and give you insights that you never even know you had because you haven't gotten at it, and it can see patterns in your company that you don't even know exist. Secondly, you can get the sentiment analysis from social networks that really gives you the voice of the crowd or the wisdom of the crowd on what are people saying about my brand? How are they enjoying the experience and what can I learn from them? But it also has a predictive analytics engine built into it. So once it takes all this data, social, structured and unstructured, it can give you a prediction about what you need to do for your customer to change the game. And I think that winning organizations like the NBA Under Armour and the San Francisco 49ers want to put that data to work for their constituents.  You, we're, we're in a, in a world in a society that it's just information is at your fingertips. If that doesn't work inside of a sporting arena, whether it's an NBA arena, an NFL football stadium, you know, today it might be acceptable. I don't think that's going to be acceptable in the near future, if not the present. So I'm not necessarily looking at it today as how does this generate more revenue for us? It's really, how do we continue to get people to come to live sporting events, which to me is the most exciting place to watch a game, but you are, your information locked in most venues. So how do you now take that to the next level where you have more information inside the venue than anywhere else? And you're more plugged into the game inside the arena, inside the stadium than anywhere else. And I think in the future, that's really where you see a huge revenue explosion, because it's just easier to determine what 68,000 people want in our stadium, what 20,000 people want in an NBA arena. And you can again have an individual approach to everybody that's watching and consuming a game, whether you're in the arena or outside. And I'll add, I think Jed and I come at it from different perspectives because I'm the league person and he's a team person. So he's very, in terms of monetization, he's very focused on fans and seats in a stadium where, to your question, do we consider ourselves a data company? Increasingly a technology company, a media company becoming a technology company. So where Jed is talking about technology, using it to create a deeper fan experience in the stadium. For us, it's how do we create a deeper experience for literally billions of people who follow the NBA, who will never come within thousands of miles of an NBA arena. And for those fans, I think part of the way, ultimately to monetization, is we find ways for them to engage more deeply in the sport. And often that is through data, that they're going to consume our products in more ways, including buying more apparel, watching our old media telecast for a longer amount of time, staying online longer, playing fantasy games, by the way, maybe gambling on the NBA one day, which is illegal in a lot of places, but legal in a lot of markets where we operate. So data and technology are the way that our sport is consumed by the vast majority of our fans. And I'd end it with, I think everybody up here that we need data in SAP is killer at providing that. But every one of us is in a people business. Jed's been very clear and consistent about what it means from the customer interaction. Adam, I think being aware of where are you going from what the players need, what the teams need, where there's draft analysis and other things. But the comments I'll draw on was Bill's comments about trust. I've got a brand, which means if I'm relying on the fact that I think my logo is cooler than company A or company B or company C, I'm dead in the water. Because you're buying my product and you're probably paying a premium in price for it because of the trust that the consumer has in us. The fact that we're not going to violate that trust that when you buy it, it's a better product than they try.  And with it, I can do this. But with the brand, I can do this because the shoe's going to make me a little faster.  And we can never violate that trust. And so there's a lot of ways that we violate that trust. As a company, we keep these, again, I mentioned my whiteboards earlier. I keep them at the center of my whiteboards. I keep my job description. It says, build a great product, tell a great story, service the business, and build a great team of people that will help us do that. We're a product company first and foremost, but one of the best products we build is our stories. The way we compel the consumer to say, you don't need a cotton t-shirt. You need to try synthetic performance. And then you look at service. I'll tell you, a good lesson I learned, actually, before Under Armour, I worked in the restaurant business. And somebody taught me that the most expensive thing in any restaurant is an empty table. And I'll tell you, being in retail now, the most expensive thing in any retail store is an empty fixture. And so I can do all the great jobs of creating a great product and having people out there. But if my fixtures aren't there, and I've got empty shelves, and we've dealt with that over the years. So getting behind projects like SOAR that we implemented again, the partnership between IBM, SAP, and Under Armour to really get that allocation process where we can get product going. I mean, three years ago, we were less than $1 billion. Next year, based on our long-term outlook of 20, 25%, we're closing on $3 billion. 3x growth in three to four years. That type of trajectory is something that we're managing and having, again, that's where systems, technology, and data take a people company, a trust company, and really make it reality. Great. We'll go over here for our next question up front. We'll go to John. John Furrier with Silicon Angle, how are you? In sports, they talk about the modern error, moving into the modern error. And IT is transforming to a modern error. So Jed, you had success at the 49ers, the young organization, new stadium, obviously recent success on the field. But a lot of the transformation IT issues are organizational. So Bill, you and Jed could talk about the transformation to this modern era of business and computing. And what are the challenges, and how did you overcome them, Jed, in your organization, and some of your experiences, Bill, that you've had directly? Sure. Well, I mean, I think when I started to look at the way we scouted, the way we analyzed game film, the way we analyzed just clock management, game management, it was antiquated. So when you're looking at how do we get better? How do we get an edge in a game where there's a salary cap? We're all spending the same amount of money. We all basically have the same pool of coaches, of scouts, and things like that. Where do you go to get your edge? And I think it's how you use data and what data you have. That's how you get an edge. So three years ago, every team in the NFL was using beta to watch film. Yes, beta. Something that was developed before I was born. And that's not the right way to analyze data in the 21st century. So what we did was say, OK, how can we just build something like, let's just think this is Star Wars. This is Star Trek. This is what's in the future. What can we do? Tell me what you want to see as a general manager, as a scout, as a head coach. And we'll figure out a way to build it for you. Don't worry about it. You don't have to do it. And once you get your football guys to understand that this isn't something that they have to build out, they just have to dream it up, that's when you find the right partner and you start putting things together and know that it is malleable. It is something that can change over time. It's something that's adaptable. And it grows with your business. It grows with your team. And I think we're only at the beginning stages of what we can do with data in the NFL. And it will get so much better as time goes on. And the more and more people get comfortable with it, the more and more you're going to see used with every team. And ultimately, it's going to make the league a better product. It's going to make it more enjoyable for fans because you're going to have a smarter game and a more efficient game. And I was pretty open about it this morning on the strategy side. All of this comes down to leadership. You have to have technology to run your business and to serve your consumer, your fan, or your ultimate consumer of your service. But you also have to have leadership. And what we try to do is get a strategy together for our customers based on where the world was going and where they needed to go. And it's obvious here, they're consumers on the mobile. And the mobile became the new desktop. And that device is really issuing in a new era of opportunity for all of these franchises and, of course, great companies like Under Armour. Because at the end of the day, the millennial is on that device. Have you ever gone to a game and seen a kid in that game not spend as much time on the device as they do staring at the field? I haven't. So there's really something going on here with mobile. Now, there's data. You've got to have the data in the hands of the user. And they want instant on. So HANA became attractive in terms of our strategy and what I've learned because it gets them the information really fast. They can extract that information from any source they want. And it starts to make predictions. I bet Kobe has a different foul shooting percentage with two minutes to go in game seven of the playoffs that he might in a regular season game when he doesn't focus as much. And those are the kind of questions these fans are asking that device about their favorite player when the game's on the line. And that's what enriches the fan experience to such a level. And I have to tell you, when I was out at the 49ers stadium with Jed, and I went to his organization, he allowed me into his office where they're going through draft picks and thinking about talent, I was blown away by the professionalism, the attention to detail, the finite areas where they focus and really think about the team and the fan and how they're going to win and be a perennial winner. It's just amazing. So I think it's this rich combination of having the right technology, the right leadership, and the passion to want to win. And that's what these guys have. That's why I think you see in the best panel we've ever had at SAFAR. All right, we're going to go up front for the next question. I'm Jackson. I'm from IT World Canada. Quick question about who you're hiring. This is for the customers of SAF. Are you bringing in a data scientist to help you understand all of this data that is being processed by your new products? Who are the people that are going to help you interpret what the software is telling you? Hi, I'll start. The answer is yes. Increasingly, we're hiring young, really smart analytics people who understand data, understand how to mine data, and understand how to use the tools that we're getting from companies like SAP. But I should also add, and maybe this is part of the response to the last question, too, that Kevin addressed it this morning. It's about partnerships. It's about a partnership with a company like SAP. I mean, at the end of the day, we still are, maybe I'll call ourselves the data company or media company, but I also recognize we're a sports league. And that we need great partners like SAP to move into the next generation, to the next generation of fans. And even in the hour between the panel this morning and the panel now, just the conversations that I was having with Bill and his team, Kevin and Jed, I was already taking notes on things to bring back to our office in New York on new innovations that we need to focus on. And it just reminds me about what it means to enter into these partnerships and also the peer relationships we gain from being at conferences like SAP are. That's beautiful. Finally, add on that, too. I think you've got to be careful, one thing that I've found, and whether it's trying to become going from a very masculine men's brand into adding and making women's an important part of what you do, whether it's trying to become a footwear company, whether it's trying to go international. These things can't live as a department with one person. They need to be of your company and of your culture. And whether it was being a footwear company, I remember in 2006, walking around and pulling up rug mats around where it said, Under Armour Performance Apparel. And it's saying, man, you're insulting everybody in our footwear department when we have that. Footwear needs to be everywhere. Global needs to be everywhere. Technology needs to be everywhere. SAP sits on the screen on every desktop within our company. It's not a group, it's not an apartment, it's anything. It needs to be of us. And so I think that's one thing of truly embracing that culture, embracing what data, what, again, the things like HANA can do for us as a company. It'll start, and you're going to have, again, you'll have people at the tip of the spear that are leading for the business. But it's important that over time that continues to trickle down to everywhere throughout the organization. I'm going to take this opportunity to remind people who are watching this slide that you can send questions to press at sap.com. You can also send it to us by Twitter at the sapphirenow hashtag. But I want to follow up with a question about culture that was submitted. And I'll focus with Jed and Adam about when you say you're a technology company, I think you touched around this. But what about the blood and guts of the sports? And what kind of cultural change does your organization undergo when you adopt technology increasingly, when a lot of this stuff is gut and passion? And do you see attention? No, I don't see attention at all. As I said earlier, I think the technology helps sort of unleash the passion. It's through the technology that you get to understand more deeply what's really happening in the sport. Things, patterns, as Bill would say, that you don't necessarily detect just by watching a game. And I think the notion that while you're watching a game on television or you're there in person, and as Bill said, Kobe's on the foul line. The way to be able to instantaneously access a sense of how is that player doing in that situation? Think of it from a coaching standpoint. Increasingly, the coaches are using that data too. It's not all about the hot hand or about intuition. It's about let's go to the real data. How does that player perform in the fourth quarter with two minutes left? And even probably more importantly in a sport like basketball, how does that player perform with these other four players around him and these other five players against him? Beautiful. And I think that's the key. We talk about technology. And the 49ers are not a technology company. But we want to be an innovation company. And so often people want to combine technology and innovation and say they're the same thing. They're not. They're very different. So I don't want to have my team worried about building out everything on the back end. I want to worry about what do we do well and how do we partner with people that can help us do what we do well even better. So if you're going to have a coach that wants to know what are the right calls to make in the second half? What are the right calls to make during two minutes? What am I thinking about when another team is on the field and how are we trying to combat that? That is going to help you. It's not always going to give you the right answer, but it's going to at least make it easier for you to get to the right answer. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure we get to the right answer. And for our coaches and our general managers and our players, if you can give them something that can help them win and help them be more successful, they don't care what it is. They're just looking forward to an advantage. Each lucky wristband. We're going to go for the next question right up here. Good morning. This is Brian Enix with AT&T. I look at you guys and I think of, I just get excited because I think you guys are somewhat of a dream team here. You're on a pivotal edge of sports entertainment. Adam, you were talking about enabling all these statistics and the dark data and all that. And I look at Kevin and I think, OK, you've got all this biometric data. Why are we not right there at the digital edge of real time biometric data? For all sports, all athletes on the field, you can actually just pull it up and say, hey, look, this guy is about to tire out. Or he's really peeking. Here he goes. You get punched by a boxer and you can see the amount of impact that it had on his body. This real time biometric data, I think we could almost revolutionize sports entertainment by enabling it and watching these athletes and seeing how they're tiring. And you can be a coach and you can say, all right, look, this guy is starting to tire out. I've got to pull him. That type of real time biometric data in sports entertainment could revolutionize how, talk about the 18 to 35 age.  They're like, wow, this guy is really starting to tire out and you talk about betting. You could say, all right, I can see this guy, the horse is starting to, you know, you can even enable it. Can I have any kind of a thing that you could read biometrics on? Almost at a pivotal point. No, to your point, think about it. I mentioned before there's the data on what that player has done historically. But just imagine that same player is now on the foul line. There's five seconds left in the game. He's got two shots. They're down by one. And you know what his blood pressure is doing. You know where his pulse is going. I agree with you. That's the future. So we began that more than two years ago in 2011, January or February 2011 at the NFL Scouting Combine when Cam Newton, Julio Jones, we had several of our athletes were coming through the combine. And they were for the first time wearing Armor 39, which was reading out for them real time biometric data, heart rate, breathing rate, accelerometry, horse power, G-forces, all these things. You're measuring and saying, you look at what a Cam Newton's horse power was, or Julio Jones going 9.2 Gs in the first 10 yards of his 40 yard dash. And you're measuring that and saying, OK, against the best athletes in the draft, if we're going to spend first, second, or number three, or number four, five pick on one of these athletes, how does that measure to somebody else? The vision that we have, I mean, it all comes back to its measurement. But if we have problems and you're seeing it play out, particularly in the sport of football right now, around concussion issues. And so whenever we have issues, the first thing we want to do is we want to measure it. And in measuring it, it gives us the ability to find out what's the issue. And then we start saying, what can we do once we measure? Where do we go from there? So we're in the process of measuring these issues. To be clear, at Under Armor, one of the things that we want to do with Armor 39 is the vision we have is a coach someday. It's not the subjective opinion of a trainer or coach who's walking around a field and saying, well, what's the problem out of the field? But somebody's actually got a handheld or some kind of PD-8 device that's saying, number 38, number 64, and number 91, you guys slow it down. Or the trainer says, hey, coach, the team's really redlining right now. Let's push them back a little bit or maybe get time to get them some water. I mean, that's the future where every athlete in the future, and I'll hold back on saying when that is, we'll have some type of biometric measurement device in their apparel, in their clothing, in their body that is telling them how the athlete's actually performing. And you look at that from a team standpoint, not only does that make the game safer for your players, it makes it easier for your coaches and trainers to know what to do and how to do it. But it also provides a better game for the fans, because you're not having somebody out there. Nobody wants to see a star player get hurt. And if you know that a guy's more likely to get hurt at this point in a game or at this point in his body, then you can take them out. And so you're going to have a better game overall, and you're going to have a healthier, safer game, and that's what we want to accomplish. And the one thing that I think will be at the essence of all of this is speed. Because that feedback loop has to be instantaneous, and that's where HANA plays such an amazing role, because it's 100 to thousands times faster than any other technology in the world. So anybody with a handheld device, including all of you, will not wait. So it's instant on, it's instant feedback, it's instant action on all these decisions. And I think on the field or with the athlete, this is going to be a key success factor for all of us. Excellent. We're going to go over here, and then we're going to go over to Doug for the next question, Mona. Hi there. John, I'll be from Bluefin. Question to you, Bill. One of the things that I heard, and I think is the most powerful thing, is SAP is a Diane the Woolley RP company, technology company, turning into what I term as a human company, a people company. And your customers, and what we're hearing, is they're people companies, media companies, brand companies, trying to become data companies, as well as remaining brand companies. How do you manage that enormous difficulty of changing the culture within the company and helping cut your customers with their cultural journey, as well? That's a great question. So what we did three and a half years ago, we looked ourself in the mirror, and we were very determined to not celebrate the things we liked. We knew we had the ERP market sewn up, and we were the market leader. But we wanted to go where the world was going with the company and where the customers needed to go. And that led us on this mobile path for the secure application mobile platform, market leading. It led us on the big, fast, super fast data and HANA. And it obviously took us on the cloud. But it also led us into a different journey becoming a B2B2C company and co-innovating with brilliant CEO executives like the ones I'm next to here that had visions of their own. So we became much more humble and much more empathetic for what companies were trying to do on the front lines. And we took the technology and the co-innovation concept and started to build out new business models. Case in point today, this is the sports, media, and vertical business. We added the 25th industry that SAP is in. The other piece that I think is quite fascinating is whatever we have, they can have. Like there's no secrets. We're on the same team. If I can do something for these guys and they could do something for me, they'll do it and I'll do it. And I think this idea of true friendship, true innovation partners is what's fundamentally changed. We are really on the outskirts of having something really big here because if we can become a consumer brand and drive that demand-driven supply chain where it's sense and respond, it's instantaneous, it's on the mobile, you leverage in the cloud for the line of business or even running entire companies on the suite on HANA in a private cloud environment, I mean this is game over. We got a real chance here and that's what I see coming together in front of you today. Excellent, thank you. Go to the back. Hi, Juan Carlos Bernate from Columbia. I have a question. How can you monetize these kind of solutions because this is a one that is orientated to the fund sympathy and that he likes your team. How can you explain the financial guy that you're going to invest a lot of money but you aren't gonna receive a revenue in a short period? Well luckily I don't have to explain anything to the financial guy. But I think the most important thing for us, if we're building a billion dollar stadium, and we're on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, I wanna make sure that people are coming to our arena, to coming to our sporting event and in order to do that, you need to make the in-game experience compelling. It's not about just building a nice luxury suite and building a nice club seat, you have to make sure that the fan experience is something that the fans actually want and something that can change and adapt which is why you're looking at a software driven solution as opposed to hardware driven solution. So when you're looking at not putting a ton of money back into hardware in your building, we could build a $60 million scoreboard, have it be the biggest, most expensive scoreboard in all of sports. It's gonna be obsolete in several years where our fans, especially in Northern California where smartphone penetration is probably the highest in the world, our fans are spending on average about $1,000 every 18 months on their own hardware technology, whether that's a tablet, whether that's a smartphone. So our fans are spending that $60 million that we would spend for the best scoreboard in the world. They're spending that every 18 months on their own hardware. So that's something that's gonna continue to allow us to leverage our building and make sure that we get fans to come into the stadium and when you're talking about data, you're talking about, well, I don't really wanna go get a soda right now or a hot dog because it's in the third quarter. How do you make in-seat delivery possible? How do you make sure that there's a ticketless stadium, a cashless stadium? You make it easier for fans to purchase. I think you're gonna see a lot of revenue generation just because the hassle to actually buy is taken away. You wanna make it easier for fans to literally leave their house, get to the game, find parking, find their seat, upgrade their seat, connect to the game, connect to fans inside and out of the game and then actually leave and get home. If you can make that an easier, better experience, then your revenues are gonna follow suit. And I'll just add to that. I mean, take the product I've been talking about earlier, the NBA.com statistical area. Since we added the HANA technology to our stats database, we've doubled the amount of time that consumers spend on that section of NBA.com. So that's sort of a very narrow example, but as I said earlier, more broadly, it's all about increasing engagement. If through this technology, we can increase the amount of time, for example, people watch our games. Obviously, take television ratings. Television ratings are a function of the number of people that watch times how long they watch. And one of the increasing issues for all of us is that as people have so many other entertainment options, more unique people to use an internet term are watching the NBA on television than ever before. But a lot of people are watching for shorter amounts of time because they have a thousand channels and unlimited number of options on the internet or through whatever technologies. But if you can find additional engagement and get them to focus on some of the things we were talking about before, the player's pulse when he's on the line at the end of the game or statistics on the likelihood that he's gonna make that basket, that's gonna increase their engagement, to increase the amount that they view the game and ultimately increase right to Kevin's business, the amount of products they consume that are associated with our game. Exactly. Okay, next question will go to the back again. Hi guys, great panel. This is Ron Hanscom from Gartner. We've talked a lot about teams and sports are always the greatest example of how high performance teams come together.  How are these solutions helping you build that high-performing team in your own organizations? I'll jump on that one first, is implementing things like success factors to us has been a huge addition. Again, there were two strategies. When we got involved with SAP, so now seven coming up on eight years together since we started the implementation process and knowing one another. And it was an interesting philosophy because as you begin with a company, you look at SAP and they're top three in any category. And you look in a business, particularly, you know, Unrummer's been around now, we're heading in our 18th year in business and you can take different philosophies as how are you gonna grow your business. Continuity consistency is an extremely valuable asset to any company in any business. And you know, as I've seen, as we've evaluated different processes, different pieces of the puzzle, it's say you know what, we think today there may be a better solution, there may be a better partner in the market where SAP's probably, they're number one, maybe they're number two in a particular segment and whether it's for us, particularly HR. And getting into one consistent system with one consistent backbone, I'll use that word again, that has SAP there. And when we brought on for instance, success factors, it wasn't saying who else can we find in the market that maybe the HR director that we had at the time maybe was familiar with or liked. We've declared that we're an SAP company and that's made things a lot easier for us as we're looking to hire and build off of that infrastructure. Now within that, things like success factors, I gotta tell you, the evaluation process for people is, you know, we've got an average workforce of 31 at headquarters, we've got about, coming up on 1,400 people at headquarters today, we're adding about 300, 325 new heads a year. And you've got, you know, you're bringing in these young people that are saying, what are you gonna do for me now? I mean, these millennials are not easy to manage. They're wondering and saying, I want it now, right? I expect to be a vice president today. I want the money. I expect cafeterias and gyms and flexible hours and all these things. I mean, there's a lot from the other side, so part of it's an education. But we need to listen as well because it's not about us dictating to our people, but it's about our people managing the company. You know, that's where things like, you know, I'd say that the human resource aspect that was something of, again, another plug-in from the SAP mainframe that comes into Under Armour that makes it that much more consistent for us. And we took a process that was literally, it was hours on end to do the evaluation process that today is about, it's twice a year, it's about a one-hour process, and it's a conversation that's explaining to somebody, here's where you are in life, and more importantly, here's where you're going. What we care about from a human resource standpoint, for instance, as much as we're growing, recruiting, onboarding, and development is our people, it's our job to tell them where they're going and again, having the right pieces that will do that, you know, have been a huge help to us. In the essence of time, I don't want to build too much on it, but that's, my organization is much smaller. Outside of football, we have about 125 employees, but the more that we can bring folks in and train them the 49er way, whether it's on the field or off the field, and you can show people your quantitative analysis, not just your qualitative analysis, and you can get them better and show this is why you're not being promoted or this is why we want you here for the long term, it makes it so much easier to have those conversations and make sure everything is streamlined. And I'll just add, I'm learning a lot just by being on this panel and as Jed said earlier, describing his company as an innovation company as opposed to a technology or media company, I think innovation is what attracts so many of our employees to the NBA or to the NFL for that matter, and the kind of people who work at sports leagues, I find are people who often are very competitive themselves, and while they may not be able to compete on the field or on the court, they want to compete in business and they recognize that by having access to a company like SAP and to a HANA solution, that's gonna enable them to do their jobs and better and to compete against all the other entertainment options in the marketplace.  I wanna go in software, the innovation layer and improve the whole fan experience, that's where I can add the value. I think about basketball, five persons on the court against five, and the sophistication and complication associated with getting five people to do exactly what they're supposed to do in a fast break or a zone trap defense, or I think about putting 11 football players on one side of the football on any given Sunday and having them do what they're supposed to do to win the game, and then I underscore Kevin Plank with thousands of people on the scalable, fast-growing global business, and I'm like, listen, consistency, my way, scale, innovation on top, no nonsense leaders. This is why their organization's a world class, and there's a lot of them out there where everybody does what they want, and it's a free-for-all, and you just don't get as good of an outcome. This is that simple. Excellent, next question, we'll go up front. Yeah, Kevin, today you mentioned a new partnership with IBM that you had a problem with the slow-running report. Can you go a little bit deeper on what the problem was, and are you moving to Hanna and how is IBM involved in that? Right. I'm gonna be careful about going above my pay grade with my definition here is where we go, but I'll tell you the issue that we had. So as our systems continue to grow, we were having process with the sales allocation process, and so every night we're implementing orders all day, and then all of a sudden those orders need to get downloaded, sent over, and get ready to shift out around the world, and what would happen is that process, as the data became more and more cumbersome, the process took longer and longer. So based on the servers that we are using, the system, the horsepower that we had beneath of it, it was literally, it was a process, as I mentioned, it began at midnight, and then midnight turned to 11 p.m., 10 p.m., and then we were backing up to the day where we just couldn't get through a full day of orders, and so we weren't getting the full allocation, so we were shipping things 60, 70% full. Today we are 91% faster in a process and we called this problem out and we went to SAP and saying, this is very specific to us, how can you help us with it? So they said, we need a bigger engine, which is where IBM came in, and then we need a bigger platform for what SAP provided us, and with that now we're implementing speed on the HANA platform that's allowing us to run, as I mentioned, 91% faster than we were before. So getting goods to the consumer again, the most expensive thing for us is an empty fixture, and we've dealt with that. Our product is selling right now, and there's nothing more frustrating than we're going through that entire expense of convincing and compelling a consumer to want our product, to go to a store, to go look for it, and they don't have it, and so in that case they're typically buying either one of our competitors or it's a no-buy decision or it's a disappointment in the brand. Thank you, do we have, we have one more question up front? Yeah, I did for Bill, this is an error-clone quiz for me. As you get to sort of millenniums and mobile and consumer, the user interface becomes more and more important, but traditionally not one of the strong points for SAP. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the resources you're putting behind that issue and how you're going to resolve it. Sure, it's a very fair point, and as I said in my keynote today, it is the number one top priority in the company. One of the things we learned a long time ago is when you want to get something done, put a leader in charge that knows what to do. So if you think about Vishal Sika, who's the CTO and executive board member of all of SAP, he's got a gentleman by the name of Sam Yen that has the whole user experience mandate for the company. Everything is about the user experience. One of the things that really helped out is once you became the mobile security and application market leader, everything looks a lot more beautiful on the mobile. So now we've also taken a lot of the applications that were SAP desktop type applications and put personas around them, where the user can actually customize it to her or his pleasure and make it much more beautiful to use. So everything new that's coming out is gorgeous and obviously device ready, and the things that were legacy or older in nature now have personas around them where they too can actually be beautiful and much more pleasant for the user. But this is right. You're absolutely right. It's just like the fan experience. Anyone using this software, they have to love it. They have to have a great experience with it. They have to say, this is making my life better, my job better. And that's the kind of SAP we are today. We'll take one more question. Team owners need to make sure that the executives don't muck up the user interface. Take the next question up front. Yeah, I'm Stuart Kennedy from The Australian Newspaper. Just one realized discussion about biometrics and analytics applied to support. Is there a point where it gets too good? We know which horse is going to win the race before it starts, and which team is going to win? When which player is going to make a shot, it just gets too good. Maybe with a horse. I don't know enough about horses. But I mean, when you're talking about 11 athletes and going head to head and somebody making a play, somebody making a catch, Kobe, for the most part, he's really good in the last two minutes of the game, but we've seen a mis-free-throws at the end of the game. So I think that's where it gets really exciting because as a coach, as a general manager, you try to put the people in position to be as successful as you possibly can. And from a fan standpoint, you look at a guy, and I'll never forget Mark Lemke, who was never much more than a 200-hitter throughout the entire season in the MLB when he got into the playoffs, Mark Lemke was a superstar. So you're going to always have an anomaly, and I think that's going to create even bigger, better stories. And now you're going to be able to know how to benchmark that story versus somebody else stepping up. And there's always going to be user error and user sort of overcoming whatever data is in front of them and whatever statistics are in their way. And that's what makes, to me, the game more compelling. And I'll just add again, the league perspective versus the team perspective is that when you're in the league office and you see teams doing what Jed's suggesting and making these enormous investments in getting that incremental win, you realize from the league office standpoint, in the aggregate, they can't create a single additional win per year. There's going to be the exact same number of wins and losses on a league basis every year. So it's a fascinating exercise that we watch from the league standpoint as all of these teams compete for the edge, compete for the edge, and then they all try to catch up with each other, knowing again that it's a zero-sum game in terms of wins and losses. So something increasingly that I'm spending my time on is as opposed to what Jed is doing at a team level, looking at the aggregate data from a league-wide basis, thinking about how can we grow interest generally? How can we make a more exciting product for the fans, not just how can we create an additional win for an individual team? I appreciate the references. I'm actually in the horse business. I own a farm called Sagamore Farm. As we sit here in the evening, the Freakness in Baltimore, Maryland, we've got a big race this weekend. We'll have some horses down in the Melbourne Cup someday soon as well. But I mean, as a guy in the horse business, I'm not worried about having too many answers in horse racing these days. You can make me a little bit smarter. I'd take anything we could get. Any tips you want to give your friends today? Oh, I mean, I'll give a shout out to the Australian press about Rebels Sport, who's our new key partner in the country, but no, I don't have, I think, or if I like or if a lot though, I think we've made this prediction, we've made a few predictions, but we call them in the derby, and he's the Maryland homebred, so we're definitely gonna go with the Maryland horse. We're going to wrap it up here. I want to thank you gentlemen for many of us coming in today. Innovation for the fan experience was when Lazy Boyd put the cup holder in the recliner, so our eyes are open and we're illuminated today. So thank you, everyone. Thank you all for joining. Thank you. Have a wonderful sapphire. Thanks, everybody. People love you. He's a wonder. Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to meet you, man.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session. My name is Dutton Kataria, and I work as a senior product manager at American Express. I'm very excited to be here today talking to you about beginning your PM journey. So you might ask, what makes me somewhat qualified to be talking about this? Well, I started my career many years ago as a software engineer. I enjoyed that for a while, but soon started asking myself if that is something I wanted to do for foreseeable future. Now, as I came out to be no, I was a happy engineer, but I realized I could stretch myself to focus on why we were doing what we were doing rather than just thinking about how that needs to be done. Made a conscious choice of doing an MBA, came back into the tech industry over the next few years with a variety of roles relocated from India to the UK during this period. And luckily, at that time, got a chance to watch from an arm's length what product management is and what a product manager does. So I would say it was around 2015 or 16 when I started dabbling with the idea of getting into product. However, the actual transition took a little bit more time. And after a brief consulting stint, finally was able to get into product about four years ago at American Express. So in product terminologies, I have pivoted a lot. And when I go through this session today, I am going to try and share my own personal experiences from my journey, things that I learned along the way and things that really helped me. My approach and thought process towards certain things, the choices that I made, the decisions that I took, that shaped me and led me to where I am today. So my hope from today's session is that by the end of it, you all leave with some food for thought on how you might want to approach your own journey. Things that took me years to understand and learn. I will sincerely try and attempt to cover. If not all, then at least a few snippets of it in this session. So why product management? This is an absolutely fundamental question that you should try and answer for yourself. Something that I did very consciously. Over the last couple of years, I have taken my fair share of product interviews and very rarely I have gotten a convincing answer to this. So why do you want to move into product? What is driving that decision? Suppose you're an engineer or a consultant or a UX designer or part of the sales function, what do you think is missing in your current role? What is product management going to offer you? Is it something that you're going to enjoy doing for the next two years, five years, 10 years? Appreciate product is a very hot topic right now. We need the technology industry, e-commerce space, startups. And yes, it is a rewarding career as well. But your own personal decision to move into product should not only be based on these aspects of the role, rather you should think through if you are going to be a good fit into product management. And talking about my own thought process, a few reasons why I decided to move into product work, I love the cross-functional nature of the role. I still love it. Working with engineers, designers, user research groups, marketing teams, data analysts, et cetera. If you think about it, none of these teams or people directly ladder up into product manager. So product management is all about making things happen, working with a wide set of stakeholders, always being available for your engineering and design team. You're rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty, diving deep in the nuances of your product and ensuring that if something goes wrong or doesn't work as expected, you are the first one to take accountability and ownership of the situation and then fix it. You figure out so many things as you go along the way and these aspects of the role very strongly resonate with me and I absolutely love solving real-life customer problems that also fit in with the company's strategic vision and drive the business forward. Now these are the good things. There are challenges of the role as well. There are a lot of meetings and then there are a lot of emails. There is a lot of context-switching. One moment you could be solving a production bug with your engineers, the very next you could be presenting to your business leadership. So calling it multi-tasking doesn't even begin to do the justice of what the reality is. So overall it is not a role that is going to allow you to be just an individual contributor. It is going to require you to work with teams, play a leadership role in guiding your team in different stakeholders to a shared goal and vision. So it's very important that you have an absolute clarity that the role is the right fit for you and you're the right fit for this role. My humble opinion, don't consider this as just another job. Think this through as your career. Different types of PM roles. Now a very quick whistle-stop tour of different types of PM roles that at least I have personally come across. So not saying that this is an exhaustive list. This is purely from my own experience and there could be many more different types of PM roles depending upon the industry or the company. However, the requirements of these roles itself and the skills that are needed to perform any or all these roles could very well be overlapping. And that's why it becomes important for someone who is wanting to transition into product to understand what these roles are because chances are skills that you already have or the responsibilities that you're already performing in your current capacity may be relevant for these roles. So looking at these business-focused PMs, they would typically sit at the intersection between technology, design and business. They will own the product vision and the strategy. They will have a deep understanding of their customers. They will create road maps, go to market strategy and then execute on that road map. Technical PMs will focus on platforms, infrastructure solutions, building developer apps, APIs, processes that enables business capabilities to be built more efficiently. Please do note that a lot of aspects of this role also overlap with the business-focused PMs. Both PMs typically operate in an environment where the foundational product build has already happened and what they are trying to do is optimize the current product feature sets by running a series of experiments, taking qualitative user research insights into future iterations, monetizing the current product features. So they will focus less on the actual product lifecycle, rather they will focus on improving the existing business matrix. Design PMs would typically focus more on web experience design, mobile app design, content strategy, how users interact with the digital experiences or different communication channels. Marketing PMs, the product marketing managers will have some amount of marketing background or knowledge, which is beneficial as marketing should ideally be built into the product from the beginning. These PMs will work more on creating the web content, communication channels, communication materials, go to market strategies, but their interaction with the engineering team, building the actual product is going to be minimum. So once you have gone through the why and the what, it's important to also understand then how you're going to begin your journey. With something, literally anything. Product management is all about making things happen. So if you don't have a direct PM experience, the next best thing that you can do is by building something as a side hustle. That gives you a learning into what a PM does and also demonstrates your skills that you can identify a problem. You can break that problem down into multiple different potential solutions, develop it and then execute on the solutions. This could be your YouTube channel, a podcast, a blog, focusing on an idea and then marketing, talking about it, or an actual product and app, or a e-commerce business or a service business, anything. Networking, I can't emphasize enough the importance of networking, especially if you're new into product management. Learning from others who are either already doing PM roles or can give you advice on transition is generally a very good idea. Identify PMs in your personal or professional network. If you don't have a direct contact in your network, ask for recommendations who can get you introduced. This will be important to understand what a PM does in their role and how you can learn from them. Reaching out to someone completely unknown through a professional networking platform is also okay and it will likely yield you results, but it's a number game. You might send a message to 10 people and only one of them responds, but don't get deflated because of that. So please do note that goal of this exercise is not seek a job referral. Rather, it's about establishing a personal connect and building a relationship. If you are able to establish a network with someone in the product community and are able to demonstrate, you have the necessary skills, the right attitude, willingness to learn, it's only going to be a matter of time that the job referral then automatically becomes a natural outcome of this process. Find a mentor. I think they're all very lucky to be in this day and age where the power of technology and internet has given us access to so much literature and just different avenues to learn almost anything about anything. A few years ago, you could have found mentor possibly only in your immediate company or the social circle, but now you can literally find it from any part of the world. You'll be surprised to know how many people out there are going to be willing to help you if you just approach them with the right context and with the right intention. What I have learned from my personal experience is that if you don't ask the question, answer is always no. No one is going to know if you need help in a specific area. No one is going to know you're wanting to make a transition into product management. And no one is going to know if you're wanting to learn a specific skill. So please help them help you. In key to a successful mentoring relationship is to be very specific and have a clarity on what help you need from your mentor. It could also be that you can identify multiple mentors both within and outside of your organization, but my recommendation will always be to outline the objectives of what you're wanting to achieve from the mentoring relationship. Hackathons. Again, a good forum and event to network with a different set of people. It's a time-bound collaborative and deeply focused event which allows you to demonstrate your skills and talent to ideate and define a problem, come up with solutions, building a working prototype to solve that problem in a very short span of time. In addition to be able to do some hands-on PM work, it is a great networking opportunity. At least in my personal experience, I have seen many people getting their first break through someone who they met during Hackathon even. So again, the message is talking to people really helps. Shadowing other PMs. This is assuming that you already have an access of product managers in your existing company or the role that you currently perform. It's not very straightforward and it's going to depend upon the dynamics of your company, your immediate leader. But if you think you have an opportunity to take on additional responsibilities and even a remote chance of learning from someone in your close vicinity, please try and take advantage of this. It could just be joining few meetings and listening in how the product manager operates, what they do on a day-to-day basis. Though every day could be completely different in a product manager's life, but essentially it's about watching and learning. Sponsors. Consider sponsors as your advocates who have seen your work and can proactively vouch for you if they know an opportunity is going to come through. The only difference between mentors and sponsors, I personally feel is that you reach out to your mentors, you try and find your mentors, but your sponsors find you. But this would be someone who you have previously worked with. They have seen your potential. They can pass it forward to someone who might be looking for fresh talent. There are associate product manager programs as well that big tech companies offer. I have not been directly associated with such a program in my own personal experience, so I won't be able to talk about that. But you should feel free to do your own research and find out if an associate PM program is on offer with a company that you might want to work at. Please do keep in mind that if you are from a non-PM background, getting into a product might mean starting from a junior position and then making your way up. This isn't necessary, but just a watch out. Okay, skills that will set you apart. Storytelling, now this definitely is your secret weapon as a PM. I would not say that storytelling is an art that either you have it or you don't have it. In my humble opinion, it is a skill that you can learn over a period of time. The idea of this essentially is how you are setting context for everyone and bringing them along the journey with you to deliver on the product version that you have. You are communicating about your product to the stakeholders who may or may not necessarily have the same level of intricate detail, helping them realize why is it important, what's in it for them, what value it drives, what customer problem it solves. That is the heart and soul of it. It is essentially moving from the transactional aspects of the product management to conveying that narrative in form of a compelling story that engages the audience and steers them on the path of making that product a success along with you. Leveraging the power of data. This is another powerful skill that you should learn. It's not saying that you need to be a data expert, but it is very important that as a PM who understands how you evaluate the performance and success of your product. For that purpose, you will need to become comfortable with using data and learn how to look for problems and potential opportunity areas that data is informing you. This is necessary not only to take fact-based decisions so that your problem solving, your product development approach is not biased or opinion-based, but what it also does is, it allows you a mechanism to collect insights for how the product is being perceived by your users and customers. Building a product complemented with data is going to make an overall story very impactful. Influencing without authority. This is absolutely bread and butter for any product manager. There's essentially saying that you are enabling to play an entire symphony with a full orchestra without yourself playing any of the instruments. The role of the product manager is such that it requires you to lead and guide many stakeholders over whom you don't have any direct authority. Important thing is to build a culture of trust, collaboration and partnership. What I typically try and do is defining what the success looks like and developing shared objectives and goals. When you as a PM can drive your team, your business partners and stakeholders to feel inclusive and proud and passionate about things that they are building collectively, bringing them along the journey, that's your true success as a PM. Another good way of influencing without authority is by becoming an absolute subject matter expert in your area. So people who don't necessarily want to listen to you, also have to listen to you, but you need to stay humble and operate with a lot of humility and share that knowledge with them to influence them, to stare them on the right path and enable them to educate that this is what the thing that we're trying to build is the right thing to build. Learn about the business and its economics. So I personally think to excel as a product manager in any industry or in any company, what's always going to be important is to understand the true nature of your company's business. Who the customers are, how does your company make money? What are the revenue generation streams and what are cost pillars or expense centers? It is only by having an overall holistic understanding of the entire business model. You're going to be able to relate all the above points and formulate a coherent product vision that solves the customer problems and also ties in with the company's vision, mission, and strategy. Things that I learned along the way.  Few of these statements are borderline philosophical, but essentially this is how I approach product management or in general, my life. I think our personal and professional lives are so tightly intertwined that how you approach a particular situation in your day job automatically starts reflecting in how you approach your personal life and vice versa. So it's important that we have some fundamental guiding principles along the way. And these are my basic tenets which I have developed and evolved over time and I sincerely strive to follow them. Time is finite. It's a PM's worst enemy. I'm sure even if you're not a PM, you would wish that you had more than 24 hours in a day. Some people say time is precious. Some say time is money. I will probably go a step further and say time is life. That's all we have. So as a PM, it's a daily realization and a constant battle on what you should be building, how you're going to maximize the limited time and capacity that you have, what is the most important problem to solve. And this all is going to define the success of your product's performance as well as your life's trajectory. Outcome over output. Well, years ago, when I wasn't a product manager, I used to take a lot of pride in saying that I'm working well out of the day. I'm very busy. The work is very hectic right now. But this mindset and internal dialogue started changing a few years ago when I got into product. I started realizing and valuing productivity and the value that gets driven out of the work delivered is more important than the number of hours that go into getting the job done. So this is going to be a mindset change for pretty much everyone who make their transition into product. It could very well be a single line of code or a small UX change or content change even that drives the business benefit. So ultimately you start redefining how you measure your own success when you transition over into product. Culture is more important than strategy. There is a wonderful quote on this. I think it's from Peter Drucker. If I'm not mistaken, which says, culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have the most sophisticated, wonderful strategy laid out. But if the culture around which it is based is not right, it's not going to be sustainable for long term. And culture I feel is a function of values and people. You define the values that you stand for and then you find people who really believe in those values. Culture does percolate from top down, but as a PM, it is your responsibility to build that culture for your team and everyone around you that you work with. You need to make sure that everyone's voice is heard, junior or senior, doesn't matter. Everyone has an equal opportunity to share their ideas. Encourage people to voice their opinions, their concerns and then be open to changing. You pretty much have to let go of your ego. You don't need to be right all the time. You need to create that atmosphere around your team of psychological safety where everyone feels connected and part of the team. And even if someone is trying to do something new and fails at it, they are still backed and supported for at least trying because that's where learning growth happens. That's the only way in my opinion where collaboration happens, innovation happens. And mutual trust and success then automatically becomes an actual outcome of that process. Confidence without clarity never works. How I define this for myself, at least in my personal context, is when I say I believe this, I am confident. And when I say I know this, I am clear that this is how it is. It is like saying I believe it is going to rain today versus saying that I know it is raining outside. One is a mere assumption and another is a fact. The idea here in the product management context is that you can never assume anything just to look or sound confident. You have to absolutely know the facts, how they are and all your decisions, choices of what you build, what you don't build, things that you do and things that you don't do should be focused on raw facts rather than opinions, sentiments or assumptions. And finally, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. There are no shortcuts, there are no hacks. This isn't a role that gives you instant gratification. You think about an idea today and it comes to life tomorrow. It just doesn't happen, at least not in my experience. There is a lot of patience needed, a lot of discipline needed and diligence needed to bring a strategy and idea to execution. There are product features that can, at times, take months to be delivered. So obviously the challenge then is to stay on course day in and day out. If you don't want to show up for yourself, you show up for your team.  And because if you as a product manager lose faith, your team and your partners are not going to see language at all in the vision that you're trying to write. So you are in this for a long time to be very clear when you start your journey, when you transition into product that this is not something that gives you instant joy but there is a lot of satisfaction at the end. With that, I leave you with some useful references. You should look at this. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I have really found useful. So we're spending some time going through this. So that I end today's talk and I wish you all the very best in your journey. Thank you.


Hey everyone, welcome to Archland. So we have here my account way below 40 as Expected because I was I played the late ready Been so busy during the Christmas holidays that I wasn't able to play this game But got hooked as soon as I played it and now I'm here So let me take you over my account and see what my progress is so far Again as far as the adventure is concerned, I haven't been playing I haven't been playing the story much. I've been progressing the dimension secret Space and not space time, but more or less. I've been trying to level up my characters Farming and a little bit of summoning on the side So going back to the campsite I'm gonna take you to the roster that I have so If you can see the first 10 here are going to be my primary roster, so Roster 10, but I usually use around 5 I'll take you through that later and see how I usually build my teams during battle So this is my roster. I actually have it been at our here, but I don't use him So this is what I really have. It's a balance of It's a balance of SSR's and SSR's and SR's so at this point I'm just making sure that I have a character for each element and The usual that I you know that I bring is mainly Sigard He's actually built as a as a pseudo tank He hits hard Really really hard with with his great sword He also has a HP restore For himself. So survivability wise. He's good unless he is taken down by water Element opponent, so I don't have he's one of the best front lines that I have the next Would be Charlotte. So Charlotte. Of course, you guys know Charlotte. I got her Late in the game already in the banner. I didn't get her in the re-roll By the way, I didn't really re-roll that hard. That is why I got her late But she has been side-by-side with Sigard In terms of the core of my team and the other core would be Gabriel. So recently I got Gabriel. Um, I Did not really re- I know I didn't regret getting her. She's been one of my core in terms of tanking in terms of defense in terms of debuffs Counter, you know counter counter attacks you name it She's good. She her role is mainly as a counter attacker and a tank So both Sigard and Charlotte would more or less be your damage dealers here Charlotte by the way has more or less the rune for vampire So she's she could survive on her own for Sigard. The rune is more on damage dealing so I have here the sword and For Gabriel, I do have a primary shield Set on her again She's she's going to be my main tank and I think the only tank that I have at this point So the three are my core the rest I usually interchange But on the fourth on the roster It's going to be Avia. So Avia is I made her my main Healer Initially it was her then I shifted to Lohanus for a while But I returned to Avia because of her play style because she does it give a buff If she's beside One of her allies attack buff. I give she gives a heal She gives a secondary heal if she's beside as well and she She does highland. So again, she's a very good utility for me That is why I'm making her my primary healer and to round out the team if I'm usually in in in a mood to Do auto I usually Have peacock with them. So peacock has almost the same set as Charlotte that is why her survivability for my team is actually good and She is built again to deal What do you call this to deal lots and multiple damage? Okay, so That is usually my first five If I don't want to bring peacock Usually what I bring is either Clarisse for more If if usually I we have a lot of lightning, you know lightning opponents then I Bring Clarisse to protect to protect Charlotte or sometimes I would bring Brown but I'm not happy with brown. I'd like to change him in the future Hopefully I could get there are better, you know shooters in the game that would be available in the future Also, I bring us on Hassan actually complements peacock in terms of damage dealing. So sometimes That is it. So I bring sometimes peacock and Hassan together in the team. So going with sig hard going with With Charlotte, but I leave out Gabriel then I bring in avia for healing and for other support So and Nicholas is here He's an experiment That I'd like to do because I don't have any more, you know any more characters to do to use so I'm experimenting with her because the leadership of What they call this of Sigard is already active. So I need to fire. So I have to fire extra here Therese and Nicholas and The main character which is Warden is Actually a new addition to the core because I'm really struggling with with lightning With not having any lightning element to the team. I'm supposed to get semi But I'm opting for Catherine to summon at this point. So I think I'm gonna use them up to a point where I can Get another DPS for lightning, but definitely I really need lightning. It has been a glaring spot in my roster. So that is it So so far. I think I have the team that I that I like And also I forgot to mention that this guy has a leadership that I also need To activate. So this is very easy one presion one tank increase P attack M attack P defense M defense of all as with 10 That's actually good allies deal 10% increased damage against enemies afflicted with ignite so actually the first one is already good, but this one is a bonus if You could have some, you know ignite people on your team. So this one So the future roster would look like Warden no Warden main character Replacing brown as a mainstay. There's a possibility because again If I if I need three DPS of each color you have sig hard You have Charlotte and you have the main character. So Again, that is where I am and with my account so far I'm happy with my progression. It's just that I have a gaping hole in In the the the lightning department don't have much lightning. This guy. Helsen is not good The others not good as well. I have your arm on but definitely for For assassins, I'm actually Begging off assassins because There they're too much of a liability especially on auto. So that is why I'm going with Will warden here with the main character. Sorry. So that is it guys comments on my account tips on Probably other team, you know other other characters you that You might you know encourage me to use and let's discuss But thank you guys for staying this far. Take care. Stay safe. This is the warden and I'm out of here


Welcome back everyone. This is Brian and we're going to continue our journey with Python 3 with class inheritance now when we talk about inheritance We're not talking about a loved one dying and leaving us everything they own We're talking about how a class can inherit or include the attributes of other classes So for example, you were born into this world. You have a mother and a father You have a hair color and an eye color and those came from your mother and father you inherited those traits That's really what we're talking about with classes. This can get super complex and we're gonna look at a few issues that can pop up Okay, we're gonna go through a lot of this at warp speed just because we've covered this before so I don't want to waste a lot of your time We're gonna make a feline class. Now. Remember Class is just a blueprint I'll say feline and Then I'm going to go ahead and define our constructor Self and let's give it a name There we go Notice one thing right off the bat. We're saying self name, but we've never actually declared a name variable Pay special attention to that because we're gonna find out really really hard how that's a bad idea And that's why I said I tie I try to declare all my variables at the top that way I know instantly what the class has and it's been declared. This is gonna come back and haunt us And I'm going to say Creating a Line so we have a constructor here Now I'm going to just do speed this up just a bit I'm going to put some functions in the feline class It can meow and we can set the name So really all we're doing is meow just prints out self name meow and set name you guessed it prints out setting the name and Then we go ahead and set that variable Remember we haven't declared this Now I want to make another class that inherits the feline class You know how when I mouse over this it says feline feline. So it's just a self-contained class with no inheritance We're going to make a class and I need a snazzy name. Let me get my notes here. We're gonna make the lion class I'm gonna say class lion And you may have been wondering why classes would even have a parentheses here. Well, we're about to find out The line That's all we're doing here is we're saying the lion Will use everything in the parentheses and the first thing it's going to use is the feline class That is just simply how we inherit Now we say deaf Roar And we have to have the self in there and we can just print something out. There we go Looks super super simple and well, let's go ahead and play around a little bit here with the code So we can say c equals feline And we got to give it a name. So let's call this kitty Go ahead and print c out and let's say see meow go ahead and run this and it says creating a feline so our constructor of our feline class was called and we have a Main notice how it's got the underscore underscore main. So we're at the main part meaning this is python at the root It's created a feline object at this memory location and the kitty is meowing Now let's go ahead and make a lion. So I'm gonna say L equals a lion And let's call this Leo Go ahead and print out that object so we can see what's going on under the hood and Let's also say L dot meow now. You notice something magical just happened The lion class does not have a meow function. It is inheriting it from the feline So in short everything you inherit you now have access to This is extremely cool And we can also add to this class. So we're saying the lion is not just a feline All of this class all this blueprint, but also this additional stuff that we can define. So now we can say like L dot Roar Go ahead and run this and sure enough Creating a feline, you notice how the constructor for the feline was called and then the lion is created Interesting how that works. We did not define a constructor for lion. So we're seeing the default constructor for the feline Interesting that is gonna come back and haunt us here in the next section I keep saying we're gonna have a bad time and that's coming right up, but I want you to understand what's going on here Python is creating a feline and creating a lion those two are together into one object at this location But it's simply going to say main dot lion now the main of course is this file right here and Then Leo's gonna meow and Leo's gonna roar and if I just Go up a little bit. You can see the kiddies meowing the lion's meowing the lion's roaring So everything's working as expected now fasten your seatbelts because things are about to get really really bumpy Let's go ahead and make another class here And we're gonna call this the tiger class because we are going to inherit the feline class Almost a timer that would have been interesting All right, so we've got our feline class now one thing I'm going to do here is I'm gonna go up here and just grab this and I'm drawing your attention to the default constructor I shouldn't say default the constructor for our feline class where we have a self and a name and remember I said we did not initialize that variable. We are doing it right here in this constructor But what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go to this tiger class and you guessed it plop that in here I'm gonna get rid of the name because guess what we're inheriting the feline has a name So I don't really want to mess with it with the tiger So now I have a different constructor even though What you can see is we are constructing a feline. So bad things are about to happen All right, let's go ahead and Say Instructing a tiger I want to plop some notes in here And they may not make a lot of sense at the moment Super allows us to access the parent when I say the parent we're talking about this right here Whatever we are inheriting from or the base class if you will if we forget This we'll have a bad time later meaning we can say super the parent in this case the feline Call the constructor with a name and we're just gonna set no name now. I'm gonna comment that out And we're just gonna say creating a tiger Oh boy, we've got some problems here. So now let's go ahead and make another function And we're gonna say stop I'm trying to kind of like explain this as we go. So you understand why this fails because it will fail What we're doing here Is we are trying to rely on python to do all of this management for us And we have to make sure That name is set in the parent when we say parent. We're talking about the super or the base class This is considered look before you leap. We are dynamically adding the attribute and what do I mean by that dynamically adding the attribute Right here We're adding it in the constructor of the feline if we bypass that constructor Using our own in the tiger and we don't call the constructor of the feline class That variable never exists. What happens when you call a variable? It doesn't exist. You get a not defined error So let's go ahead and print And we're gonna do a formatted print and we're gonna say Self not name Notice how IntelliSense is saying it's valid because we're working with a blueprint not an object And to make things even worse We think this is gonna work Let's go ahead and pop in yet another function Let's say I want to be able to rename this We're going to say super because we know there's a concept of a super which we're actually accessing the feline class And we're going to call the feline class set name In case you're wondering, yes, we could actually call tiger set name and just set the name directly But I wanted to show you that you can go up to the super and call it directly if you wanted to The feline class and if that seems super super confusing, it's because it's meant to be I'm trying to show you that super Is a separate object from the tiger even though they're merged into one class It is a separate entity that python understands and tracks So the difference between saying super set name and just saying set name is very subtle Set name is setting the name in the tiger class where super is saying hey Go up to the feline class and call this function in feline Because remember when we create a class the first thing that gets created is our parent or the super Man that is super super confusing. So this is one of the subtle complexities We're going to have here. So the major takeaway is we have horribly designed tiger. We have Basically created our own constructor And I want to plop a note right here Overwrite the constructor is a bad idea because we now have this chicken or the egg problem Where self dot name does not exist. That's not even defined Let's go ahead and demonstrate all of this just to show that it will explode So I'm gonna say tiger And I want to plop a note right here Is a feline but with a different constructor Different constructor So now there's no name. We've deviated from our class design here. Let's go ahead and print this out Save run and creating a tiger notice how Main tiger object is created. It hasn't exploded Now go back up to stock And remember we're going to print out self dot name But we've never set the name Oh bad things are going to happen Let's watch this fail and then understand why it's failed Uh-oh attribute error tiger object has no attribute name Remember we are overwriting this constructor. So we have to initialize that And it's simply because we didn't do it like this If we had it here it'd be initialized right in the feline and it's initialized for us whenever the feline is constructed But because we didn't do that We're relying on the feline constructor and in the tiger we defined our own constructor. It never gets called up here in feline That is super confusing. So the major takeaway here is unless you have no other choice Do not override the constructor in a child class always rely on the parent constructor Otherwise you have to make sure that you are calling Either the constructor or you're initializing the variables in here Oh, that's why this is called look before you leap because we want to make sure that we actually can do something We want to make sure the name is in the parent. That is the look before you leap principle Uh, so this is what we're doing right here is we are Making sure it exists and look before you leap. There's a lot more to it. But that's the basis Now let's go ahead and run this Suddenly no name Stocking where is it getting no name from? It's getting it from right here. So we're saying tiger create And then we're saying go to the feline and call that constructor, but we don't have a name So we're just going to say no name We could put anything we want there and it would work just fine Let's go ahead and rename this now. So I'm going to say t dot a rename And let's go ahead and call this tony And let's just say t meow just to prove that we are inheriting the attributes of the feline class in T dot stock. Let's call that again I'm going to bring this way up so we can see this in action clear that out and run Okay, so What is happening here? Creating a feline creating a tiger The tiger is created No name is stalking. We've renamed it to tony Tony is now meowing and stalking If we go back into constructor lands And comment this out We're going to have a bad time. I want to really drill that into you The reason why this is crashing is because we are bypassing this constructor and name is never defined Let's watch it fail again Sure enough tiger object has no attribute name Okay, so major takeaways from this video is that inheritance is extremely cool extremely powerful, but has Some hidden issues you really need to pay attention to Do not override the constructor unless you absolutely know what you're doing And you want to make sure you take ownership of that process if you do Easiest ways to call super in it and then call the constructor of the parent class But there are other little gotchas as well And you need to make sure you look before you leap or you do some sort of error checking or you're going to have Some kind of crazy issue I hope you enjoyed this video You can find the source code out on github.com If you need additional help myself and thousands of other developers are hanging out in the void realms facebook group This is a large group with lots of developers and we talk about everything technology related Not just the technology that you just watched and if you want official training I do develop courses out on udemy.com. This is official classroom style training If you go out there and the course you're looking for is just simply not there drop me a note I'm either working on it or I will actually develop it I will put a link down below for all three of those and as always Help me help you smash that like and subscribe button The more popular these videos become the more i'll create and publish out on youtube. Thank you for watching