Hello, I'm Alled Roberts, a careers adviser at Careers Wales. I'm delighted to be joined by the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, Deputy Minister for Economy and Transport, Lee Waters, Alison Stallard, Head of Income, Generation and Marketing at the Hospice of the Valleys and Ashley Davies, Assistant Technician at Engineering, Design and Planning Company, Arap. All four are past pupils of schools in South Wales and are here to talk about the exciting alumni project. Let's start with a brief introduction then from everybody. So, tell us about your former school, your current role, how you found out about the alumni project and why you wanted to support it. Starting with the First Minister. Diolch yn fawr, Alled. Well, I'm Mark Drakeford, I'm the First Minister of Wales. I'm from Cymarthen originally and went to what was then Cymarthen Boys Grammar School in Cymarthen. I've done many things since then before I got to the job I'm doing today. I heard about the alumni programme through Lee originally. He was telling me how it worked and what he was designed to achieve and I think it's great to be able just to share some experiences with others and to just demonstrate the choices that are there for people and how they might go about making them. Diolch yn fawr. Well Deputy Minister, Lee Wartus, tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I'm the member of the Senate for the Chmarche constituency and I'm a Minister in the Economy and Transport Department. I'm from the Amman Valley. I would do Amman Valley for the Comprehensive School, that's called Gevin Diffrin Amman, as it's now called. I can remember when I was about 14, being told if you want to get on, you've got to get out. I remember feeling that was wrong then, my life is wrong now. If people with something about them leave, then our areas are never going to grow stronger because a way forward, a way of rebuilding our communities lies within our genius and our talent is there. But often what we lack is those networks, those relationships that help us get through life. When I got my last job leading a think tank, I was writing to my old school saying I had no relationship with my school at all. Can I help? I have this network. I've created my own network since leaving. Can I help anybody at the school? I have no reply. I looked at how universities work and how private schools work and they all have these alumni networks where they help out pupils. I thought why don't comps have these? They need to have them.  But if you want an internship with a city law firm, you probably haven't. But I guarantee that if people have gone to the school, who could help. They just don't know how to help because they don't get asked. And the people in the school don't know how to find them. So let's put those two things together and help each other. Thank you. Alison Stallard. Hi everyone. My name is Alison Stallard and I went to Penadry High School in Booth of Tiddavill. I'm currently the head of income generation for Hospice of the Valleys based over in Blaenogwent. I was approached by Geraldine from Careers Wales about becoming part of the alumni. And to be honest, when I saw the opportunity, I thought it was fantastic. For very similar reasons that Mr Waters has talked about the Deputy Minister in terms of, I feel quite passionately about the school I went to. It's quite often had, you know, not the most positive of press in terms of where it's based. However, I went to that school and they were a fantastic support to me and certainly a huge positive impact on my education. Unfortunately, my mum passed away when I was 15 just before I sat my GCSEs. And the school was a huge support in terms of supporting me through that and supporting me onwards through my A-levels. And I feel it's an honour really to be asked to be part of this programme for that reason, to be able to share and impart some of my knowledge and experience that I've gained over my career so far with pupils in the school now. But also to try and broaden people's horizons when I was in school, the third sector wasn't really talked about. I wasn't aware anyway that you could have a very long and prosperous career within the third sector. And so I'm keen to promote that and make young people aware that there is the third sector where your skills can be transferred across into the sector and you can have a fantastic career. But for me, the crux of it is that I'm doing something and I'm actually making a difference to the kind of people that I work with and for. So yeah, there's quite a few reasons why I'm keen to be involved in this programme. Thank you. And finally, Ashley Davis. So my name is Ashley. I went to Covalta High School in Murthyrtidville. It was commonly up against Pernodrae, Alice in the School in all the sporting events. And I'm currently an assistant technician for a company called Arap, which has an office based in Cardiff Bay. But they have a multitude of offices scattered around the UK and across five continents, I believe. I found the alumni programme through Geraldine. She sent me an email. I think it was like a maths email that had been sent out to lots of different people and I reached out and said, yeah, I'd love to be involved. And the reason that I wanted to get involved was because I joined Arap as an apprentice. I went from sixth form to an apprenticeship and I felt like there wasn't enough sort of advertisement of apprenticeships and that you were very much pushed down the university route if you were academic. And I was someone who was quite academic in school and I just didn't like the idea of university. It didn't really appeal to me. It looked very, very expensive to me. And I like the idea of having my own money and not having to rely on my parents for the next few years because the grant and loan system wouldn't have provided me with enough money to see myself through university. So I would have been very dependent on my parents and I didn't want that for myself anymore. And I thought that this programme would be a really good way to sort of advertise apprenticeships to young people in school and even just let them know that they're an option and that you don't have to go to university. OK, thank you. I think that's quite valid when it was, you know, when you were in school and I think the same is valid today with the choices and the options that young people had. It'd be good to know maybe a little bit more about each of our guests and their journey from school to the role that they have now. When we asked current pupils what they would like to ask former pupils, Nathan at Gabbathfa High School wanted to know if this is the only job you ever wanted to do or was there something else when you were younger?  So when I was in school I didn't think I would, well when I say didn't think I'd be an engineer I wanted to be a pop star. I wanted to travel the world and tour everywhere. I started a YouTube channel, I wrote my own songs. I really enjoyed writing generally so I started a blog and started reaching out to different websites to write for them. But when I was in school I really, really enjoyed maths. I really like the problem solving aspect of it and this is going to sound really sad but I found it quite thrilling when you found the solution to a problem and you found out that it was the right dancer. I was like this is incredible and when it sort of came to picking what I wanted to do I thought well do you know what to be an engineer or do something maths based and say oh but in my spare time you know I write for my blog and I play the ukulele. I thought that sounded pretty cool but what I thought wouldn't sound as good is if I said oh I write for a living but in my spare time I do third order differential equations doesn't sound quite as riveting and it sounds like quite a boring hobby. So that was how I sort of ended up pursuing engineering. I really enjoyed maths, I really enjoyed the sciences and a few teachers in school said you'd like engineering and I was like I don't really know what that is. No one really explained what that involved. They just said oh you like maths yeah engineering's for you and then I thought £9,000 a lot of money to find out I don't like it so I'll go somewhere else and work the job and see if I do like it and maybe then I'll pursue it as a full-time career. Okay what about the others then maybe first minister you know when you were sort of the ages of 14 to 16 did you have any sort of career ideas at that sort of time in your life? I think fair to say that I didn't know at all. I would like to open the batting for Glamorgan. I still think that was probably amongst my ambitions when I was 14 and I absolutely I took completely what Ashley said really you know I did loads of different jobs and the main thing I think is to have a go and see if you enjoy it and I'd be very lucky. I've generally done jobs that I've enjoyed and they mean as I say completely different in character and I think when you're very young you shouldn't over plan you shouldn't feel that because you make a decision that somehow that's it forever because life turns up not to be like that and life turns up all sorts of chances that you haven't thought about and sometimes some chances that you hope were there and what you want to need to do is to ask yourself you know what will I get out of it what will I enjoy are these people I like working with you know I've done some very good jobs and sometimes work with people I didn't get that on with that well and didn't enjoy it and I've done some pretty tough jobs at different times and if I've done them with people I like I've enjoyed going into work every day there's lots of things to weigh up being willing just to take chances as they come and take experiences as they come you you'll learn a lot and you'll be surprised at what turns up to work for you. Alison you know you mentioned in Penodrae when you were sort of 16 thinking about the future you know what you think was going through your mind what was the main priority for you at that stage do you feel of your life? Well it was probably quite confused really because I think there was that level of expectation that by that point that you needed to well before that really you needed to know what you wanted to do because you had to choose you know your kind of GCSE options and different things and and I can only echo really what the others have said so far in that I took the approach of doing things that I enjoyed and that I was good at and that made me happy and so those were my kind of choices for GCSEs etc and I jumped around in terms of thinking what I wanted to do I think very early on I wanted to be an accountant but I don't think my math skills were quite as advanced as Ashley's I didn't quite enjoy doing equations as much then I thought about joining the forces I did some work experience in the RAF and again that was something that appealed to me and then the police force and then being a PE teacher I loved sport but I also loved music and so I kind of went down that route then but but yeah I would certainly it's difficult at that age in your life to make decisions and I think you do feel pressure you know with making choices and thinking oh what if this isn't the right decision what if this isn't the right subject and I can remember you know having conversations with with staff in in the school and and then you know they they were they were really honest and kind of said look this isn't the be all and end all you know you you you do what you enjoy what you're good at and you know you're not defined by the choices that you make now so yeah I think it's trying to to do the things you enjoy and that make you happy and and that you're good at and Lee Waters in the Arman Valley you know was it the same sort of thought process for you? Yeah I'm a very clear young age knowing I didn't want to get wet working the cold that was my key starting point but all the men in my family worked you know cold and wet and I didn't want I didn't want that my grandmother just before she died in the early 90s held my hand and she said to me almost with a sigh of pride you've got gentlemen's hands she said and I took that as a sign of success I didn't have to do the the rough old jobs of all the men in my family had done but nobody had gone to college and my mother when I was 14 she'd been a hairdresser and had divorced my father and didn't know what to do and she went back to college and trained to be a careers advisor and seeing her go through that process of pushing herself and working made really walk a spirit in me really and then that's when I decided I wanted to go to college I never thought about it before I wanted to be a reporter until I figured out that you had to learn shorthand and I couldn't I couldn't get my head on shorthand far too complicated but I did become a reporter despite not knowing shorthand but that's been my pattern too really do something you like and do it for as long as you're learning new things I want you to stop learning new things try something else and the other thing I said other reflection I offered people is don't just see your day job as the only thing you do do volunteering as well because I've learned as much from being a school governor as I learned from being a reporter and it's through being a school governor it made me want to leave being a reporter to do other things where I felt like I was making a contribution so just keep you know the get off this cliche in school the more you put in the more you get out they're being told that all the time but clubs and that is absolutely right about life in work as well and most of you do and everybody has different passions don't they and some people are happy just flooding along and some people are not happy flooding along but just do what feels right listen during sphinct because it's rarely wrong yes some good points there I I feel for young people to maybe take on board now when when they are looking towards the future again you know how things are at the moment in in the big wide world you know resilience it's always been an important part of the world of work you know and maybe more so for young people now how did you cope Alison you know maybe with some early frustrations or rejections when you were younger looking at that first step on to the job ladder um I think in my younger days I certainly lacked confidence in my ability and I think that would be one of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to young people these days is to and I think it's worse now because of all the pressure of social media and things but to be confident in your ability and don't compare yourself to others um because I quite often wouldn't put myself forward for things or wouldn't apply for a job or things because I'd always think oh no there'd be somebody better than me somebody else will get that and and it was only through um having small little part-time jobs I worked from the age of 16 you know in in lots of different part-time jobs that I learned resilience in terms of you know understanding how the world of work actually worked um and and that was good experience for me you know that kind of went in line and kind of parallel to my to my education then and yeah I think I think confidence is a big thing and I think young people these days there is this you know this this world out there where this what I call it the Instagram world where everything looks perfect and and you know abrushed photographs and all the rest of it and I think it's hard for young people because they're constantly seeing this and comparing themselves and I think it's quite a a fake world that exists and I think if ever there was a time for people to to to kind of not judge you know look at others and judge and just be confident in you and your ability it it's now really it may be to the first minister I mean obviously involved in politics resilience plays quite a big part in that job but what about you know in the early days perhaps when you were looking for that first opportunity when you left university how was that for you when your first job is a tough job because you know you're not used at that point just to the basic routines are you you know I went from university to to work and on the first first of September 1979 I turned up at the probation office in Westgate Street at Cardiff and 10 years later I was still there although I was I never planned that but the challenge challenges a lot aren't you you're learning the job inevitably you're learning the routines of work it could be there every morning at nine o'clock you're going to be there for the day all of those things that you have to get used to I really echo something that Lee said you know it's good to be doing more than one thing because in any job you will have days and sometimes even a bit more than days when the job is pretty tough and difficult and turn more than one thing on the goal because you know you're doing a bit of voluntary work or you're doing a bit of study sometimes I've you know I continue to work in some university study while I was working and on the bad days it's good to save yourself what I really do you see what I really do is the other thing it's a bit like Ashley was saying you know what I really do is I don't do equations what I really do is I write songs and so having more than one thing going on in your life I think helps you to get through some of the tougher times in work and then you come through those and you know generally you've learned from what you've done you carry on what about you Lee Waters did was there any sort of parental or peer pressure on you when you were in school to go down a certain route or or not none at all and this is why I think the alumni network is so important because it's those practical advice you may not having your own network in your own family because nobody in my family then experienced many things I was interested in and you know a couple of schools have experimented with this already and we're speaking to the head teacher in um Risker comp and Lewis Boys in Penguin they've been doing a scheme like this with Future First who's helping us with this project because they've created a toolkit of every school in Wales for an access to and then there's going to be 10 valley schools who create Wales help a bit more but they gave me the great example of when they'd done their first of database of their former pupils and they'd asked people did you go here would you let us know because schools don't keep the record they've lost touch with their former pupils which is one of the things we're trying to put right in this project and they had a couple of lads who wanted to be airline pilots now it costs them like a hundred grand the train to be an airline pilot and you know it's a particular set of skills and experiences and if you don't know people in who's been an airline pilot you don't know whether it's right for you or that's the right thing to do or should you go on the air force first or whatever and the great thing they were able to do through this project is they had no idea they had some former pupils were airline pilots but because of this exercise they carried them out and they were able to connect the current airline pilots with the kids who wanted to be airline pilots and have a conversation of what was it for them and what are the steps they should do what work experience was the right thing that they wanted to study and that sort of social capital is invaluable I think and where families haven't got those networks so you know you're not the son of a doctor or or or whatever you wouldn't possibly know what jobs exist and that's the thing about the world of work jobs have existed 50 years ago now a stopping existing when jobs didn't exist three years ago all of a sudden they've been invented and you couldn't possibly know about that unless you reach out to people and that's I hope that this scheme will be I think you're right there because technology now is moving at a fast pace and I know in Wales there are lots of industries now blossoming you know I'm thinking of the the wafer factory outside Newport which is really cutting edge kind of thing but I'm just wondering maybe Ashley is there anything you feel that you might have done differently back when you were in school to to get you to where you are now I think if I could do anything differently back when I was in school it would be to pick GCSEs that I enjoyed not things that I thought were the smart choices I'd have done the things that I genuinely thought I'm just doing this because I like it not because I think this is going to have an end career but because I think this is something that I'm going to really enjoy doing and I think I would like Leah said try and reach out to people who are in the industry that I'm interested in because when you speak to your teachers a lot of the teachers that you speak to have gone from school to university to doing a PGCE and then into teaching so when you say to you know your physics or maths teacher I'm looking into engineering they don't really know what what that sort of involves in the the real world and I think that's that's something that I would really encourage students to do is to try and reach out and find people who who have that sort of information and hopefully this project will allow for that and if I might add you know on behalf of careers Wales we've got careers advisors in every school in Wales so you know utilise our expertise we're up to date with you know labour market trends where the demand for the futures will be and hopefully we can give you unbiased advice and guidance towards the future so that's all yes the thing I found as well is is amazing most people are willing to help somebody who asks them for help and often kids don't perk up the confidence and the courage to ask for help and that's one thing I did and I was probably a bit odd there was in that sense you know I just won't let this to people who are doing the jobs I was interested in saying can you help me can you give me advice and I had lots of good advice and I had work experience from it and that's what you know I encourage people to do now is just show it I've been a cheek chance your arm ask for help and often you know people will help and you know people like to be helpful and to give advice and don't stop asking for help either keep asking for help and then pay back you know I think you're a responsibility then to seek out opportunities to help other people. Good advice we've received lots of interesting questions from pupils that they would like us to put to our guests some about video questions and others I'll be asking on their behalf so let's get started on those then. The first question it's to the first minister and it's a question from Karris. What is the most important skill you use in your job? I think the most important skill in the job I do is listening. I spend a lot of my time in meetings and what we used to call when I used to teach people to be social workers is what's called active listening. I don't mean to sort of sit in back in listening I mean being part of the conversation by listening listening carefully to what other people are saying. Check in with yourself whether you've understood what they're saying you know I do a lot of meetings with very expert people like the chief medical officer you know I ask myself am I sure I've understood what he's telling me because he is an expert and he's having to translate it into words that somebody like you know like I can understand. Am I learning something from what I'm hearing? How are what I'm hearing helped me to make the decision that I know that I'm going to have to try and make it the end of all of this? So I think in meetings which I do a lot of listening is more important than talking and if you listen in that active way then that's a skill that you can put to really good use. Here's a question for Ashley Davis. What motivates you to get up for work on a Monday morning? I think there's two answers to this because getting up for work on a Monday morning in the middle of July is very different to getting up for work on a Monday morning in the middle of January and I think if you've got when when I get up for work in the morning if I know I've got a really good project to work on and I've got lots of stuff to do I feel really motivated to get up if I know that I've got you know meetings with people in work where we're going to you know discuss new innovations new things in the industry that gets me up for work if I know that I can if I'm going to be going in and able to plug my earphones in and just plough through a really big task and get a lot done that motivates me for work seeing the people who I work with because you know a lot of a lot of where I work is about the people that I work with and that helps you to get out of bed in the middle of winter and this is probably the wrong answer it's food it's snowing oh I'm going to make myself a good breakfast or I'm going to take a decent lunch into work today and knowing that you know it's going to be a cold come out but once you're in and everyone's there and you will sort of muck in together that I like I like the environment that I work in and I think that's probably the the biggest thing that encourages me to go into work on a Monday morning and that's if I haven't got uni because on a uni day it's a very different sort of motivation because it's a lot more self motivation rather than work motivation on that front it'd be good to know how everybody would answer the next couple of questions. If you weren't doing this job now what else do you think you would be doing? Alison what about you? Well I would probably whether I'd still be there I don't know but I probably would have joined the police force because when I as I left university I'd made an application to the police force and to have been accepted through the stages yeah so yeah I think I would have been in the police force. Lee Waters what about you? Well I was doing some normal jobs and I ruined it all by going into politics so I'm probably doing what I was doing before which is running smaller organisations and leading teams like that's what I really like I love working in the team building a team of people all with different skills coming together and picking what we can do as one big team and politics quite worked like that in the same way and I missed that a bit so that's what I probably be doing. First Minister what do you think you would be doing? Well I guess the same as Lee you know because before I came to do the job I did now I used to teach in the university here in Cardiff and again I was very lucky because it's a job I love doing I love being with young people you've got to be a bit of a show-off to be a politician and you've got to be a bit of a show-off to be a lecturer as well standing up in front of people and you know doing all of that I liked all of that I used to be able to write you know part of the job in university is to write and I used to enjoy the chance to do that as well so if I wasn't doing what I do now I would have been very happy to have carried on in the job that I was doing for all the reasons that that I've just said. And Ashley what about you would you have gone down that pop star route or not? I think if I had to so I'm 21 so I would probably still be in university but I think I would have gone and studied environmental science had I not done engineering because I think climate change is something massive that my generation will face and I think that's something where I feel like could have made really really made a difference. Here's another interesting one um do you think things are different for young people now and do you think you would make different choices if you were in school today? Lee Waters. Oh gosh well things are always different the context we live in in every generation things are fundamentally the same no I think I think making different choices is a really good one and this is something I thought a lot about because when you know especially when you're in school when you're going to take option and you're going to decide to go to further education or higher education and you take a job but at every point you're put in front of a crossroad and there is no right or wrong answer and sometimes you're just going to hold your nose and just pick one and it's always tempting to look back and think what would have happened if I'd done that and not this and that this has happened to me a few times and this is a poem by Robert Frost called The Path Not Taken and it talks about the taking the path less travelled by and I've always had that poem in mind when I faced these choices I've always chosen the path less travelled by but also importantly I haven't second guessed in my mind if I take the right one because it's impossible you're just going to pick one go for it and if you don't like it do something else you know these things aren't set in stone forever but don't torture yourself by second guessing listen to your instinct in your heart and give it a crack and Alison do you think things are much different now to when you were in school? I think things are different as I said I think you know the digital world has changed a lot of things even you know if I compare to when I was in school and you know kind of having my first mobile phone now you know Youngsters that's all they look at and so I think there's a lot more pressure on young people these days and I think there's this unrealistic world you know I was brought up in a generation of you know you kind of like Lisa said you kind of you get out to what you put in and where you work hard you know you put the time and effort in and yet there's almost a culture today of you know the commodities and you know the kind of these these influencers and instagram influencers and different things and I think that paints quite an unrealistic picture for young people that you know perhaps you don't have to work hard you can you know go down this road and do these types of things and it's very you know unrealistic so I think that that does make things harder for young people these days there's quite a lot of unrealistic kind of parts to society and so yeah I think it can be more difficult but again I think for young people it's again about focusing on them and having confidence in themselves and their ability really. Okay Lee Waters Harry's question is for you. Did you have a part-time job in school or at university? Yeah I was a newspaper boy from the age of 11 till I was 16 and I used to deliver the south Wales evening post and I used to have to get my own customers and have to put the orders in and send any returns back and try and build my own so that's what I did when I was in school and I worked in a video shop don't exist anymore they've been digitally disrupted Netflix has killed the video shop but there was such things as video shops when I was a teenager so I worked there I didn't I was lucky not to work in the university I had a a grant which paid for my rent I had a very sort of frugal lifestyle I didn't spend very much money because I wanted to go and see my girlfriend on the weekend who's in Cardiff now my wife and do my studies in the week so I was a bit boring really but I meant that I didn't need to have a job which was very fortunate. Ashley Franke would like to know what advice would you give to a year seven people starting their school journey? I would say be a sponge be curious ask all the questions don't be afraid to you know ask your teachers things in a respectful way if you disagree with something that's fine just be respectful about it you can you don't have to be nasty or rude to ask questions be kind to the people who you're in your group with because you're with them for the next five years so make friends but focus on not making enemies as much as trying to make friends and join all the clubs see what you enjoy and don't care about what other people's opinions are of those clubs because it doesn't matter if you're having a good time. What great advice? First Minister Isabel she's in your rate and she'd like to know what is the favourite part of your job? Oh people is the best part of my job the fact that no day is ever the same as the one before and every day is about meeting people and learning from them. I remember one of my predecessors Rodri Morgan who I worked a lot with saying to me that he'd never met anybody who didn't know more about something than he did and that you know if you're in a conversation with somebody try and find out what they know about because it'll be interesting and they'll know more than you do and lots of what I do is about learning from other people hearing things that they know that I don't and it's a it's a fantastic part of the job that I do and I think we've done a bit of a theme in what everybody has said isn't it is that working hard at getting on with other people and enjoying being with other people and learning from other people if you can do that then you'll enjoy a lot of what you do. Alison Justina has sent this question in and she'd like to know what's the biggest achievement you've accomplished in your time in your job? It's probably the the current job that I'm in now as head of income generation and marketing for a very small hospice. When I started there four years ago the role was was a new role that had been created because they recognised they needed to drive income forward so it was it was a new challenge for me. I'd previously worked at THAV and Children's Hospice and loved my job. They had managed a lovely team but I'd felt a bit likely to talked about I'd kind of stopped learning and so this this was a brand new challenge for me but still working you know with a cause that was very close to my heart in terms of hospice care and I came into the role and kind of sleeves rolled up you know right let's get on with it and it was it was really tricky. A team of just two who'd been there a long time I think themselves become a bit stagnant and complacent and didn't really have that drive and ambition anymore and so I had to set out a strategic plan of how I was going to grow income for the organisation and I had to restructure the team but obviously had to work with these people like to performance manage which was difficult because you're dealing with people and you know it's very tricky but again you know there was this goal that we had to achieve and move forward with raising more money and in that four years I'm quite happy to say and pleased and proud to say that that I've been able with the support of now a fantastic team to generate 20% more income over that period and I think certainly the last 12 months has been exceptionally trying but it's been a fantastic challenge and testament really to having a good team in place of people where we all support each other and you know we know we're making a difference in the local community so I think the biggest achievement for me has been able to make that impact and know that that impact is making a difference to people's lives. I know time is rushing on just a quick answer then Alison Miaw wanted to know how do you think career choice decisions for the future generations might be different? Oh I think there's a bit like Lee said earlier that you know there's jobs that existed 30 years ago that don't exist now and you know it's an ever-changing world and I think technology and certainly probably the last 12 months in terms of you know lots of things becoming more online and digital and people working from home has kind of made a difference but again in terms of career choices I think it's harping back to what we've all talked about this afternoon. I think it's about people choosing careers or choosing you know subjects that they enjoy that they're happy to win that they're good at and hopefully that will lead them into a career that works for them and if it doesn't then you know nothing is set in stone and has to be and you know there is always that opportunity to move on to something else really. One final question then and really a quick fire answer from all of you maybe starting with Ashley Jack wanted to know what's your favourite memory of school? So when I was in year 11 and they just opened the sixth phone college in Murthes year 11 was the highest year group and every year when children in need came around there was this big talent show that was held and when I was in year seven I remember walking in and they ran the show three times over the course of the day for all the year groups and I thought whoa this is awesome I can't wait to have to plan this and then I got year 11 and I was on the senior team with a few of my other friends and I thought oh my gosh we have to plan this and it has to be fantastic and it has to be just as good and funny as it has been every other year and it was a lot of pressure but we pulled it off we had two boys come out and um and dance to let's get ready to rumble just after Anton Deck had done the revamp of the song we had a load of boys in our year group go on stage in Leotards and dance to single ladies it was awesome we had so many different people who were you know sort of embarrassed of doing that sort of thing out on stage and really really enjoying it and everyone thought it was really good that I was just so proud that we'd managed to pull something together like that and that it went down so well and leave what is your favourite memory I got lots of memories really and was the involvement of laughing and doing creative things so taking taking part in the school play or doing a sketch our school newspaper so it's an extracurricular activity interestingly so the stuff I did on the side and first minister have you got a favourite memory from kiwi hi uh playing music that will be mine as well not not anything to do with the classroom but just uh with a group of other people all interested in playing music all doing something together in that collective way that you all get something up to it and yeah if I think of one thing that I look back on I think what did that school give me uh it was the chance to to play music and to enjoy it with other people and the last word Alison with you very similar um being part of a team um you know through different sport um going away representing the school um overseas with sport and just being with a group of of like-minded friends really and feeling part of something well can I thank you all very much for joining us today and sharing your experiences of school and your career pathways and thank you too to the teachers and the pupils who sent in the questions that we were able to put to our guests I think it's clear that an alumni community will have a wealth of different career stories that will be of interest to pupils in school now whether they had a clear idea of what they want to do it's from an early age no idea at all or it changed careers along the way thank you all for watching


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to a new Zor education. I would like to continue talking about indefinite integrals. I think it's very important to devote some time to basically do the job to find integrals. And the more the merrier, actually I would like this lecture to be an illustration of the fact that integration is really more of an art. Rather than the skill because you really have to think about how to approach each individual problem based obviously on your experience. And that's why the more integrals you take, you find the more comfortable you will feel the next time. Now this lecture is part of the course of advanced mathematics which we present for teenagers and high school students. It's presented on unizor.com. All the lectures and corresponding notes to lectures are brought to this website. So if you found this particular lecture on YouTube, I would rather suggest you to go to the unizor.com and watch it from there. Because the result is very detailed explanation about whatever is going on in the text which is supporting each video. Okay, so, well, let's just do the work. We have a lot of work to do. We have six different problems which I would like to present. As usually with all the problems which I present, I do encourage you to try to do it yourself first and then listen to a lecture. Regardless whether you will or will not succeed, it's still a good idea to think about this before you listen to somebody else. Alright, so my first integral is, well, before going into each particular problem, I think it's worth to remind two major approaches which I actually explained before, but I'm going to use it in one or another capacity in these particular problems. One is the integration by parts and I would like just to remind you that integral U, dv is equal to Uv minus integral dv. So, where U and V are both functions, so this is differential of functions, U of, let's say, X and V of X. So, this is the integration by part and another thing which is kind of a substitution. If you know that integral of f of X, dx is equal to g of X, then you can substitute instead of just an independent variable X in the other function, but plus C obviously. So, you can have f of, let's say, W of X, g W of X equals to g of W of X plus C. This is substitution. So, if you, for instance, have your integral reduced to this level, to this form, then you can attempt to do the integration of function f of X and then in the solution just substitute W of X. So, I will use these two. I consider them as known and there are a couple of lectures which I did before to basically prove these two rules of integration and examples of using them. Okay, now let's go to concrete examples. Sine of X cosine cube of X dx. Okay, so what's creative about this particular example? Well, you have to notice in this particular case and it's very easy to notice that, well, sine and cosine are two different functions. So, whenever you have two different functions, you cannot really use something which you know, like integral of something is equal to something. This is, you don't know. However, what you can actually do is you have to notice that the sine, well actually minus sine is a derivative from a cosine, which means you can rewrite it as minus cosine of X dx divided by cosine cube of X, right? So, this is a derivative of cosine. Instead of a sine, I put minus derivative of cosine. Derivative of cosine is minus sine. That's why I put minus in front so it neutralizes that sine. Now, grouping this together, you obviously see that this is minus differential of cosine of X, right? What is differential of the function? It's derivative times differential of the argument divided by cosine cube of X. Now, how should I approach this? Well, there is a substitution, obviously, which we're just talking about. If you will substitute Y is equal to cosine of X, you have this integral as minus dy divided by Y cube, right? Or minus Y to the power of minus 3 dy. Now, this is a power function. So, what do we know about power functions? Well, if you integrate any power function, you have to increment the power by 1. Why? Because the derivative will subtract one from the power, right? So, basically, this is minus Y to the power of minus 2. But we need some kind of a coefficient to neutralize this. So, the derivative of Y to the power of minus 2 is what? It's minus 2 times Y to the power of minus 3, right? So, I have to put here 1 over minus 2 to neutralize the differentiation. So, when I differentiate this, well, this minus is from this one. Y to the power of minus 2, if we take derivative would be minus 2 times Y to the power of minus 3. So, we have to neutralize minus 2, and that will be the result. Well, plus C, obviously. Now, instead of Y is, we can put the substitution. So, this minus and minus, it's all plus. So, it's 1 half 1 over cosine square of X, right? Y to the power of minus 2 is 1 over cosine square.  Check. Now, how can I check my integration by differentiation, right? So, let's differentiate this function. It will be 1 half times cosine to the power of minus 2 derivative, right? Equals 2. 1, 2. Now, this is the power function. Well, it's actually a function of function, but outer function is the power function. The power is minus 2, so it's minus 2 times cosine to the power of minus 3 of X. Times, since it's a function of function, I have to differentiate inner function, which is cosine, which is minus sine of X. So, 2 and 2 minus and minus, and we have sine of X divided by cosine cube. The end. So, that's my first problem. 5 to go. Next, integral logarithm of sine of X times cotangent of X dx. All right. Again, we have to do something about this before we can't integrate it directly, right? We don't know what it is. Well, let's just think. The first guess would be to replace cotangent with cosine of X divided by sine of X. That's basically the definition of a cotangent, right? So, I didn't really change anything. Now, again, let's just think about it. We have sine and sine, and this is the cosine. Same as in the previous example, we can use the cosine and dx as a differential of sine of X, correct? The derivative of sine of X is cosine times differential of independent argument. So, I can rewrite this as integral logarithm of sine of X 1 over sine of X times differential of sine of X. Obviously, it's easier because I can put Y is equal to sine of X and my integral is equal to logarithm of Y times 1 over Y times dy. That's easier, right? But still not exactly because we have logarithm and we have a power function. Again, another guess. Remember, logarithm X derivative is 1 over X. So, this is actually differential of logarithm of X. Well, actually, logarithm of Y, obviously. Derivative of logarithm of Y, which is 1 over Y, times differential of the argument. So, my next substitution is logarithm of Y is equal to Z, which makes my integral equal to Z times dz. Logarithm is Z and d of logarithm is dz. Now, what is this? This is a power function. So, this is 1 half z square plus c, right? The derivative of z square is 2z. 2 and 2 will cancel each other and z will be whatever we have to integrate. So, all we have to do now is go back to the substitution. So, instead of z, we will put logarithm, right? Now, instead of Y, we can use whatever substitution here. And this is the answer. Now, let me try to check it out. Let's differentiate this one. So, it's 1 half. Well, this is a power function. That's the outermost function. So, it's three functions. Outermost is power, then inside there is a logarithm and inside there is a sine. So, differentiation would be in three steps. First, I differentiate the power function, which is logarithm of sine of X. Then I differentiate inner function, which is logarithm, and that's 1 over sine of X. And then I differentiate the innermost function, which is sine. And that's the cosine derivative of the sine and cosine. So, that's my derivative. And obviously, these two are exactly cotangent. Oh, I forgot two, obviously. Differentiating two logarithms. One half of logarithm square is one half times two logarithms. So, that's why two, and the two is supposed to cancel out. All right. So, that's the answer. We've done number two. Okay, let's go on. Oh, that's complex. Integral logarithm X minus 3X square root of logarithm X. Okay. Well, hmm. Okay, we have to notice something specific, since I'm presenting this as basically an exercise. It's a development tool to develop the creativity and analytical abilities and logic, etc. There must be something which would simplify this, right? Now, what is it? 1 over X and dx is differential of logarithm, right? So, it's logarithm X divided by square root of minus 3. Divided by square root of logarithm X. D logarithm of X, right? So, differential of logarithm is 1 over X times dx. So, that's exactly what I have noticed this. Now, how can I do next one? Well, obviously, I have to substitute, all right? So, what I have is Y minus 3 divided by square root of Y dy. Now, how can I do that? Actually, it's very simple. I separate Y minus 3 into Y and minus 3. So, it's two different integrals. Y over square root of Y dy minus 3 over square root of Y dy equals 2. This is Y to the power 1 half dy minus 3 times Y to the power 1 minus 1 half, right? dy. So, now that's easy. These are just power functions. So, what do I have? I have Y to the power of 1 half. So, I need plus 1. So, it's Y to the power of 3 halves. And since when I take the derivative, 3 seconds will be out. So, I have to put 2 thirds minus. Now, Y to the power of minus 1 half. How can I get that? Well, that's Y to the power of plus 1 half. 3 times Y to the power of 1 half. And now, since if I will make derivative from this, it will be 1 half times Y to the power of minus 1 half. I have to neutralize this 1 half by multiplying by 2. Plus C. Well, and that's the answer. All I have to do is substitute back. It's 2 thirds logarithm to the power of 3 seconds of X minus 6 logarithm to the power of 1 half of X plus C. That's the answer. Okay, let me try to check it out. Well, actually, you know what? It's kind of simple. So, I have my answers here and it corresponds to my answer. So, that's why I will skip the checking out. I do suggest you to do it yourself. So, I will save some time. Okay, next. Integral X square E to the power of minus... No, plus X over 2. All right. Now, how can we approach this? Well, we know that differentiation of exponential function basically leaves it in the same exponential form, maybe with some multipliers. So, most likely, we would like to... Yes, and differentiation of the power reduces the power by 1, right? So, what we probably have to do is we have to apply the integration by parts having something like this first. Now, what am I missing? Differential of E to the power of X2 is the derivative, which is E to the power of X2 times 1 half, the inner function, right? So, I have to compensate this 1 half, so I'll put 2, right? So, differential of E to the power of X over 2 would be E to the power of X over 2, like this, times 1 half will cancel with this one. Now, I will use integration by parts, which is 2 X square E to the power X over 2 minus 2 integral E to the power of X over 2 dx square, right? Now, what is differential of X square? That's a derivative, which is 2X times dx. Now, is it better? Of course, it is better, because here we have a second degree, here we have the first degree, and everything seems to be more or less the same. So, I will do again the same thing exactly, equals to 2X square E to the power of X over 2 minus... Now, 2 and 2 is 4, and I will do again integral of X d of E to the power of X over 2, and I'm missing, again I'm missing 1 half, right? Because if I will differentiate this, I will have E to the power of X over 2 times 1 half, which I have to neutralize, which means I have to multiply it by 2. Now, again, I will use differentiation by parts. So, this thing stays minus 8X E to the power of X over 2 minus, so it will be plus 8 integral E to the power of X over 2 dx, right? Equals. Now, this is easy, because we know that E to the power of X2 is a derivative of E to the power of X over 2, and we need a multiplier 2. So, it's 2X square E to the power of X over 2 minus 8X E to the power of X over 2 plus... I need 8 times 2, so it's 16, E to the power of X over 2 and plus C, right? Derivative of this would be E to the power of X over 2 times 1 half, and that would make it 8. And this is the final answer, which we can obviously simplify with this. So, that's the final answer. And, again, it corresponds to whatever answers I have, so I will skip the checking procedure, the differentiation of this. I do recommend you to do it yourself and check if you will get exactly the original function which we integrate. Okay, next. Integral dx divided by square root of X square plus 4X plus 5 minus X square, yeah. Okay, now, here again we are at loss. It doesn't really show any obvious solutions in this case. So, we have to think about certain functions which, if differentiated, will give us something like this. 1 over square root of some quadratic polynomial with minus at X square. Well, there is one, and now you just have to remember it. I mean, if you recall that the arc sine of X derivative is equal to 1 over 1 minus X square, then that would help you. Because, you see, this is also some kind of a quadratic polynomial with a minus in front of the X square, and this probably can be somehow related. Well, by the way, why do I remember it? Actually, I don't remember it. I was thinking about this, and then I kind of flip-flopped through my previous lectures and found that this is exactly what it is. Just in case if you don't know how to derive this, think about this this way. Sine of arc sine of X is equal to X, right? So, if we differentiate both parts, we will have cosine of arc sine X. This is the derivative of the sine times derivative of the inner function arc sine of X derivative. So, derivative of the left part is this, derivative of the right part is this, 1. So, what is cosine of arc sine? Well, in most cases, if you have the sine of X is equal to X, arc sine of X, and you take the cosine, it's a cosine of the angle sine of which is equal to X, and this is obviously, in most cases, this. Obviously, we can talk about whether this particular angle, this particular argument is in one part of the domain of this function or another, but let's take the simple case, right? When the sine square plus cosine square is equal to 1, so that's why cosine of arc sine is equal to this. From which follows that arc sine derivative is equal to 1 over, like I said? So, how did I come up with this? How did I guess that this might actually be useful? I don't know how to explain it. It's just based on experience. If you are doing this exercise many different times with many different functions, eventually you will run out of different possibilities. So, you will probably have it in your mind that if you have in the denominator, square root of quadratic polynomial with a minus, that's somewhere around arc sine. Now, so what do I have to do? Well, obviously, I have to somehow relate this to this. Well, the best way to do it is to have the full square, right? So, let's just think about minus x square plus 4x plus 5. I would like it to be in the form of 1 minus and have some linear combination, something like this, maybe with another coefficient. That would probably do the trick, right? Because then all I have to do is this coefficient will go out and this would be just a substitution of the argument and I will reduce my problem to this one. Now, what is exactly this? Well, let's just think about it. The full square we need from this is x minus 2 square is equal to x square minus 4x plus 4, right? So, minus would be minus here plus here and minus here. What difference between this and this? So, we need 9. Then we will have plus 5, right? Okay, so we have transformed this into this. Well, but we need 1 here, right? So, we have to divide it by 9 and here you will have here, right? So, 3 to the power of 2 would be 9 and it will cancel with this one and this would be 9. So, basically this is something which I might use in this case. So, it's equal to integral dx divided by 9, the square root of 9 times 1 minus x minus 2 divided by 3 square and now we are very close to our arc sign. So, what do I have to do? Here it is. Well, first of all, 9 goes out of the square root, it would be 3. Now, if I would like to make this substitution, now what is differential, right? If I will differentiate both sides. So, the derivative of this is one-third of x, right? Times dx, so I can do this type of a substitution very handily, I have these 3 exactly here, right? So, I can actually do this substitution and have dy divided by square root of 1 minus y square, right? dx divided by 3 is dy and under the square root I have 1 minus y square. Now, this is arc sign, right? So, this is arc sign of y plus c, which is equal to arc sign of x minus 2 divided by 3 plus c. If I substitute back my y. Okay, so, I'm not doing any checking, you have to. And by the way, I'm not doing any checking right now because I already did it before when I was preparing for this lecture and the checking is in the notes for this lecture. If you are watching it from theunisor.com, you will see how the checking is done. Alright, my last example, which looks innocently and simply. However, that's the most difficult of them all because I don't know what to do with this. I cannot really use sine as a derivative of a cosine or a cosine derivative of a sine because they're both kind of represented here, right? However, however, I have one lucky guess. If you remember the formula for cosine of a plus b, it's equal to cosine a cosine b minus sine a sine b. Okay, now, what if I have some kind of a number which is both cosine of some angle b and sine of this angle b? Well, I know this angle. Angle is 45 degrees, cosine of 45 degrees equals 2. This is pi over 4 by the way. It's equal to square root of 2 divided by 2 and sine of 45 degrees equal exactly the same. Which means that if I will multiply this denominator by square root of 2 and I will put square root of 2 on the top as well. Okay, what that will give me? Well, it will give me that this is the cosine of x times cosine of pi over 4. And this is the sine of x times sine of pi over 4. So I can convert it into square root over 2 dx. And here I will have cosine of x plus pi over 4, right? Cosine x times cosine of pi over 4, which is square root of 2 over 2 minus sine x times sine of pi over 4, which is also square root of 2 over 2. So that would be my... Now, this is simpler, right? Because I can obviously have here, doesn't really matter, right? Because differential of x plus pi over 4 is the same as differential of x because the derivative is equal to 1. So now I can make this substitution. And I will have that this integral is equal to square root of 2 over 2 integral dy divided by cosine of y, where y is equal to x plus pi over 4. That's easier, right? But I still don't know what to do with this one. Well, let's just think about what can we do about this? Well, 1 over something always resembles the logarithm, right? Because logarithm of x is 1 over x. So it might be related to some kind of a logarithm of something. But I have this cosine, not y. If I had y, this problem would be solved, but I have a cosine of y. So I have to neutralize the cosine somehow. How can I do that? Well, here is another wild guess, if you wish. What I can do right now, I can multiply and divide this thing by cosine. What will it give me? This is what it gives me. So that's what I have on the top. Cosine y times dy is differential of d sine, right? Now cosine square is also very easy to convert into sine, right? Cosine square is 1 minus sine square. So now I rationalize this, basically. I convert it into a rational. So z is equal to sine of y. And now I have square root of 2 over 2 integral dz over 1 minus z square. Okay? Easier, because this is now power functions, etc., so it's kind of easy. Now, how to deal with this one? Well, the simplest way is just have it as a sum of two integrals, very easy.  And we need some multiplier. Because if I will take this into common denominator, what I will have is 1 minus z times 1 plus z. Again, 1 over 1 minus z square is equal to 1 minus z plus 1 plus z. But this will be 1 plus z plus 1 minus z, so it will be 2. So I need actually times 1 half, right? So I have to have 1 half here, which means I will take this to 4. Now, this is easy. Now, how easy is this one? Well, this is almost d of 1 minus z, right? What's the difference? Differential of z and differential of 1 minus z. Well, this is just sine, right? Because derivative of 1 minus z is minus 1, and that would give me n times dz, so that would be this one. So, and if this is true, now this is basically logarithm, right? Plus, now this one, I don't really need anything with a sine. Differential of z or z plus 1 is exactly the same, okay? So this is minus, this is plus, this is logarithm of 1 plus z, and this is with a minus, logarithm 1 minus z plus z. Well, that's the answer. All we have to do now is substitute sine instead of z. So, that's equal to square root of 2 over 4, logarithm of 1 plus z. z is a sine, and y is x plus, so that would be sine of x plus pi over 4. Minus, logarithm of 1 minus sine of x plus pi over 4, and that's my answer. So, as you see, this innocently looking integral actually was a little bit more complex than the previous ones, so you never know what you're getting into. All right, now this is actually a very important integral because I will probably have another lecture on integration, and I will suggest a couple of other maybe methods to integrate this particular function. It's a good kind of learning function to basically go through all the different aspects of integration and different approaches which you can take. Well, that's it for today. Thanks very much. I do suggest you to go through all these exercises yourself. It's all on unizord.com and check your answers. That's mandatory. Well, other than that, that's it. Thanks very much, and good luck.


Hello and welcome to this session. Thank you for joining and today we're going to talk about how to shift mindsets from data product to data as a product. My name is Omar Salam and I'm a senior product manager with Booking.com. I have about 13 years of experience between project management and product management. Precisely about six years in product management and I've worked previously with the delivery hero and the junior group. And throughout my experience with different business domains and different kinds of products, I've always had the belief and realization that the data is the most important thing that we as product managers can always rely on to understand the behaviors of our customers and the needs of our stakeholders in general. And of course, also to justify and validate any kind of hypothesis that we're thinking about. And especially recently as digitization is growing, also the amount of data is growing exponentially with the technology getting more and more into our daily lives and our daily routines. Data that is gathered, different types of data relevant in different ways to different domains are always exponentially increasing. About 90% of the world's data that is existing right now was created or acquired within the last two years. And that implies that data, if used correctly and efficiently, can be one of the most valuable assets any organization could possess. But that doesn't just come with all the benefits. It also comes with a lot of challenges in how to manage this data, this huge amount of data. So data generally on organizational level, some in some places up till now it's still managed in silos and it's managed separately between different teams and different kinds of products and they're just maintaining it to enable how the product is working. And that causes a lot of problems and it's a challenge to manage this data because usually it's fragmented between hundreds of systems and a lot of different applications and products are using it at the same time and also contributing back to it at the same time. It's usually locked with legacy systems and legacy databases that causes a lot of fragmentation and that leads to having an unclear structure or even dark structures that nobody really knows about and ownership becomes a problem. Managing this data, making sure that it's compliant and it's well-maintained becomes a very, very big problem and as a result of that, as I said, many organizations are considered in the dark when it comes to most of the data that they own and this causes a lot of lost opportunity and misdirection in how to take decisions and how to build better features and better products in general. That's why the framework of DataMesh was introduced by Yazzamak Degani, driven by the simple idea that stakeholders within the business, internal stakeholders with the different business domains are the best people to understand their own data. So we're talking about the marketing-related data, finance-related data, any kind of specific activities that has its own relevance to data. They are the most capable and most qualified people inside an organization to handle their own data because they only understand what it takes to manage this data and how to make it more relevant to the business and also how to get the best outcome out of analyzing and processing and working with this data. And this framework of DataMesh introduced the first concept of managing data as its own product. There are four core principles for the DataMesh framework. The first one is data is managed as a product, as I said, and data ownership and architecture is something that is domain-oriented. It should be decentralized. But this concept, also these four principles, they balance between total decentralization and actual centralization. So if you're in a specific domain, you are trying to centralize the relevant data that you should own and manage from all over the organization to be centralized within your domain. And when all the different business domains inside the organization do that, the data would be decentralized, but centralized to some extent relevant to the domain. Also another principle is reaching the level of full self-service with these different domain-related data. So the optimum case would be if anyone needs to use this data or work with this data, they would be able to self-serve this data to themselves to reduce the pressure and optimize the capacity of the teams that are managing this data. Also, that doesn't mean that everyone and every domain is totally free to manage the data, however they see with any kind of standards that they decide on, but data governance is something that is very important and this should be federated somehow. So also there is this balance of what can you decide on your own as a business domain and what kind of global standards that you should be following to make sure that this data is properly served across the organization and to avoid the problems that the data mesh framework was actually introduced to solve, right? Within the context of this session, we're focusing on data as a product and how to manage your data as its own product. So first we need to understand what does data product, the normal definition means before going to the next. So basically data product is a product that is built specifically to generate value or to deliver a specific customer experience based on some data. So they are designed to extract insights or some knowledge from data to present them in a useful and actionable form to build an experience, a greater than experience for users and customers. So sometimes they involve the normal algorithms, sometimes machine learning is involved, any other advanced type of data analytics might be involved, but the main goal is to how to serve a specific user experience. There is a lot of examples for that, but for example, a customer segmentation tool that segments demographics and this kind of analytics to be provided. A predicted maintenance system, almost any kind of recommendation engines and also fraud detection systems can be examples for that and try to think on a broader concept. So like recommendations, recommendation systems based on user behaviors, based on how this data would make sense and be put together. So delivering this end user experience is the goal of a product, but it's based on some data that they are getting from, either they are managing themselves in a silo or getting it from elsewhere. Data as a product is a concept that is focused that the data itself is the actual product. And the goal here is to manage this data and work with it to extract some more exciting data and some more meaningful data out of it. So we're using data to generate some other data and the second version of the data is going to be served to other teams internally inside the organization to use it to build data products as the first definition entails. So when you're working with a data set of data and you're trying to deal with it as a product, you are trying to serve your direct customers, the internal stakeholders, but you are trying also to proxy impact to the end users or the external stakeholders that are using this final product that your internal stakeholder is building. This concept might be a little bit confusing and actually as to make things easier, usually data as a product gets transformed also to data product to make it easier to pronounce and say, but the most important thing is to understand the framework and to understand the concept and to apply it when you're trying to work with data in general or if you're trying to build a strategy or a structure for your own company. So again, to sum up this very complicated comparison or misleading comparison, data product versus a data product, data as a product. So data product is building a product that uses data to operate. It doesn't matter if the data is managed in a silo or centrally sourced or you're getting it from somewhere else externally or internally, you're just building some sort of a customer experience feeding on data. While data as a product, you get that the actual data is the product that you are trying to maintain and scale and serve to other stakeholders to use it to build data products and you're trying to produce more impactful data to proxy your impact to the end user. So in order to do that, you need to start thinking about how to apply product thinking in general on data and how to use the different frameworks of product management to manage your data and to make sure that you are cascading this multi-level impact to your internal stakeholders and proxy stakeholders, if we may call them. The most important thing at the beginning is how you define your scope and how well you define your scope. So as I'm quoting here from as a Magda Ghani, for a distributed data platform to be successful, domain data teams must apply product thinking with similar rigor to the data sets that they provide considering their data assets as their products and the rest of organizations, data scientists, ML and data engineers as their customers as we already established. It's very important to define all of these and also to distribute data ownership and the different pipeline implementations to the hand of business domains and to make sure that you have a very, very clear definition of what belongs to you and what doesn't belong to you and have a very well-defined ownership matrix that is aligned with your stakeholders of what you should own and what they should own to be able to have a crystal clear vision on what are you doing? What are you trying to build and what are you trying to achieve? This is something that is very important and there are a couple of questions that you need to ask yourself and discover and work with the different stakeholders to get answers to such as what is the data scope and what is the scope domain? What kinds of data and taxonomies that already exist and we need to source? Who needs this data and where is this data flowing from and to what are your data sources and who's consuming your data? What are the purposes that this data is serving and is there a way to make it easier to work with or to access this data in the current state and that you're starting ground? Is this data compliant or actionable or not and what kind of governance exists right now if you're also at the starting ground and how can this data be optimized to aid the internal stakeholders' needs and create a proxy impact to our external customers? The last step is like how might we statement that is usually used within design thinking and that's the next step that you should start applying. So after you've defined your ownership, you've defined your scope, you know what you're doing, what you own and what you don't own and what you want to do with it in general to like govern the whole thing, you need to start applying the concepts of design thinking to be able to brainstorm and plan and discover what is the actual potential of this data set that you are supposed to be managing and relevant to that, who are your customers, what are their problems and what are their needs and how you can serve them in the best way. So as most of you probably know, design thinking works by considering human needs and human problems, your end customers needs and problems before considering the actual solutions. We're trying to look for a problem and that's the first step of the double diamond framework as you can see. So first you're focusing on the problem space, you try to discover and define the problems and the needs that your customers have and then you start iterating and thinking about what would be the solutions to that. So you need to work with your different internal stakeholders because these are your direct customers, you need to identify them and understand what are their needs, what kind of problems are they trying to solve for their own customers. And this is the essence of how to manage a data product. Again, you're serving data to an internal stakeholder and this internal stakeholder is using this data to build a customer engaging product at some extent and in order to do that, you need to understand very well the kind of impact that they are trying to give or to build for, to be able to give them data and to give them an output of your product that would help them to do that. Design thinking, as we've been saying is a structured approach to identifying and solving problems and it has five steps that you need to go through with your at least internal stakeholders and to get access or be involved with their own research with their end users. The first one is to empathize with your customers to really understand their needs and to be able to understand the reason behind everything that they are requesting or what is the actual grounds of the needs that they have because again, as we established since this setup is domain related, so you in your domain should be the best person to know what is the actual potential of your dataset and what is the potential of what it can provide to your internal stakeholders. The classic product management thinking says that if a customer comes to you and says, I just want this, they probably don't know what they want. They want to satisfy like a very, very direct, very basic needs, but the work that you should be doing for discovery and validation and revalidation and iterating on that should help you provide like identify what are the actual problems, the root causes and provide even better solutions to totally eliminate the problems or to totally satisfy the need and even satisfy its exponential scaling. So you need to empathize with your customers and your proxy customers. You need to be able to define the scope and define who are the customers and define the different problems and then work after you identify all the problems and the risk and how the market looks and what you could, the current state and potentially what could happen and so on. You need to start ideating with your internal stakeholders and with your team, every member of the team, whether it's engineers, machine learning consultants that the scientists and so on to start ideating about how to actually solve these problems. And there's a lot of practices that can be done, just the classic product management practices. This can be another discussion for another time. And definitely you need to work with your internal stakeholders to prototype and test the outcomes of delivering this value to them and building the kind of features or specifications in the data product that you are serving to them. You need to understand the impact of what you've built and whether it's meeting the hypothesis that was given before or not because if you just deliver on requirements and that's it, you would have like a lot of missing pieces in your puzzle. You wouldn't see the full picture and you wouldn't be able to effectively iterate on that. So you need to be involved with the product launches of your internal stakeholders and you need to be very involved with the experimentation, how they are setting their own experiments and what are the results and how they are planning to iterate on it because also you could support with this iteration. After that comes the other part of how to manage a data product and also a data team, the product engineering part. There is a big part of how the dynamics of the team is managed between a product manager and the engineers in the team. And of course, I'm also sure that you already know a lot about this. I would suggest getting more into how to manage this kind of relation between product managers and engineers and the dynamics of managing such teams and the philosophy of setting this kind of team spirit and collaboration. But you need to, for the scope of this presentation, you need to be focusing on what are the core values or the core principles that needs to be delivered with any piece of your data product, any new piece that is being built or increasing the quality of what has already been done as a legacy system and so on. So data products from an engineering perspective, they need to have six main values or six main attributes. They need to be discoverable, self-describing, interoperable, addressable, trustworthy, and secure. And you could map these objectives or principles to the four main core principles for the data mesh. If you remember on one of the first slides for being, eventually you should be leading your strategy into more self-service and for data governance. So let's go a little bit more into these concepts. So discoverable means that you need to provide some sort of search capability with the data set and the data stock that you have with the taxonomy that you have. If your data could be considered as a product or qualifies to be considered as its own product, that means that you are managing a huge data set, a very, very complicated data set with a very complicated taxonomy. And you need to make it easier for different teams and stakeholders to search through that and understand what data do you actually own rather than especially in large organizations rather than communicating with each and every team. It might be tens or even hundreds of teams in your organization to try to explain all of that to them, you need to shift the responsibility and shift the ability for searching and understanding such taxonomy to them and you need to provide that to them. Also, they should be able to identify through that and through the next principle, they should be able to identify what they need and request access to it. And all of this process in a perfect world should be somehow automated or at least semi-automated to reduce the pressure and to reduce the burden on your own team and to optimize your own capacity to work on better things. Again, this data should be addressable. It should be understandable and that would lead to more productivity for your team and also for your internal stakeholders. You don't want your team or data analysts or engineers to always be just answering the questions about where is this data? What kind of data do you have? How would that be useful to me? What does it contain? How many records and so on? So your data needs really to be searchable and addressable. Of course, you need to establish trustworthiness with the quality of data that you have. So you need to establish regular or hopefully also automatic quality checks and quality audits on your data and you need to be able to automatically identify or get alerted or be aware of any discrepancies that are happening to be able to manage the data in itself, not just the data infrastructure but the quality of the data. Because as I said, you need to establish this trustworthiness with your internal stakeholders and that they can rely and build products that are fueling customer experiences with the data that you are providing and there shouldn't be any problems with the data quality as much as possible. And again, aiding to the searchability and addressability, your data structure and your data information generally should be self-describing. Again, this is mainly to minimize the effort and pressure on your teams and also to allow for more self-serviceability and to allow any internal stakeholder to be able to understand and find what they need out of this data. So stuff like data location, data mapping, example of on how to use this data samples of application. All of that is things and variables that need to be existing for your data. So it could be easily understandable and hence it could be extended and scaled to more and more use cases. And of course, it needs to be interoperable throughout the ecosystem of your organization and that mainly relates to the data governance concept for Datamesh. It should be able to be used anywhere in the organization. It should fit into any other system to be combined with any other data that is coming from other domains or that is being used on some silos for some specific teams for some experiences and so on. It should be compliant to the specific organizational and holistic governance programs that you have. And of course, your data needs to be secured. It shouldn't be automatically available for anyone because you want to prevent any kind of misuse or misprocessing for this data. You need to protect it from being unregulatory, edited or modified whether by intention or by mistake, of course. This also relies within the objective of having global or holistic governance across the organization and to be totally compliant with that. And of course, this also includes managing data access and who would be able to play with this data and tracking the usage and tracking the behavior of the different users on how they are applying this data. So to recap the key takeaways that we can get from this that depending on how data is treated it could be the most important asset or it could be the biggest lost opportunity for an organization. Also, data mesh is a framework to balance data centralization and decentralization based on business domains inside the organization. And the main topic for this presentation is the comparison between data product and data as a product and how to make sure that your mindset is at the correct place where the data product is just consuming data to fuel an experience, but data as a product, as a framework is for governing and generating more interesting data that you could provide to other teams to build data products to deliver value to the end customers for the organization. So in a way, you're kind of having a proxy impact to the direct and end customer of the organization. And as we discussed, product thinking and design thinking principles make a huge difference on how you manage data as a product. Here I added some useful reads and references if you can see them or check them to read to know more about data as a product. Of course, this is a huge topic it needs much more time to discuss but I was aiming to give you a highlight and a generic view, holistic view over this concept and I'm hoping that this would be beneficial for your day to day activities and managing data products. Thank you so much for your time. Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn with any questions, discussion points. I'm always available and I hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much for your time and have a great day.


Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to London, England. You're watching two days of wall-to-wall coverage from Nutanix.NEXT 2018 Europe. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Ute Piscar. And happy to welcome to the program Tim Isaacs, who's the general manager of Data Services, which really is the core products at Nutanix underneath the hypervisor, if I understand correct. Correct, right. With Nutanix. Tim, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. All right, so Tim, this is my seventh .NEXT. And for a lot of them, it's like, okay, where are we with kind of that HCI marketplace? A couple years ago, Nutanix expanded the marketing to Enterprise Cloud and now has, and I got right from two years ago, it was about two products. And today it's more like 14 products. Some organically, some through M&A. But as it was put out, there's Core, which is AOS. It's the HCI, HV, Prism Management, and your stuff is what all of these customers that are attending here are using. I'd love to get a number sometime as to how many Nutanix customers aren't running that in the future. We were hearing how many are doing more than that. But give us kind of the state of your business. Sure, sure. I'd love to get that the, you know, no pun intended core of what Nutanix does. Absolutely. Yeah, so, I mean, I think you were sort of referring to our most recent segmentation, you're talking about Core, then Core is basically AOS, which is synonymous with the HCI. And then obviously that includes AHV built in and then Prism for Management. And then Essentials is several other things relating to operations management, automation, file storage, so on and so forth. So I'll talk about Core and I'll talk about maybe a few things in the Essentials bucket. So Core obviously is all of our customers today, right? It's a layered cake, clearly. So people start with Core, then they move up the stack, if you will, right into Essentials and then many into Enterprise as well. And Core, at its base, is software-defined storage technologies, right? Powering HCI. So what we realized quite early on is, look, you know, HCI is all about virtualization. So virtualized workloads. So you've got virtual machines, they can be desktops, they can be servers, they can be databases. But then there's also the notion of unstructured data, right? So what about all this file storage that I have? What about all this object storage that I have? And what we realized was, well, we have the platform, we have the infrastructure, software-defined storage, and it was simply a matter of expanding that. And if you think about files, it's just another use case on this infrastructure. So we started on our files journey about two years ago and I think you might have seen some announcements today as well as about six months ago where we're getting ready to release our object storage solution. So now if I take stock of the portfolio, what do you got? Buckets, I believe it's called. Buckets, it's called buckets, exactly. What do you think of the name? I don't hate it. Okay, okay. As an analyst, that's probably the most you're going to get out of me. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, so if I take stock of the portfolio today, you got Core, right? Which is the Piper Convergence, virtual machines, multiple workloads, and then you got unstructured data via files as well as soon via objects. And then we also provide just generic block storage for anybody who wants to, hey, I got a database, it's running on a bare metal server. Can you give me block storage? I want to consume it and I'm going to run Oracle on it in a rack setting. Yeah, sure, go for it, right? So even though most of our customers are indeed hyper-converged, there are some customers who use us as storage only. And that's okay. If that works for them, great. But the power of the whole thing is now you can consolidate all of your workloads on a single platform. Yeah, one of the things we talked about with Deerage yesterday is when Nutanix launched, there were certain waves that it kind of hit. It seemed to be the right time for things. So, you know, software-defined, before we called it software-defined, what was there, flash as a technology was really coming from a little niche product to broad adoption. A lot has changed in the, you know, about nine years since the solution went on and you had a major file system rewrite in 5.10, I've heard some people call it, think of it almost as AOS 2.0, to get ready for some of the modern things happening from a technology standpoint, as well as the modern applications that will sit on top of it. Deerage has said it's like, you know, the plane flying at 35 miles, 35,000 feet, you know, running at full speed and we're going to change the engine out. So, it gives a little bit of insight as to, you know, what goes into that, what that took and what that prepares Nutanix and your customers for. Absolutely. So, you know, there comes a time in every technology's lifespan where you have to re-architect significantly.  And we are at sort of an interesting time where things like memory class storage, NVME, RDMA, all of these things are starting to get mainstream and for good reason, right? They actually deliver a lot of value. So, the file system that developed nine years ago, yes, you can make incremental changes, but there comes a time where you have to say, look, I got to make these big changes. I have to rethink my data metadata structure. And that's what you're seeing. And obviously this will be in phases. Phase one was more about optimizing metadata. Phase two will be about rewriting the file system in a major way. What we're calling block store to basically take advantage of things like memory class storage. And the end result is two things. One is, we'll be able to take better advantage of all of these new technologies. And by doing so, now you're delivering a very different kind of a, if you will, not just an experience, but value to your customers. So somebody could be running a database today and there's certain expectations of performance and reliability and latency. In this new world, AOS 2.0, those expectations will be entirely different, right? So, looking at the adoption of it, right? So AOS 2.0 basically, everyone's going to run it at some point. Everybody is running it already, upgrading it is going to be, in Nutanix style, pretty easy. But I'm wondering, the other storage products, what's the adoption there? How many people are using it? What are they using it for? Sure, sure. And by the other storage products you're referring to file storage and things like that, right? So, files, of all of them, files is the most mature. We released this as G about two years ago and we have close to 1,000 customers using files today. So not just purchased, but using. So 1,000 users as customers, pretty decent, good adoption. And there's also been a bit of a journey here. We started with files being a SMB protocol product. So it had a bias toward Windows environments, user data. About a year ago we released NFS support. So now the game changes a little bit. You're talking machine data, machine generated data, right? So it's very different. And that's also forced us to rethink how we go about scalability, how we go about automation. You know, if there's a hotspot, the system should take care of itself. Does it go off and scale up? Does it go off and scale out? Does this happen automatically? So a lot of those things started to get beaved into the sort of the fold of the product. So that's files, I would say, the most mature outside of HCI. Objects is new.  We've done a bunch of early access with a few customers. Things are looking good, right? So looking forward to what we have there. Block storage. So we also offer just generic, ice-cazi-based block storage. That's also been in market for a while. And this has been use cases where somebody wants to run a bare metal database outside. Reasons of licensing or what have you. Maybe it's legacy databases. And I just want storage from the Nutanix cluster. So what we said is, you know what we'll do? We'll carve off a portion of the Nutanix cluster, logically speaking. Serve it out as volumes, right? Generic volumes. And you can use this for your databases. Performance and everything is very similar to what you would get if you were hyper-converged. So you're not giving up anything by doing so, other than the fact that obviously you're not in a true hyper-converged form factor. All right, since we're talking about storage, I wonder if we could drill a little deeper on some of the new stuff. So in 5.10, you're ready for memory class storage, things like NVMe. Where are we today? What is further down the road map? The storage industry, NVMe and NVMe over fabrics is pretty hot discussion. Everybody's getting ready for it. Is there anything that Nutanix is doing unique there?  Sure, sure, it makes sense. So I think at the more fundamental level, I think we all agree that if you're in a hyper-converged form factor, because you have storage right with compute, that gives you an inherent advantage to begin with, versus three-tier storage that goes over the network. So what we're trying to do is, hey, let's continue to milk that, so to speak. And in 5.10, we released, I would say, one portion of what we call AOS 2.0, and here what we did was we optimized heavily for metadata. So our metadata versus data model changes with AOS 2.0. And then what we'll do, we'll follow this up with major changes to the data model itself. So for example, now, when you're dealing with memory class storage, you've got to be able to address it slightly differently. You have to be using low-level APIs, things like SPDK, to circumvent the kernel, for example, and go directly into storage. So all those things are on the works. And the net result is going to be, well, I see higher performance, I see more consistent performance, I see lower latencies, right? And obviously more throughput as well. Now, you talked about NVMeo fabrics. Now, the idea there is, look, you've got the NVMeo protocol fabrics now. So what sort of fabric are you building? Because we deal essentially with Ethernet, ours will be an Ethernet fabric, right? So now we'll start to leverage RDMA more. We already do so in our systems today, but I would like to see end-to-end RDMA, where you start at the application and then right through the pipeline, through the data path, it's RDMA all the way down to storage. And even for your replicas, it's RDMA. And now you're talking a very different kind of latency, right? You're not talking, forget about a millisecond. You're talking about less than 100 microseconds of latency end-to-end. So that kind of sounds like the perfect use case for IoT, heavy data processing. What are some of the efforts you're undertaking to optimize for XI IoT? Right, so IoT, you know, there's obviously two pieces to IoT, right? There's what the computing I do on the edge, and then the computing I do after the fact, somewhere else, machine learning models that I can feed back to the edge, right? So this new technology would apply in both places. Now, when you're on the edge itself, there's certain situations where your real-time processing needs to be real-time. It better be quick, right? So faster my storage, the faster my decision-making. And then, so let's say you're able to make decisions faster, inferencing decisions faster in real-time. Now you go to the cloud, shall we say, where you're doing the long-time processing. And there too, it's a matter of, okay, I'm doing all this machine learning. I have a bunch of, say, AI or ML packages running here. There too, there's an angle of time, you know? If I do this in two weeks and feed it back versus two days, there's a big difference in business value that's being delivered, right? So I think the applicability of all of these changes is across any use case. All right, Tim, I want to give you the final word. You know, you've got the core products there, but what are you hoping that customers walk away from as they leave the show this week?  We are getting better and better. You will see us be on the leading edge, on the bleeding edge, when it comes to core technologies. I think we are a first mover. All the things we talked about, we have been investing in, this is not the first time. It's released for the first time, but it's been around. We've been developing it for multiple years. So you can think of Nutanix as someone who's on the forefront of all of these new technologies. And at the end of the day, it's all about your applications, being ready for all of those applications, traditional as well as new. And in your choice of form factor, you wanted to go hyper-converged, great. You want to go storage-only, it's up to you. All right, well, Tim, really appreciate the updates. Congrats on all the progress and look forward to watching where things go in the future. Thank you guys. All right, be sure to stay with us. Got a couple more interviews left here from Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in London, England. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.


I am Dr. Steven Pomerance, Medical Director and Founder of ProScan Imaging, and ProScan has over 25 years of experience owning and operating outpatient imaging centers. I started out long ago and far away with the first crop of MR fellows in the Jurassic period of MRI. As you know, still today, keys to success in any practice revolve around the quality of interpretation, excellent service, and the character of your relationships with referring physicians. As the market has evolved, those are necessary factors, but not by themselves sufficient for success. In the current market, it's not the total story. It's not the total recipe for a success model. With increased competition from hospitals, pressure from insurers, and rapid industry consolidation, independent outpatient imaging centers are more important than ever for patients, doctors, and communities. That's why last year we invested in building best-in-class expertise in online marketing. We hired top talent from Google and other specialized marketing digital firms. We've built tools and capabilities that enable us to reach new patients and physicians online. We've pressure tested what works and what doesn't on our own business. Fast forward a year later, we're now reaching a new base of patients over the Internet with the same great story. High quality patient care, luminary service at a low affordable price. We're excited to partner with innovative market leaders to build digital capabilities. It's more important than ever in the current environment. If you own or operate outpatient imaging centers, we'd like to talk to you further to see if ProScan can help you raise the bar of your own practice and reach deeper into the patient community. Thanks. Have a great day.