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“Is Crochet Turing Complete?”: Christina Burger with Runway (Video + Transcript)

In this ELEVATE session, Christina Burger (Runway Senior Software Engineer) discusses the intersection of computer science and crochet. She explores the idea of representing a Turing machine as a crochet pattern and demonstrates her attempts at creating crochet symbols for the different states.

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Christina Burger ELEVATE Crochet is Turing complete

Transcript of ELEVATE Session:

Christina Burger:

Thank you so much. What a wonderful intro. I guess that makes my next slide less relevant. I’ll just introduce myself quickly. I’m Christina. I not just love making software, I also enjoy all sorts of other things, including hanging out with my cats, who ignore me, and also, I have a art supply shopping problem, which has recently extended into a yarn buying problem.

I also recently made a zine with my good friend Erica, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that at the end if we have time. All right, so this is where you find yourself at the intersection of computer science and old lady crafts. I really love this place that I find myself in. I love both of those things equally.

I’ve also often felt like I can … it’s hard to not see them as similar things because when you’re looking at something like crochet or knitting, it’s actually quite a technical endeavor.

I have lots of family members who always claim that they’re not technical or they’re not smart, but they’re able to make amazing, wonderful things from scratch, and so I think that there’s something to be said for respecting the technicality of certain crafts and hobbies.

To kick off this talk, let’s talk about what is crochet. I just recently learned crochet myself. Previously I had tried to learn knitting, and I found it a little bit overwhelming with all of the counting and dropping stitches and things like that. I tried crochet, and I really loved it.

I feel like it’s really soothing, if you have a very active brain at the end of the day, you can just do some crocheting to wind down. The history of crochet is very long, and there’s lots of different countries that claim that they invented crochet. It’s been around for a while. If you haven’t crocheted before, you use a hook like this, and yarn. And you’re just basically making fabric from yarn.

Crochet consists of a few stitches. You can go from different heights, so you have single crochet, which is the lowest stitch, and then it goes all the way up to a super high stitch, which is a quadruple treble crochet. These are US stitch names. I think the UK uses a slightly different system, but I learned how to crochet in Canada, so these are the ones that I use.

Crochet can be used to make really intricate, wonderful laces. It can also be used to make a little hat for your cat, so it’s very versatile, but learning crochet and learning crochet patterns, I felt like something about them was very familiar in that it almost felt like I was reading an algorithm, and I think that’s because it is an algorithm.

For the next part, we have to talk about the next part of this talk, which is what is Turing completeness. The first time I heard this concept was at university, and it was very foreign to me to understand why it matters. I’ll endeavor to explain that a little bit better.

To introduce the concept, Turing complete just means that a language or a thing can be used to make a Turing machine in theory, and so I guess what we need to talk about more is what is a Turing machine?

A Turing machine is a theoretical model of a computer, but before we had computers, and it’s very important to be able to think through something like a Turing machine because it explains to us how we could solve general problems with one machine, instead of making a new machine for each problem that we have to solve, which was the approach that we had before we had this way of thinking.

A Turing machine is a very theoretical thing – it’s not a physical thing. It was never built to prove that it could exist. I think people have built ones in modern times just to show that you can, but it’s more of a way of illustrating what a computer could be.

The parts of a Turing machine are very simple. It’s this tape that you see here, and it has symbols written on the tape, and you’re able to read and write onto that tape.

To illustrate a little bit more, because it can be a little bit hard to understand that just from a quick introduction, here is one algorithm that we will be stepping through in a Turing machine.

First of all, we’re going to start with 110, that’s the number, and our goal is to invert the number to 001.

You can see that for this machine, we have three symbols, a zero, a one, or an empty tape or an empty cell in the tape. We have the tape and we have the ability to read a symbol under the head, and so how this program works is we have 110, and we have this state table that tells us what to do in case of each symbol that we read.

If we read a zero, we’re going to invert it, so we’re going to write one, so write zero, write one. Then we’re going to move the tape to the right, and we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going to read one, and then we’re going to invert it and write zero; move the tape to the right, read one, write zero; move the tape to the right, and now we read an empty cell. That means we can stop. That’s pretty much how a Turing machine would solve this particular problem.

Right. I was thinking about this and how familiar it felt. And I thought, could you represent all of that as a crochet pattern?

It turns out you absolutely can, and it also turns out that it’s really fun to figure it out.

Before we go through the pattern that I ended up making, I will show you a few of my attempts. I tried to make various ways to represent the different symbols in crochet, and all of them turned out a bit wonky. One I tried to do with color, and I think you could totally do that with color. But I gave up after one row because I realized that it’s cheating, it’s not really thinking too much about crochet stitches and more about the colors. But yeah, you could definitely do that if you want.

Let’s go back to what we had before, the Turing machine that we were or the problem that we were solving with Turing machine in this previous slide. Now we’re going to solve it in crochet, and I did end up with a more acceptable crochet block.

All of you are welcome to use my pattern to make your own crocheted Turing machine.

So what is our algorithm here? To start with, we’re going to chain 15. Chain just means putting in the foundational stitches to start, so these ones at the bottom. We’re going from left to right. From row one, we’re going to add a few stitches for height, and then we’re going to chain one, and do a double crochet, chain one, do double crochet, all the way through. And that’s just to set up the tape.

These shaded areas of double crochet, these are just structural to keep the piece in a sort of grid. I shaded them so that you can ignore them and understand that only the ones that are not shaded are important for our tape. Okay.

In the second row, we are going to write or not, I guess, not write, we’re going to make a double crochet to represent a one, another double crochet to represent another one, and a picot, which is this little piece at the top, to represent a zero, because we need three states, we need to be able to also represent an empty cell, which is a chain.

So yes, we’ve done that. Then the crucial part is that we need a stitch marker, which looks like this, and that’s how you can mark a place within your work. You can mark, oh, I’m here, yeah? That’s going to be our head. In our crochet Turing machine, we’re going to not move a tape, but move a stitch marker. We are putting the stitch marker at the picot, and that’s going to be where we start. And then we’re going to go over to row number three.

For row number three, four, and five, we’re just going to follow the algorithm, which is this part here at the bottom. The algorithm goes, copy each stitch that you see from the previous row unless you’re at the marker. If you’re at the marker, if you see a picot, do a double crochet. If you see a double crochet, do a picot. And if you see nothing, then you’re done.

Let’s go through. To the next row. Copy, copy, copy, copy, to the marker. We see a picot. We’re going to do a double crochet. Copy the rest. Chain three to turn. Then we’re going to remember to move our stitch marker over two stitches to the right.

In the diagram, they’re all to the right, but if you were doing actually the crochet, you’d have to remember to move it to the left, because you turn your work every time you add a new row.

So yes, for row number four, we’re going to see that we have double crochet, so we’re going to do a picot, double crochet, double crochet. Move our stitch marker to the right. And then copy everything. Chain three to turn. Copy everything. Then we see a double crochet, so we do a picot, a picot, and double crochet. We’re just copying again from row four.

We know that we’re done because in theory we moved the stitch marker to the right and saw that it was empty, so we were done with the algorithm. And yeah, this pattern is available, I will share the link in the chat, if anyone wants to follow it. And just wanted to show a bit more visually, it can be really hard to see.

Also, I’m not the world’s best crocheter, but this is my final product. I’ve tried to highlight the different stitches and what they mean both in the diagram and in the finished product.

If you look at the colors, to represent the one and the zeros, that might also help for you to see that we started with a picot and two double crochets, and we ended with a double crochet and two picots.

That was a really quick run through both of Turing machines and crochet. I guess, my conclusion is that crochet is Turing complete, as long as you don’t think too hard about the fact that a person has to still do the crocheting.

There’s no such thing as a crocheting machine, we have knitting machines, but crochet is actually really complicated to automate. And so mostly it’s done by humans. I guess, in that way it’s not Turing complete because it’s not a machine at all.

It’s still a really interesting thing to think about, how we have algorithms in our day-to-day lives that we’re following, and how we can integrate computer science more into our granny-like crafts.

Yeah, so that is pretty much it. Just one final note, I wanted to share my zine. Oops, sorry. Wanted to share my zine here, which I made with my good friend Erica. It’s filled with really positive thoughts and fun puzzles, we have a crossword.

Follow the link in the slide here if you would like to buy one. Or if you have any questions, now is the time.

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“Strategic Interviewing: Pursuing Roles Despite Skill Gaps”: Amie Dsouza with Southwest Airlines (Video + Transcript)

In this ELEVATE session, Amie Dsouza, a cybersecurity program manager at Southwest Airlines, shares tips and tricks for job seekers. She emphasizes the importance of tailoring resumes for each job application and including the specific keywords mentioned in the job ad, and encourages candidates to apply even if they have slightly less experience than specified, as some employers may be open to training. 

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Amie Dsouza ELEVATE send a pre read for the job interview to stand out

Transcript of ELEVATE Session:

Amie Dsouza:

Hey everybody. Thanks for the warm welcome, Angie and Happy International Women’s Day. As Angie mentioned, I’m working with Southwest Airlines currently as a cybersecurity program manager and since I have a few years of experience of interviewing for jobs, looking for jobs, as well as writing job requisitions and interviewing job candidates, I thought I’ll share some tips and tricks on how you could go about. I want this session to be really interactive. Could I get a sense of how many of you are students, maybe you could raise your hand if you’re a student and you are looking for entry level jobs? Or maybe you could use the thumbs up emoji. Okay. Okay, so there are a few of you. All right. Okay, many of you. Thank you. All right. I’ll try to tailor it half-and-half for entry level as well as experienced professionals. I’m going to share my screen real quick.

I am going to dive right into it. A couple of things while looking for a job. You all know there are lots of softwares out there where recruiters, when you apply for a job, it only reaches the recruiter if it passes by, and I don’t have a lot of knowledge about that. I’m sure you’ve got some tips about that from other sessions as well.

The one thing I definitely know, once it reaches a recruiter, say your resume has all the right keywords for that job. A recruiter looks at your job for two to three seconds maximum.

Make sure what the job ad specifies, especially the main things they’re looking for is in your resume. One size doesn’t fit all. If you’re really serious about applying and trying for that job, make sure you are tailoring your resume for every job you apply. I know it is tiring. It is a full-time job to apply for jobs, but that’s how it is, and that’ll give you the best chance.

We are going to look at a few job ads. These are job ads I’ve taken out of LinkedIn and I have a couple of entry level jobs and a couple of senior level jobs as well, and I’m just going to analyze who could apply for them. Since I’m from the cybersecurity space, some of these terms like the jobs would be in that space, but it would apply for anybody in other technology areas as well.

This job is a fairly straightforward job. This team is looking for a pen tester and they have specified here, they already have a team. They’re looking at adding. a team member to their team. That’s one of the things you need to know that they’re looking at adding a team member. This is not a leadership position. It’s a consultant tester, that kind of analyst, that kind of position.

They have mentioned three years of professional experience. As a person who’s looking for candidates for my team, for example, I would prefer someone who could come join the team and get started. There’s not too much of training time. That’s why some of the jobs will say three years experience, but this shouldn’t deter you if you are a student and you have trained, have some training as a pen tester. If you had it in your college degree and you’ve done some internship around that, I would encourage you to still try for these jobs.

Everyone is optimistic when they’re looking for candidates they want find the right fit, but when they don’t find the right fit, there are some considerations that a manager who’s looking for a job will make.

If they’re not finding people who have enough of experience, they will look at entry level uni grads as well. If they show the right kind of attitude and they have the right kind of writeup in their resumes. This is one tip I would say. If it says two to three years, it’s possible that that team will look at someone who is fairly new to the workforce and will be ready to train. But, you have to show some examples of what you have done in this particular space. Have you done a course? Have you done some actual internship with an organization? And you could give some examples of that as well.

The other thing which I noticed on this job ad was a strong desire and future focus. It looks like they have burned their fingers a little bit. Like they’ve brought in somebody who kept changing their mind, whether they want to be a pen tester or not. If you read between the lines, you’re looking for someone who will be committed to that job, to that role. If you could mention something like that in your resume that would help you at least get to the interview level.

They have specifically mentioned all candidates are subject to a technical interview. If you haven’t done any work in this space and don’t have the training, I wouldn’t suggest because the technical interview will actually test you for those technical skills. If you have any questions, keep posting them. I’ll see if it is relevant. I will try to answer. I’m going to go to the next one.

This is the job for cyber threat intelligence analyst. Again, it’s similar. It’s an analyst role. I would look at it as… To be a cyber threat intelligent analyst, you need to have some experience, some working knowledge. But again, since they have said three years of proven experience, if you have a little bit less than that as well, I would encourage you to apply, still apply. Now they’re looking at certifications. See some of the certifications, CISSP certification, for example. Only someone who has five to six years of experience in cyber would be looking at doing those experience. They’re looking at a rockstar over here. They want someone with three years of experience, but a rockstar. I think it’s a little bit too farfetched. They may or may not get someone who with this kind of a combination. These are the kinds of things you should try and see and apply if you think… This doesn’t really match three years of proven experience and CISSP. It’s not a match, as such. A CISSP would be at least seven years of experience in cyber itself.

If you’re in the cyber space, Security Plus and CompTIA Security Plus are the entry level certifications, which are really, really useful. It just shows your commitment towards that field. I would highly encourage those certifications, but the rest will come as you go through your career. Don’t get bogged down by lots of information in the job ad. Now these are things that these are good to have for them, right? Can you do trend analysis? Do you have social media mastery? Can you look at social media records and look at and understand what kind of threats or indicators are there?

What you should do is still try to understand what they’re looking for and embed that in your resume and that yes, you have gone through social media logs and have found something like this, for example. That will show that you have specific examples for what they’re looking for. Again, because it’s three years experience, even though you may or may not have that much experience, give it a go because you never know. Maybe they’ve been looking for a cyber threat intelligence analyst for six months, have not found one, now they’re ready to train someone. Maybe you’ll be the right person at the right time.

I’m going to touch upon a couple of a little bit senior positions. This is a job ad which I really liked. Identity governance project manager. It is a lead role because they have mentioned leading a team of functional and technical resources. Someone who has enough of experience, but they have kept it pretty broad. They’ve said 10 years experience, but they’ve not said in what. Not specifically that you should have had 10 years experience in identity and access management or in project management.

It looks like they would be okay with someone mid-level and having some experience in each of these areas. That’s how you should read it. Say you have 10 to 12 years of experience in technology, but only three to four years of experience in identity and access management. A couple of years in project management and agile, you should still go for it because since they have not specified that, it looks like they are open to it. Don’t be shy to apply for this role if you have some experience in any of these areas.

This is a great job ad because they have said how you will stand out as a candidate. They have said these are the bonus points. It’s very rare you’ll see this in a job ad. If you have any of these, familiarity with NIST or you have experienced any of these IM products, any of these networking products or security tools, that’ll just make you stand out. If you have it, put it in the resume right up there. In those two to three minutes that the recruiter looks at your resume, they find those keywords. I’m going to do one more.

This is a GRC lead role. IT security, governance risk and compliance lead. It is a big role. It is managing a team definitely, and it helps in IT risk and control assessments, maintenance of IT risk and control catalog. The only thing about this role, if I look at it… I feel like, oh my god, they’re looking for so much of experience. It feels like that. But you’ve got to read each and every line and see where you are at.

Looking at skills and qualifications, again, they have not specifically said how many years in each of these areas, but they have said, do you have some experience in regulatory and compliant assessments, for example? Do you have some experience in maturing cybersecurity processes? If you have touched upon any of these areas, it should be in your resume to be picked up for this.

Some things they have mentioned. Some years of experience, five to seven years in related experience and project management experience. These are some of the keywords I would look at to see whether I have the right skill. Say my background is more in the identity and access management space. I have touched upon GRC a little bit and I have some experience. I have project management experience and experience in information security and audit. I could probably apply for this.

If they don’t get the exact match, they will at least consider me for an interview. That’s the kind of message I’m trying to give. If you have some related experience, at least try for it and highlight what they’re looking for in that job. Okay, so say you have applied for the job, you get selected.

I have a couple of tips for how do you prepare for the job, especially if you don’t have all the skills necessary, but the recruiter still wants to give you a try, that organization still wants to see if you’re the right fit.

Make sure you look up on the responsibilities and tasks like day-to-day tasks involved in that role so you’re familiar when they ask you those questions. In fact, go ahead and hit up some people on LinkedIn or in your network who are in the similar role and see what they do on a day-to-day basis just to get an understanding. You’ve not done that role in its entirety, so you need to have some inside information on what really happens in that role. And for no matter which level, if it’s entry level or senior level, I always recommend doing a 30, 60, 90 day plan.

What would you do if you are given that? Get into the mindset of that role that yes, you have got the job, and what would you do in the first 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days? Do this for yourself, whether you share it with the recruiter or not, do this for yourself. This will put you in the mindset of that role that if you actually get the role, because they will ask you that. Yes, if you are a pen tester and this is the situation you’re in, what would you do? If you plan that out by walking through your 30, 60, 90 day plan, it will help you answer the questions, prepare you for the interview.

And lastly, I do recommend sending a pre-read for the job interview, because people are looking for so many candidates. If you want to stand out and you want to show your commitment towards how committed you are towards preparing for that role, send a pre-read a day or two before your actual interview. The pre-read, now you’ve already sent your resume. They have looked at your resume, they’ve probably had a chat with you. You could just send a little bit about me, as in very specific, not more than seven to eight lines, very specific to that role, what exactly what the skills you have for that role. That’s it. You could have a 30, 60 day plan for leaders who are looking at middle management or senior roles. You should also look at 90, 180, 270 day plan because as a new leader, the first few months is only about establishing yourself.

You can only be productive and actually show some outcomes a little bit later after three, six months, nine months. For leaders, I would suggest you also show the up to 270 day plan. But for anybody else, you at least have to have a 30, 60, 90 day plan. And make sure you send it to the recruiter and make sure the recruiter sends it to the person who’s going to interview you. This will help. A lot of times they will pull it up as part of the interview. That gives you more control at the interview itself. And even if they don’t bring it up, you can refer to it and say, “I sent my 30, 60 day plan to you, and based on that, this is what I would try and do,” in response to any of the questions.

Yep. And that’s it. Yep. I highly recommend a pre-read. It makes you stand out as a candidate, shows your commitments. Definitely try that. No. Anybody. Even if it’s an analyst position, a testing position, doesn’t matter. Even if you are in technology like an engineer position, anybody will need to have this kind of plan. Look it up for specific your role, what would you need to do? And it could be your opinion as well. It makes them aware that you have really thought about that role and if you are appointed, that you will succeed because you are already in that mindset that yes, I’m getting that job.

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“Don’t Be Elizabeth Holmes: When To Make That Difficult Decision To Cut Scope”: Natasha Harpalani with AWS (Video + Transcript)

In this ELEVATE session, Natasha Harpalani, a senior technical product manager at Amazon Web Services, discusses the importance of knowing when to cut scope in product development. She emphasizes the need to monitor and track progress, set milestones, and constantly evaluate against success criteria while analyzing customer needs and understanding what is truly necessary to achieve product goals.

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Natasha Harpalani ELEVATE always monitor and track progress for any product

Transcript of ELEVATE Session:

Natasha Harpalani:

Thank you so much and hello, everyone. I wish I could see every individual here, but really, just can’t emphasize how excited I am to be speaking and to be a part of this conference. As you kind of all noted through my very kind introduction, my name is Natasha Harpalani and I’m a senior technical PM at AWS. As you also may have seen through the title of my presentation, I’ll be speaking about how not to be Elizabeth Holmes and really talking through when to make that difficult decision to cut scope.

I will explain the Elizabeth Holmes reference a little bit later in my presentation, but this is a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart and something that I’ve learned, I think, a lot about in every product experience I’ve had.

Before I dive into the details of this presentation, just to expand a little bit more on my background, I started my product management career at a startup called AppNexus. AppNexus was an adtech company that was later acquired by AT&T. My experience there was working on machine-learning products. After spending time at AppNexus and then, subsequently, at AT&T, I pivoted into the cleantech space. I went back to the startup world and worked at Mainspring Energy as an IoT product manager. Mainspring develops a clean generator that can run on hydrogen and biogas. From Mainspring, I came to AWS, where I continued to follow my interest and my passion working on solutions to climate change, and this is where I’m at today.

Today, in my day-to-day job, I focus on working with utility companies and clean energy companies and helping them use the cloud to be able to scale some of the data issues that they have and work with the increasing complexity of data that a lot of utilities and clean energy companies are challenged with as the electric grid is changing very rapidly with more and more renewables coming online.

Now that you know a little bit about me, just to set the stage for this presentation, I want to start by explaining and talking through an experience that I had very early on in my product management career. One of the first products that I worked on was a product I developed very closely with a group of machine-learning engineers and data scientists, and what we were aiming to do was to predict the likelihood of someone online to purchase a product. It was a really interesting product to develop, I was personally really fascinated by it, and as we worked on this product, we hit this point where we’re all sitting in this room and I remember sharing with the team, “What if we use this additional data set that we’ve all talked about that we all wanted to explore to make our prediction algorithm better?”

The intent was good, but it was a situation where I was completely wrong. I was wrong, because we were working on releasing a product that had pretty tight timelines, that was already fairly complex to begin with, and I really needed to take a step back and reevaluate what the team could and could not accomplish in a meaningful amount of time.

After this day, I remember having a pretty hard conversation with the engineering manager that I worked with, and I will never forget. He sat me down and literally said to me, “Natasha, you are asking the team to build Theranos. It’s like you want this perfect product that does everything and is beautiful and has all this functionality and deliver a perfect product to customers, but we work at a startup and we have some really aggressive timelines.” While I do love a turtleneck, the analogy to Elizabeth Holmes was a little frightening and one that I will never forget.

However, even though I didn’t necessarily appreciate the reference to Theranos and to Elizabeth Holmes, I will never forget this lesson.

What I’m hoping to do today is to share how that lesson has helped me in some of my product management experiences and, hopefully, be able to share some of that with you to help you as you’re either a product manager, an engineer, a designer, really anyone that’s working on developing products that customers love.

To set the stage for what you can expect over the next 15 or so minutes, I’m going to talk about how to really monitor and track progress when you’re working on a product to really be able to identify when you might need to get to a point to cut scope. I’ll talk about evaluating your product and your goals against the success criteria that you may have started with, and also, discuss how to really analyze what customers truly need and separating that from what you maybe want to build.

Finally, I’ll talk about when not to cut scope and end things off by hitting on a few key takeaways that you all can hopefully use and leverage in your experiences. With that, let me start with one of the, in my opinion, most underappreciated and undervalued parts of product management, which is monitoring and tracking progress.

If you work on developing software, it’s possible that you’ve seen Gantt charts and milestone tables. Something like what I have on the screen. I’ve certainly seen versions of this that are far longer, far more complex, has 50 boxes in a page. Regardless of how a team organizes and tracks milestones. I think it’s so important to set milestones and constantly track against them.

The number one thing that a team has to do in order to be able to execute well, and it’s the number one thing that I think will set up a team and a software development group to make sure that they’re always evaluating how they’re doing against their milestones and get to a point where they maybe have to make a decision and recognize that they need to cut scope on a product.

When you’re looking at milestones, it becomes very clear when something is off. I think very common causes that lead folks and lead teams to have to cut scope tend to be… Work takes longer than expected, that happens all the time. There’s unexpected bugs, there’s unforeseen issues, and there could also just be delays outside of your team. For example, if you work with another engineering team that is developing a component of the product that you’re putting out to your customer, you have a real dependency there.

Despite some of those very common causes, once you look at your program, roadmap, look at your milestones and you realize, “Okay, I’m not going to hit a certain date,” or, “I’m not going to hit a certain milestone,” there’s generally three options you can evaluate, and I’ll caveat, these are not the only options, but I’d say that these are almost always three of the main options, which is you can extend the timeline on something, you can add additional resources.

That might mean recruiting and including more engineers or more designers or more data scientists on the team to help the velocity of that team, or you cut scope.

This third one is a very common one, and while it’s very hard sometimes to knock it through all the P0s, P1s, and P2s that you want to deliver to a customer, it is so important and I think it’s so important to become really comfortable saying, “You know what? It’s okay, we can cut scope and we can evaluate this and still deliver a really great product.” Once you’ve made that decision. One thing I’ll note is coming back to the example that I’d given you very early on, in the case of the conversion optimization product that I was developing with a team, we had a really strict timeline. We wanted to release this product by the end of Q3 before hitting the holiday season in Q4.

That was really important, because in the ad tech industry, the holiday season is one of the biggest buying seasons and that leaves users sometimes less willing or interested in testing a new product, because there’s just so much spend happening during that time.

Once you’ve made that hard decision and realized, “Okay, I need to cut scope,” one of the most important things I think you have to do is come back to the success criteria that you and your team have talked about and aligned on for your product. Let’s say that, for some reason, you don’t have those success criteria, those can always be developed later on. Really, all that means is, what will make this product release, product launch successful?

The reason it’s so important to take a look at your success criteria is, especially as you start product development, I think that sometimes you can really reevaluate and take another look at, “What is truly necessary for me to achieve the product goals that are set out?” Sometimes you can let go of a few P2s, sometimes you can let go of a few P1s.

Heck, sometimes you can let go of P0s, as long as the work that you’re doing helps you achieve the goals that you’ve set. And that also really involves looking at every single feature. If a feature is a nice to have, or maybe it’s a great feature, but the amount of value it drives for the customer is small, that could be a candidate for something that maybe isn’t released and launched with the first release of a product, but comes shortly thereafter.

Coming back to the example that I’ve been discussing during this presentation, I think back to this example, actually, all the time. Amazing how early lessons really stick with you. But for the product I was developing, our goal that we had set at the very beginning of product development, and at the beginning of beginning our beta testing, was that if 75% of users that were testing this new product could achieve their performance goals, then we would release this product to GA.

As I was talking to my team, as we were thinking about using richer, more data sets to make our prediction algorithms even better, one thing that really was important to look at was, “Hey, will making our prediction algorithm better actually help us achieve our goal or will it just make us surpass that goal?”

At the end of the day, if we see that 75% of our users are achieving their goals, then making an algorithm even better is great, and we always want to deliver value to our customers and give them the best experience that they can, but we’re actually potentially already achieving our goal for this period of time when we’re testing with beta users.

Another really important evaluation step is to analyze the customer need, and this maybe sounds simple, right? Duh, of course I should be always looking at customer needs. But I think in situations like this, when you’re looking to cut scope, you have to come back to the customer and come back to, “What are truly the customer requirements and what are the customer needs?” Looking at things and really deeply understanding what are the customer’s goals, what are they gaining from this experience? Will the customer gain value from a partial test?

Is there something that you can do to supplement the customer’s usage of your product, such as providing additional customer support or additional documentation? Is your customer willing to use a workaround? These are all really important questions to ask your customer, potentially more than one customers, and to understand.

I am constantly surprised and I have to remind myself that, especially early customers that are testing a new product with you, they tend to be pretty agile and really open to the fact that they’re testing a new product. It’s not the end of the world sometimes for certain customers if there’s one or two bugs, it’s not the end of the world if maybe they have to use a workaround, so long as you’re very aware of what is it that the customer is trying to get out of this. Because if I can still deliver that value and I’m releasing one bug with it, but have documented that bug, it might be okay.

Once again, just to set the stage with an example, when I was developing the conversion optimization product, one of the… The crux of that product was that our end user had a performance target. They either hit it or they don’t. Of course, they would love to surpass their performance goal, that’s always great, but the definition of success for my customer was, “Did they or did they not achieve their goal?”

Therefore, by coming back to that understanding and remembering that for our customer, giving them even more value is great, but understanding how they’re judged and how they’re evaluated, once again helped us determine, “Okay, maybe we don’t need to look at everything that we had originally discussed and outlined in our project plan if we can still help our customer achieve that outcome.”

With that, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least touch on when not to cut scope. I don’t think any of these will be particularly surprising, because in many ways, I touched on this when describing the rubric you can use for when and how to cut scope, but I do think it’s worth really calling out.

If cutting scope will lead to your product no longer solving a problem, it’s not worth it. If it leads to delivering such a terrible customer experience that you might lose trust with your customer or your customer will have such a bad experience that they won’t come back to testing or using your product, it might not be worth it.

And then most importantly, if cutting scope will keep you and your team from really learning and getting the insights and achieving those product goals that you need to launch and really develop a great cohesive product, also not worth it. With that, I want to say there’s always ways to cut scope and to think about it, but you do have to be careful and make sure you don’t cross that line where you end up delivering something that isn’t actually achieving the goals that you or the customer set out to achieve. Let me tie back to some of the things I hope you take away here.

Remember to always monitor and track progress for any product. This is so important to help you get to a point to where you even know you have to make a decision to potentially cut scope. I also think it’s just a great habit and great culture to create that the team is constantly evaluating, “Hey, how are we doing against the goals and the timelines that we had set out?” Those can obviously change a lot as you get into the thick of a project and you’re developing a new product, and so constantly keeping an eye on that is so important, because the worst thing that could happen is you get to a certain point in time when you’re supposed to release something to a customer and you realize, “Shoot, I can’t do this. I wish I had cut scope earlier on.”

Next, make sure to always evaluate what you’re delivering to the customer against your success criteria and really deeply understand the needs of your customer. As a product manager, it can sometimes feel really difficult to cut scope. I love developing great products that look beautiful, that feel beautiful, that have all the functionality that my customers love and want.

Amanda Beaty:

Thanks, Natasha. I’m sorry, we’ve got to…

Natasha Harpalani:

No worries, no worries.

Amanda Beaty:

Thank you so much.

Natasha Harpalani:

Thank you so much.

Amanda Beaty:

Everybody, I hope everybody can join us in the next session. Thank you, Natasha.

Natasha Harpalani:

Thank you.

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