stepwise

Of interest to some or others you might know:

Google Travel and Conference Grants "for selected conferences in Computer Science and related fields. Grants are available in North America for all traditionally underrepresented groups in technology (including, but not limited to, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, persons with disabilities, women and veterans) and in Europe for women in technology."

https://www.google.com/edu/scholarships/google-travel-and-conference-grants/

To be eligible for a grant to attend a conference in North America, applicants must:

National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Annual Convention 2016 (Deadline: January 15, 2016)

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2016 (Deadline: February 8, 2016)

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (Deadline: February 15, 2016)

PyCon 2016 (Deadline: March 4, 2016)

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (Deadline: March 25, 2016)

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (Deadline: April 1, 2016)

Years ago newspapers and their news sites aimed for the same things: relevance and timeliness. 

For the .coms of major publications (and minor ones too) this meant putting breaking news on the homepage, reflecting the editors’ curated hierarchy (A1 stories went to the top) as well as associating content so that readers could dig in on topics that interested them, as they were driven by news events. Since then the digital world has revolved several times and now we have social channels we wished we’d dreamed of, devices on our wrists, and Hadoop clusters that enable vast data analysis and machine learning. 

News sources like BuzzFeed are even talking about killing their .coms. 

All these things taken together require a more nuanced view of relevance and timeliness. 

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in a recent Re/Code interview defines relevance as multidimensional and contingent on three things: social (what’s shared/promoted in your graph), machine learning (algorithms), and curation (the human editor element). 

Yes, it is all these things. Now,what new dimensions are there for timeliness? 

A friend shared this with me, but I didn’t quite get to the readings. Maybe you can and then tell me about it. 

“Interviewing @ Google:

Interviewing for a new job can be scary and intimidating. At Google, we hope they’ll be challenging and enjoyable. As we aim to hire generalists, you can expect to interview with PM's working on any number of our products - our PM's are centered on problem solving ability so there won’t be many questions about specific experiences or domains.

In preparation, you can expect discussions around the following:

*Product design - Thinking creatively/critically about products - eg. how to monetize twitter, how to change Gmail, design an app for the Louvre. Give feedback and analysis on features (think of how to best delight the user), technical design, UI design.

*Product strategy - Understand Google’s competitive landscape and discuss the vision for Google, the mobile market, the ad market, the internet, and technology in general. Discuss long term product roadmaps & strategies to increase market share.

*Analytical - May be a market analysis, problem solving or brain teaser question, eg. How would you store all the phone calls in the world? Most important is attention to detail and communication of how you’d break the problem into smaller nuggets to reach an overall solution.

*Technical - You could be asked architecture/design (eg. multi-tiered web apps, data storage in databases) or conceptual questions (eg. internet technologies and protocols). Possibly even an algorithm/coding question or two.

How can I prepare for interviews?

- Listen and view Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell

- Read and study the following books: Cracking the PM Interview , Business Model Generation, The Algorithm Design Manual, Escape Velocity, and The Design of Everyday Things

- Familiarize yourself with all of Google – not just web search (Hint: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/)

- Research our industry dynamics and current/recent industry events (hint: use Google News)

Sure, there are lots of efficiencies in sharing a life together, but marriage will cost you even if you elope.

The decisions you make as a couple before and after your big day matter, and as research shows: it’s difficult to have a stable marriage if your financial life is unstable. While the cost of a wedding looms large, seemingly small decisions can cost couples after they tie the knot. For example, consider that Google charges $2.63 per click to tell you about wedding planning (a mondo industry), but banks are paying nearly 12 times that ($24.14) per click to persuade you to open a joint checking account.

Before Your Big Day Getting to know one another financially is an important first step. There are a number of important questions that you should resolve before your big day:

Do you agree on how much to spend on our wedding?

Do you have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals?

Do your views about spending and saving coincide?

Beware the Wedding-Industrial Complex If you’ve ever experienced the economically baffling world of weddings -- whether as a bride, groom or innocent bystander -- you’re already aware of the market inefficiencies and pitfalls. If you’re not familiar with the backwards economy of weddings, know this: the wedding game is rigged against you. That’s right, weddings turn standard market economics on its head. Vendors make it nearly impossible to compare prices, and too many brides (and grooms) too readily pay inflated prices. The best advice we’ve heard is to set a budget and stick to it, but also be sure to tell vendors you’re planning a family reunion instead of a wedding to avoid the standard wedding markup.

Separate or Together? The key questions of how you manage your money after marriage are inherently about whether you do things jointly or separately:

1) Do you consolidate bank accounts and credit cards?

Keep an eye on bank account fees in making a decision to open a joint account; many accounts require you to maintain a minimum daily balance.

Aim to consolidate your credit cards, but consider that closing cards can negatively affect your credit score. Holding onto the card you’ve had the longest and asking to increase the credit limit can help.

2) Do you file taxes jointly or separately?

If there is a big gap in salaries, joint filing is usually recommended.

3) Do you contribute to retirement jointly or separately?

This is a trick question. Each one of you should have your own retirement savings to take full advantage of the tax benefits. If one spouse is not working, look for a low-fee IRA or Roth account for him/her.

To protect your (and your partner’s) wallets be mindful about how you go about informing your financial decisions.

“Making a spreadsheet is very pale work next to making a product or a painting, and they remain secondary and supplementary to the needs of the actual product or business they describe. But since they are one of the artefacts we use to theorise and then direct the activity of fifteen people, I try to make them with diligence and even some craft.”

For someone who once made a powerpoint presentation to give to her nephew for Christmas: this is a beautiful essay.

If you don’t have a high-degree of empathy, the new economy will be an unforgiving place for you, says Fortune and others (many of them, as it turns out).  

This very same issue came up at Morningstar’s recent investment conference, but it had a somewhat different tenor. The issue there was that women need investment advice (just like their male counterparts), but the approach that advisors often take with women can be, um, alienating. 

We ladies, who are often the breadwinners, as it turns out, don’t like to be condescended to; rather, we prefer to be listened to and heard [alert: radical notion].

So, for advisors and the rest of us who could strengthen our empathic muscles, here are three things to try:

1) Listen more than you speak. Be silent, and let others bring things up 2) When you do make a point, confirm what was heard was what you meant 3) Make the intent of the conversation to find best solution, not sell your idea

Don Phillips is a Morningstar and financial industry great, and his has been the career of dreams, and so is this profile -- which was from when he was 30... damn. 

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/rising-star/Content?oid=881232

“People talk about socially responsible investing. That's good, but they should also be thinking that investing itself is socially responsible. It helps one become self-reliant. If you can take care of your financial needs, you're empowered. People who have a lot of debt, but no savings, find that there are all kinds of decisions they cannot make...

Ad tech is killing the online experience, but those heady mobile ad days are soon to be over (thanks, Apple, or something). So, where does that leave marketers, we seekers of eyeballs and souls? 

Well, as one venture capitalist once told me when he declined to fund our messaging app not too long ago, “it’s all about email.” 

There are literally (yes, literally!) millions of publications that can “connect you directly to [insert key customer segment here].” 

But do they actually work? Here’s how to tell: create your own cost per lead benchmark by which to compare all others. Go ahead, play God.

Note: To do this you need a marketing automation system (e.g., Eloqua, Marketo, whatever you use). Don’t have one? Get one. Here, we go: 1)    Create a unique url for the landing page you want an ad to point to. 2)    Run the ad across a few of the most promising channels you choose (at HelloWallet we use Workforce and HR Executive, for example). 3)    Tally the number of new leads coming into your marketing system for each channel. 4)    Divide that by the cost to run the ad to get your cost per lead. 5)    Use this as the benchmark to assess all future opportunities. Here’s the trick: once you’ve done this, you don’t even really have to pay to test whether an opportunity is worthy of your dollar bills. Just ask the salesperson for the total number of the very best contacts for your product in their list, multiply by their click through rate and then divide by total cost for the ad. Compare this number to your best performing test to know whether to invest.

IDEO is offering some great online courses, including one which I’m taking: “Insights for Innovation” 

There is a lot of off-computer work, like capturing insights with photos and in sketches. The question came up about sketching (answer below).

Drawing and writing, unlike powerpoint slide bullet points, force us to be more thoughtful and articulate. Bezos famously requires 10-page overviews of new ideas, and pictures/designs are worth like a million words in tech. 

Here’s the guidance IDEO provided from a lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, who teaches (among other things) how to improve drawing skills:

“First - Do it. Don't think about it. Get a notebook. Get a pen. (a good one - meaning one you like) Start in the middle of the page and start taking notes always this way. Draw pictures. Doodle. Shade. Block letters. Try. Always in ink. No erasing. No hating your work.

Second - This book - full stop. The best, as far as I know: http://www.grove.com/Fundament...

Third - Some other sites: http://sketchnotearmy.com/ http://rohdesign.com/sketchnot... http://www.smashingmagazine.co...

While I don’t agree with the half-*ssed twitter block list, which puts all of the onus on the harassed user to download and then upload csv files, when Twitter is one of the “top tech companies” in the world. Seems like a more elegant solution should have been offered up, but anyway. 

In corp world, the news is better.

Twitter released a new set of analytics today – Audience Insights. This is information is available through analytics.twitter.com for free. 

If you want to know more about your followers, I highly recommend this free tool. 

Under: Followers > Audience Insights provides details about account followers, including:

·         Interests

·         Occupation

·         Net Worth

·         Household Income

·         Education

·         Consumer buying styles

·         Home type

·         Marital status

·         Credit card holders

·         Consumer goods purchases

·         Mobile footprint (whatever that is)

I met last week with our user experience research lead to learn how she gets to the pith of what users/customers need and how she then uses responses to prioritize activities (e.g., product feature development). 

What to ask/talk about with customers/users:

Tell me how you accomplish your core-to-role activities now.

Tell me about a time when your approach doesn’t work.

What kind of info do you need to gather before you make a decision?

What are all the places you go to for answers?

What are you guessing at? (put all responses in a doc and look for patterns.)

Avg day, what’s that like?

What’s easy/what’s hard? (e.g., “Am I going to have enough $” is really “what’s our balance right now, when am I going to get paid” — what’s the mental gymnastics to get to an answer?)

Where do you not have a strong degree of confidence?

Where do you go “off the reservation” for information to do your job?

If you have a spare 10 mins at work/on the train -- where do you go online to read about non-job stuff?

What desk implements do you fidget/toy with?

What do you chat with colleagues about at the cafe/cooler?

How to distill it all (this is something I learned in consulting): Surface the approaches that users take to address their most pressing challenges. Create a three column spread sheet and then copy in their direct quotes describing their actions into one of the three columns, depending on if it's: commonplace, progressive, or bleeding edge. Obviously, this requires some level of expertise on the curator's part. Note, while in consulting you're looking for bleeding edge, in UX you want to focus on where most people are.

Remember the saying about the inevitability of a company's technology structure reflecting its org structure? Me neither. But I do know that how you meet reflects how you work. 

The New York Times is breaking up its standing ego forum -- the "page 1" meeting -- in favor of smaller, iterative standing meetings. 

This move represents a full-scale shift to digital, and I applaud it. 

If the physical newspaper represents a waterfall methodology, digital news is effectively agile in nature -- it is iterative, it is data-focused, and it is collaborative. 

To be truly agile, The Times should adopt the following agile elements (and so should you): 

Daily stand up meetings where each team member shares: What am I working on today?  What’s getting in my way?

Bi-weekly/monthly/quarterly monthly “show me the money” demos on what they've developed and what they've learned -- for the entire org.

Developed feedback loops for everything the team does (make 'em both internal and external).   

Not enough time.

“No matter how rich or educated we become, we only have the 24 hours for each of us. And with everybody promoting themselves on every possible social network, all of us so desperate for eyeballs, ... with all of us living and dying by our click history, everybody’s feeling ‘Why aren’t you looking at me?’’’

***

In last week's New Yorker, Harvard professor Thales Teixeira explains that we all have only a few fungible resources -- money, time and attention. The third is the "least explored", according to Teixeira. Particularly, it seems, the effects on those who seek it. 

A very strange case of suicide highlights how important our time and attention is to some, even when we have so little to spread around across competing sources. 

Dennis Williams, a travel writer and religious philosopher, made this deeply sad statement before taking his own life: "I believe I have an immense amount to give, not only from my mind but from my heart, and there are just no takers.” 

But who’s it all for? Post book editor Ron Charles, who received his cry for help -- sent via email to several individuals -- noted:

“No matter how rich or educated we become, we only have the 24 hours for each of us. And with everybody promoting themselves on every possible social network, all of us so desperate for eyeballs, ... with all of us living and dying by our click history, everybody’s feeling ‘Why aren’t you looking at me?’’’

The inherent price of attention and how it fluctuates can be measured by what (and how much) we watch and read, or don't read, and what people pay to capture our mindshare, says Teixeira.  

"Attention—at least, the kind worth selling—is becoming increasingly scarce...And, just as the increasing scarcity of oil has led to more exotic methods of recovery, the scarcity of attention, combined with a growing economy built around its exchange." 

Only the savviest messengers will cut through the noise, and many worthwhile voices will be lost, in other words.