Learn and Be Curious Flashcards
QUESTION: Tell me about a skill you recently learned. How did you learn it?
Title: Night Writing
Situation:
On a personal note, my wife and I are expecting a child this summer
I wanted to announce the news to our friends and family in a unique and differentiated way
I’ve been an amature photographer for the last 4 years and photographed friend’s bridal showers and holiday cards
This month, I decided to share the news by photographing my wife writing a message in air using sparklers at night
Obstacle/Task:
Privy to the concept of “night writing” but needed to educate myself on how
Action:
Research driven-approach; sourced articles online and watched videos
1. Environmental factors
Time of day: Night (or dark room)
Clothing: Dark
Lighting: No ambient light
2. Camera configuration
Slow shutter speed (15-30 seconds of exposure)
Aperture/F-stop setting of 11 (regulates light into the lens)
Tripod (to avoid shakiness/blurriness)
Manual focus setting (opposed to auto which will constantly adjust in attempt to focus at night with little light)
Experimentation/execution
Applied researched information
Experimented writing message flashlight to calibrate before using sparklers
Adjusted shutter speed, focus, distance, zoom and letter size
Results:
Research and experimentation paid dividends with a perfected approach of personalized and unique baby announcement
Although this skill development was for photography it’s professionally transferable in many ways
Pursue interests and passion (technology and customer solutions)
Research (Market, competitors, customers)
Prototype and experiment (wire-frames, designs, MVPs)
Strategically and tactically execute (establish a vision, execute the plan)
What this story demonstrates (skills, principles):
Learn and be curious
QUESTION: Tell me about an experience you went through that changed your way of thinking.
Title: Orphaned Advertisers
Situation:
Last year, I introduced a first of its kind user permissions model at Veritone that assigned an object (adv/campaign) to its creator
Additionally, supported sharing functionality for peer visibility along with the ability to transfer ownership
Model ensured that users created objects remained private to them unless shared
Once in production, experienced questions from Success regarding the advertisers of deactivated users
Obstacle/Task:
I overlooked the scenario for when an owner of the object (adv) is deactivated (no longer with the organization) and how to handle this in the UI
Action:
Replicated the scenario to assess the existing behavior before engineering a solution
Reviewed database and identified 10 advertisers in 3 orgs with an deactivated user
Designed a workflow that would categorize this type as ‘Unassigned’ advertiser
Made ‘Unassigned’ folder visible to any ‘Manager’ user type for assignment to a) themselves or b) another user in the system
Validated the concept with internal and external users
Results:
a) successful in creating UI visibility to unassigned advertisers b) enabled managers to assign a user
Reduced the number of unassigned advertisers by 50% within one week
Experience forced me to think of the relationship between objects and how changes to either the user or the advertiser could affect the experience
Ingrained in train of thought in product development and applied to test cases to better account for scenarios
What this story demonstrates (skills, principles):
Learn and be curious
QUESTION: What’s your weakness?
Title: Understanding the ‘How’ (just as much as the What & Why)
Situation:
“A weakness that I consider a growth area is” understanding the ‘How’ just as much as the What and the Why
As a PM, it’s incumbent on me to effectively capture and convey the “what” and “why”
Equally important, however, is the “how” often determined by technical teams
Obstacle/Task:
A growth area for me is to deeply understand the “how” which translates to the technical approach, architecture and implementation of a solution
Action:
To strengthen this growing edge, I’ve organized and participated in technical sessions to understand or review the technical design on the “how”
“Lean in” and act with a sense of curiosity and ask questions or explore why other options weren’t pursued
Reviewing GitHub commits to see how the code discussed solution is expressed in code
Results:
The net result has enabled me to better understand the inner workings of a solution and place me in a position to identify opportunities to refine, refactor and simplify
1) Dissecting the data ingest-to-application pipeline to address underlying count discrepancies, I was able to put together a product “recovery plan” which entailed identifying points of failure and implementing retry logic for better resiliency.
Led to a post-process that addressed missing events and patched a 23% failure rate
2) Led to a complete rearchitecture of how my application, Attribute, interfaces with underlying services. Was able to reduce the number of hops and components involve from receipt of the data to rendering it in the application
Reduced time to generate and results by avg. of 168%
What this story demonstrates (skills, principles):
Learn and be curious
Invent and simplify
QUESTION (2nd): Tell me about a skill you recently learned. How did you learn it?
Title: Rerun campaigns via Postman (TODO)
