PETALS Snapshot 7 - All the toolkits, OKRs & leaving ASOS

You. This is petals snapshot seven. It is Wednesday, the 4, October 2023, and this is me reflecting on the past two weeks of what's been going on, all things Petals. So it's been a few weeks since last time and there's been some good stuff going on, actually. So, with all that said and done, let's get into scores. Quick fireAround this time. You ready? Productivity, four. Enjoyment, five. Teamwork, four, learning, five. And serenity, four. Coming out with an average of 4.4, which is up zero eight. Whoa. Pretty good one, then. Before we get into the reasons why, though, I'm going to take a little break to tell you some other news. Let's take a moment out from the typical snapshots to say a bit more context as to what's going on with me right now. So, last week, I actually resigned from Asos. I'm working my two to three month notice period just to make sure that everyone's ready before I go, but it's going to make a bit of a change to my sort of commitments to my role, the types of things I do. Lots of change coming up over the next three, four months, obviously, and quite interesting times ahead. One thing that I'm really keen to do before I leave Asos, though, is to set them up to continue using Petals successfully. I'm quite lucky that we've got a group of agile coaches that really see the value and the potential with that Petals and they are evangelising it and introducing it to their team that they work with over time. And I've got a core group of engineers as well, and engineering managers that can see the value as well. So there's a group of people from all levels that are really keen to keep this going and I'm glad because I don't want to leave this thing, Lego, dormant as I leave, obviously, exciting times ahead where I'm going. I'm moving on to rightmove in the UK, one of the largest property finders in the market, and specifically in the UK, they're Milton Keynes based, for me at least, and they do have London based offices as well, with a bunch of other engineering managers not as big as Asos, but still substantially enough to know difference. And culturally, it's going to hopefully work as well. Let's see how things go, though. Naturally, that's going to mean for me, there's going to be a bit of a slump in some productivity, I guess. The next couple of months, I'm going to be doing a lot of handover with Asos and then I'll be getting on board with BrightMove. In the meantime, I'll be chipping away and I'm really happy with where things are getting to now the toolkits are there and actually it'll give me a chance to start using those toolkits and introducing them in different worlds, see what works. Asos is a very Microsoft driven environment and I know, right, move used like Google and other tools, as well. So it's going to know quite exciting to see the differences in how these tools work, but fundamentally I want to make sure that the frameworks are relevant and working well with the engineering teams. So, a little bit of a side tangent from this week's snapshot and but a bit more context to understand why things are going the way they're going. So there you go. Bit of news, breaking news and obviously quite a big change to what's been going on and I've still managed to fit in quite some good things with all that going on. At the same time. It will mean things will probably change over the next few months though. So let's see how things go. Well, productivity wise has been pretty good. At the weekend I smashed out a toolkits page on the website which now links through to the Microsoft and Google toolkits that I've already created. It's nothing special, it's just a very simple page, but it was on demand and I thought it actually makes sense to create just a general landing page to kind of pull this stuff together. So you can go on there, copy the Google toolkit which now works thanks to Mike, and start playing with it. And I've also put a link onto the Microsoft form templates that you can currently grab. The Excel document that I'm working on, the toolkit to kind of complement the form is still work in progress. I've got it in a good shape now. I think the reports and the Pivot tables work, but I will be user testing this before I put it out there to the general public. If you are a Microsoft house and want to have a look and play and some help, let me know. You can book in some time with me. I'll put a link through in the Show Notes for you to find some time with me to do this. But I've also got a couple of candidates that I know already who are definitely Microsoft, so I'll give them a go first as well. But do not let that put you off. If you want to have a look and play with these things, do reach out to me. You can email webmaster at petals team or I'll put a link to Calendar booking service in the Show Notes on that. I did spend some time with Mike last week as well on an Async chat. He's introducing Petals to his team. He was trying to understand who the audience should be, whether it should include all the organizations, because he works in a digital agency, so it's not as large as the organizations I'm used to. That said, he has got a core group of engineers and designers that I think he's going to introduce it to originally, but then consider growing it, extending it out to the account managers and the other people around the organization. This is not limited to engineering teams, by the way. This is something that I've realized applies to many and I am actually introducing to a completely different department next week in our organization who are interested. And again, the Microsoft framework should allow them to do that quite easily. But we'll see. Let's see how things go. Anyway, that toolkits page is available at petals team slash toolkits. I am going to put some details on there as things update as well. And I'm also keen to explore Miro as an alternative as well because I know a lot of engineering teams are using tools like Miro or Trello to facilitate their retrospectives and their workshops. A nice little win this week as well. We had a workshop this week around OKRs and defining our OKRs as a leadership crew. So as part of the OKR for Team Health, the obvious one was to introduce Petals. I didn't say anything. This was other people that was like Petals, right? It wasn't even me that suggested Petals. They instantly associated petals with measuring team health. And it was quite interesting because obviously with KPIs and OKRs you want some metrics to kind of substantiate your development and your goals. So yeah, I'd recommend any teams that are or organizations that are defining OKRs and thinking about stuff like Team Health and Happiness. Definitely consider bringing Petals into the fold there because it gives you some numbers to play with. As I keep saying, these numbers are very subjective, so they shouldn't be used as like hard measures. But you can definitely look at them with trends to see if there are changes and shifts. So I'd suggest looking at percentage increases rather than actual numbers. Otherwise you'd start getting people teams gamifying their numbers to make it work either way. Really pleased to hear the fact that Petals are associated with something like OKRs and KPIs because it really does help an organisation flourish and grow in other areas based on productivity. Actually, we've made some great progress on the custom Petals app. Now I was chatting with Brian Suter, our developer, last week. He had a load of edge cases and scenarios he wanted to kind of outline and understand a bit better. So we had a lot of Async chat through a Slack channel that we've got going on now. But it got to that point I was like, this is getting too much, let's jump on a call. So I had a really interesting call with him. We spent about an hour going through some scenarios and some know, examples and edge cases. For example, if you're organizing a petal score for your team and you can see your team scores, but you can't see some of the maybe private notes for your leadership, then you get promoted and you can how does that work? Or if you change teams within an organization, what happens then? Well, these are real world scenarios. I'm not going to kind of talk them down. But for the MVP, probably not that important, but it was really interesting to have these conversations like the scenarios when you might want to use these scores and how you might want to present them to teams and facilitate them as well. You put a lot of time and effort into the time limits as well. So if you are working in a distributor team across the globe or over different time zones, you might not be able to do it on a specific day, which is my current model. So setting like a time range to say, let's get some results over the next week or the five days or whatever your time bound looks like and review the results afterwards. So again, like I said, we're going through the details. He's been building it in his own time and he's been doing some really cool stuff all in Python, which I've never ever played with. So I've been spending some time getting my local environment set up to contribute to this repo. The whole project is version controlled in GitHub. That's standard nowadays really. And I have got a Petals Team organization on the GitHub, so then we can have multiple repos on there. It's something that I kind of realized I've just done without really thinking about it. But when I was listening to a podcast with the help of podcaster Mark Stetman the other day, he's documenting the growth of his organizing his new startup Ramble and he dives into this quite specifically in his most recent episode. I'll put a link in the show notes. Anyway, it just made me think it's a good way to organize your projects when you're working in tech. Obviously I say obvious. Is it? Do most teams do this? I don't know, but for me I was like, well I want a clear distinction between the website which you can all access at Pels team, the app which will be deployed to a different service, the website's currently on Netlify. We'll probably use a service like Heroku for the app. Other things are going to come out with Pells over time as well. So at least I can sort of have a dedicated organization for all these things and then I can dedicated repos for projects and whatever else comes out the back of it. Just a little bit of a geeky management sort of thing that I like to kind of just highlight. So yeah, it's been really productive actually. Seeing the development of the app grow over the last couple of weeks been fantastic. I can start contributing to that repo now. I'm probably going to be focusing more on the UI and the visuals, whereas I can leave Brian to focus on the clever stuff in the background with the data modeling and the facilitation and that side of things. So watch this space. If you do want to get details of the early alpha to play with, sign up to the newsletter. Petals Team will take you straight in. There you just put your email address in the bottom and we'll provide updates on all the updates that come out from Petals at the moment. That includes stuff like this, the toolkits that we're creating, the app when it's ready, anything that's kind of related to what Petals is all about. Finally, again, I'm feeling pretty pumped. So the first public speaking event for Petals is coming up now. It's all confirmed for end of November as I alluded to in a little break. I will be leaving Asos around that time as well. It's going to be quite a busy time for me at that point, but hey, whatever, it's all good. It is on the 26 November. I'll be putting this out on all my socials as well. Please come along and join up. Join in it's for DevOps knots. I want to make it very engineer focused. I'm going to be looking at the kind of profiles of the people that are in that meetup group as well. And I'm talking to the organizer just to understand the audience a little bit better, to make sure that the content is quite relevant to them. I don't want to be kind of talking down to them in any way, but I want to try and get across the benefits of introducing Petals to software engineering teams. And I'm going to bring some case studies, what works, what hasn't worked, how you might want to customize it to your needs. But either way, I just want to understand the audits a little bit better to make sure that I get the right tone across to them all. This will be version one of the talk. Then I've got version two in December with the wider, more international audience. And there's another conference that I'm looking at attending in May next year as well. They keep putting out the feelers for talks and I'm keeping it handy, I'm keeping it warm in my inbox because I'd like to put myself out there. I know it's a bit of a comfort zone thing as well, but equally, I want to see how the first two iterations go and see if it's got an appetite for an engineering audience because I don't know how it's going to land yet. So watch this space. And as I say, when I'm changing jobs next year, I don't want to put myself under any more pressure, any additional pressure. I'm going to see how things go anyway and go from there. So I'm going to wrap it up at that point. All this stuff is on the Petals team website. Reach out to me if you want to find out a little bit more. You can go for the socials at site on Mastodon managingengineers. Net. You can do outside jobbling on most of the other socials email webmaster at petal team. And if you're listening or following along in any of your favorite media apps, podcasting or YouTube, give us a little like and subscribe and all that good stuff. Give us a little review so I know what's working and not and getting your request. What do you want to know? Tell me. Ask some questions. I've been considering doing asking me anything at some point and maybe after some of these conference circuit moments there'll be more of an appetite for it. Reach out anyway and get in touch. There's is also the LinkedIn community for those that fancy going that way instead, or the Slack community. So just reach out, get in good touch. I'm available on most these platforms far too many, I know, but I'll be back in two weeks with further updates on these petal snapshots. Thanks for listening.