PETALS Snapshot 5 - Google Toolkit fixes with Mike Street & wireframing with Brian

This is Petals snapshot number five. It is Wednesday, the 6, September 2023. This is my summary and recap of the past two weeks of what's going on with all things Petals. Quick reminder of what Petals is all about. It's a framework I've been growing and building over the last year or so, which enables software engineering teams to identify and measure and trend all the cool things that are going on in their spaces, ideally creating a lovely, healthy culture for them all. I'm using the framework to kind of reflect on my own time as a team as we grow it out as well. So this is what it's going to look like for the past two weeks. So, on the scores, productivity is four, enjoyment is four, teamwork is four, learning is four, and Serenity is two. Nearly got the full house there. Averages out at 3.6, which again is up north .4. Let's get into the details as to what's been going on. So I want to call out the Serenity because this was the kicker for me in the last couple of weeks. It was only on Friday or last week, I sent out a mail shot from button down to the mailing list to get some more feedback and provide a bit of an update. What's been going on over the past month? Mike street reached out and suggested that he was having problems with the form, the Google Toolkit form, the fact that he couldn't actually capture the data. So he followed the steps I provided on the toolkit, on the Google Sheet and the form wasn't showing. I was like, Hang on a minute, what's been going on here? So I jumped on a call with him quickly. We went through it in detail and it turns out it's something to do with permissions. So basically, I've not been testing this properly. Slap my wrist, naughty boy. I've been testing this on my own profile. I haven't checked it with a different profile, a different Google account. I've got a couple that have going around for different kind of projects and domains I've got going on. And when we looked at it from his perspective, we realized that he was unable to actually view the form that was created attached to the Google Sheet. Anyway, did a bit of digging around, little bit of research, and it turns out that you can actually hack the URL for sharing your sheet to append copy to the end. I sent that over to Mike to see if it helped. Game on. We're all good. So thankfully, it was an easy fix. I was panicking, though. That was my Serenity going through the roof over the weekend. I was like, I need to get to the bottom of this. It's really bothering me and I want some good wins out of the week. There's been a few things that I've been, like, chipping away at, but that was a bit of a fundamental one for me. He also called out on the email. I didn't put any links through to the toolkit or the website. Again, a little bit of a faux par on my side, but yeah, it was great to get that feedback from Mike, thankfully to understand that the toolkit wasn't quite working as I expected. Now it looks to be good. So if you are struggling to get the toolkit working have you not got in contact yet? Just have a play. I'm going to put a link in the show notes again. Go to the URL that's on the screen if you are watching this as well, it's Petals team slash Google toolkit. That should redirect you through to the copy view on Google and that should take a copy of the current template that is in place and the form that's attached to it and you can start playing with it yourself and then clear out any test data you want to play around with. The form responses tab is locked, so if you do start deleting rows, you'll get a little bit of a warning going, oh, are you sure about this? It's fine. It's only for test data at the moment. And when you start using it with your team, you probably won't want to touch that much. That's why that protected sheet is in place. Anyway, Serenity is coming back up to where it should be now. But yeah, that threw me out of the weekend and that was one of my big bugbears. Let's say I did get the cookie banner working as well. I talked about it previously. I got some feedback again from Mr. Wokie that was saying you need to get something on there, you're capturing email addresses. It's something I did forget about, to be honest. I found a third party solution called Osano on Asano.com. It's a free plan available just for low traffic websites. So I thought let's give it a go. It's a nice simple solution that should just drop into a website. They give you like a JavaScript embed line that you can attach to your website. Got that working with the next JS framework that I'm using. A little bit of configuration on their part, but then it looks like we're good now. So if you do see that cookie warning, I know they're not people's favorite things, but we do need to do this for GDPR and privacy. And let me know if you do encounter any problems with this. Hopefully that's it for now and if I do need to iterate, I will. But that's where we're at with that. Another thing I did mention previously, I had a good chat with Brian Sudo. Off the back of the last snapshot, we started talking about some of the user requirements and user journeys that might be required from a real dedicated Petals app. It's a great conversation that I had with him. We lasted way too long. We had a good chat about a lot of the scenarios and how it might work within teams, how the teams might be organized, who manages these things using that personalized data, lots of around a hierarchy as well from any organization, making sure it works in different environments. It's really cool. It was great to have a chat. I love these conversations. It really kind of pumps up my teamwork factor that I've got on petals. Let's have a listen to what we got into though.

We can also be super tight to start with and just say like if you are in the top level organization, you only see an average pedal score of everybody start with. And then when people are like, oh, but I want to have it broken out by department, okay, then we'll create an average pedal and then a pedal for each department and they're still all anonymized and then like, oh now maybe you only ever need to see because this is the other question we had. You really only never need to see one level below you.

And I think from a trust perspective for the team, you don't want them to kind of go all their personalized data leaking to the top. To be honest, a lot of people at the top won't even know these people are at the bottom anyway. You really want to go up a level to kind of go, I know who these people are or need to understand who might be and I can help them, I can influence them. The people at the top probably have less control but then would want to have an overall view exactly what are the trends for the whole organization? What are the trends for that specific team? If I need to, but I don't need to know who the scores are like so off the back of that conversation with Brian, I've outlined a very brief wireframe I've used Freeform in the iOS macOS Apple ecosystem just to quickly share. He's a big fan of Apple tools. And I was like, well let's have a play and see if it works. I was offline on the train, I was like, this might work. It's just a nice simple app. Can do some quick diagramming. And it was quite straightforward. You can got little mobile views that you can drag and drop stuff into and boxes and arrows and stuff like that. But yeah, I've got that wireframe out there. There's a quick flash for those that are watching this of what's going on with it. But basically we've got the foundations in place and then we're going to start building on this over the next probably a fair few months before we can get anything out for user testing. But yeah, it's great to get that ball rolling with Brian and I really kind of trust him to build the right thing for us on this. I'll be working with him on more of the front end and he's building a lot of the back end stuff and we can work out how that balance might follow through in the future. So, looking through the mailing list recently, I've managed to plug in, button down to Zapier and start getting that details into my own system that I could start using to organize and follow up with anyone that's using Petals. It's really quite interesting. I was going through some of the email addresses and you can see the domains attached to them and sort of oh, who's that? So I was just going looking at the organizations that are attached to the email addresses and see who is looking at Petals. Some pretty big names coming through now and it's quite reassuring to see that there's an appetite for using Petals in different organizations. There's a bit of a theme that was a lot of Medicare organizations as well, which is quite reassuring that they're thinking about health. Maybe there's a buzword in there somewhere that's caught their attention. But again, it's just a growing list, it's not huge. We're around the 30, 40 mark now, but it's nice that people are starting to look into this and it reminded me I did need to follow up with a few people, a few friends that have signed up that have got an interest. I want to touch base with them to see why Petals is appealing to them and maybe sort of work out how it could work for them and what sort of tools would benefit them in the future as well. Keep signing up, the Petals newsletter is there, you can go to Petals team and jump onto the subscribe list and then I can get in touch with you. There's some nice automation for me now just to organize those correspondences and I can follow up and actually create a relationship with people that subscribe to them in this run and just being a spam all message that goes out and I will be doing more regular newsletters. I've got like a monthly reminder at the moment and because it was summer months, there was less to talk about. But based off the back of this bug that I've identified in the Google toolkit, I want to kind of make sure that that message is getting out to the people that are interested. So for us, we've just completed our end of year cycle in our organization and it was an opportunity to kind of reflect on what we've achieved and what we want to do next and that sort of good stuff. A lot of companies probably go to the typical calendar year, so January through to December. And it got us thinking about, well, you've got an opportunity here to start reflecting and you could possibly introduce petals to some of your teams now where you've got three or four months left of the year to start getting that sense check going out, that sort of regular pulse and to ideally start to see the trends. So when it comes to year end, you got some substantial data to reflect on. Set up a retrospective with your teams or use it in your one to ones or whatever conversations you're having as a team and then really use that data. It's a great chance to kind of introduce Petals to your teams anyway. So I do encourage you to give it a go and reach out to me if you want any help with this. It's a very early proof of concept. It's something that's kind of growing organically, pardon the puns, but it is gaining traction and I don't want it to kind of be forced. A framework, which I think I've seen some organizations go down that route of. It's not for that. It's a framework that you can use as a team. And again, I've had someone reach out to me today going, not sure how I'm going to do this with my team and whether it's going to gain trust. And I'm like, well, you really need to work on your trust before you start asking questions like this. But maybe you can use a psychological safety radar or some very quick sort of heat map or a traffic light system to understand, are we feeling like we're in a safe zone today to talk about our feelings? So, yeah, it is a tool to use. It's a framework to use. It should not be hammered into people, but definitely experiment. I always encourage every engineering team to experiment with cool new things to see what works for them. Follow a bit of admin so I've actually submitted a talk to a localish meetup to talk about Petals, the journey it's been on, what I've built with this, and how it can benefit other software engineering teams. This is at DevOps Nottingham, which is about 50, 60 miles north from where I live. We're going to do it remotely. It's a hybrid event, so I can present from here from the comfort of my own home. I did consider going up, but I think the traveling logistics could get quite complicated. But it's a great opportunity for me to try and get the conversations going out in their public environment a bit more and ideally get some feedback, some sense checks from people that are curious about this in person, and a very little bit of admin for the website. So I've now set up a few redirects to the Spotify and YouTube channels. You can simply go to Petals Team slash Spotify for the Spotify feed or Petals Team slash YouTube to go through to the YouTube channel. Just convenience for me to quickly jump in and for anyone I want to share it with, I can just put it out there so they're there. Now there's simple redirects for people that want to use. And as I mentioned at the start as well, the Google Toolkit URL is now going through to the Copy landing page, rather than through to the actual template. One comment I did get from Mike said it would be great to have somewhere to play with this before creating your own. So I will have a look at creating a proper landing page at some time soon just to make sure that's clear and easy for people to get on board. There we go. It's been a pretty good two weeks again post summer holidays. It's all been getting back into the swing of things. Our ratings are looking pretty healthy now. Apart from that serenity. I want to try and maintain those highest scores for next time around and I'm going to try to invite someone else along to have a conversation with, see how they're using Petals or understand some of their challenges and bring them to the conversation as well. Do reach out to me for that conversation if you're interested. You can get me on most of Socials at sidejobling, you can get me on Masterdon as managingengineers. Net at site, you can email [email protected] or you can go to the website which hammered home today Petals dot team and just scan up through that for all the details. Thanks for following along and I'll be back with you in two weeks time with the next Petals snapshot.