PETALS Snapshot 4 - Content updates and observing trends with Myles Sanigar

This is the fourth Petals snapshot with me side joblin talking about all the latest progress and updates all around the Petals framework. Very brief reminder as to what Petals is all about. It is a framework I've been building over the last year or so that fundamentally address and highlight the culture and health of our software engineering teams. It's something I've been working on, I'm going to continue working on, and I'm really keen to get more people trying it out.

So this is the next update.

Since I took a holiday, not much has really happened, but I am keen to keep up the cadence of this content, make sure that I'm being held accountable to those changes that I might want to make. And I'm really keen to try and get back into the rhythm of making stuff, making those changes and addressing all the feedback that comes back from it. So with all that in mind, here come those scores. Productivity is two, enjoyment is four, teamwork is three, learning is two, and Serenity is five. Average overall of about 3.2, which is up zero four on last time. Let me explain what's been going on. So as those scores allude to, they are quite low compared to previous iterations, but that was expected with my summer break and holiday time. This is quite normal with all software engineering teams, especially around this time of year. So I'd always expect any software engineering team to get some lower scores. From productivity perspective, maybe. From a teamwork perspective, however, it does allow you to improve the enjoyment, get a little bit more time for learning and potentially improving Serenity. For me personally, it was wonderfully chilled out. I took a couple of weeks off, spread out with the family, one little break in Greece and a break up in Skegness. So there you go. Bit of a mix, but it was all good fun and it allowed me some downtime, which I needed, but also some opportunities to really reflect and think about what was next with Petals and all my other little side projects I got going on. So there we go. It's lower scores, but overall it's quite a little slight increase because of the serenity enjoyment I've got from having some time out. In between the breaks and holidays, I did find a little bit of time to chip away at some of the smaller pieces I wanted to work on. I had some content updates, kind of suggestions from a friend called Mr. Wookie who was on the Make Life podcast with me last year. He went through the Privity policy and scrutinised it and called out some improvements. So he sent them over and I've been working through them. Still a few more need to address, but I'm getting there and chipped away at that. I've been working on a sticker design as well. As part of this whole movement, this project. I like to build the awareness up. I'm always a sucker for a sticker. Every side project I have gets a sticker that I can dish out to people that are interested. The logo is beautiful for this. Would love to just go with that. I think it's a bit too plain though. It doesn't give the message that I want to get across. It might start conversations, which is great, but if I want to grow the awareness, people won't know what that means. So I need to work out how.

To get some text in there without.

Being overpowering a couple of ideas going around. So what I'm going to do is put those images out there and get some votes back. I'd like to get some feedback and any suggestions if you think there's anything better to do. So in the show notes or on the screen right now, you'll see the two options I'm playing with right now. Get back to me and tell me which one you think works best. And I'm not going to rush this, but I do want to make sure it's done very nicely and I want something that I can be really pleased and proud to hand out when I'm talking to people about petals. I've also been looking at some Zapier automation with our Button Down email newsletter list. So Button Down integrates directly with Zapier, which is like a great tool for integrating with other platforms. It's like no code solution to do some really cool sort of automation. I've used Zapier for a lot of other projects in the past, like my personal dashboards and to kind of hook together some of the different services around for me, I just want to kind of get into that habit of how do I get that data into something that I can use and keep on top of. They send automatic emails for new subscribers, for example. But I want to get into the detail of actually talking to these people so I can automate that process somehow. I don't want it to be like an automated autoresponder sort of thing, but I do want to sort of get that email ready so I can at least go in there and start opening that conversation up with everyone. That subscribes to the mailing list. Understand why they've subscribed to the list. Ideally, find out what their challenges might be and how petals might help them. So I do want to have a direct connection with everyone that subscribes. And the list is growing nicely now. I'm getting to a better rhythm and the signups are getting better and better. So if I can automate that process.

Somehow, that'll be great.

So I'm currently looking into how Zapier can help with that. It might not, but Button Down has got a lot of automation under the.

Hood that I can play around with as well.

I noticed on the mailing list an old colleague I worked with has signed up. He's moved over to a company called Doxy, which is like an online Medicare sort of solution. So I've jumped on a call with him to understand what challenges he might be facing at the moment and how Petals might be able to help. Let's have a listen to what he says.

Because of all this change and because of I'm spinning up a new team as well, a bit more of an internally facing team. I've introduced Petals to the other EMS after using it a bit asos just to record data for now. So the plan is we operate within Sprints. So every sprint we're recording the five petals and eventually we'll use that data for something. For now, why? I'm just using it as a reference point to see we've just missed a couple of our sprint goals. We've just had some bad news that someone's leaving or there's a new starter, some event has occurred and do we see a trend there in last sprint school to this sprint scores? And for me that's just informative. I don't think anyone within product teams is actually looking too closely. No one else within the business is looking too closely. But eventually we can use that data to then track over time and say we'll look at this shift. Here's the point where we reorganized everything. People, I'm expecting to say people weren't particularly happy. They were stressed out, they didn't feel productive. But then hopefully we'll see those things climb over time. As ownership is built, autonomy is built and resettled into this new working model. That's the plan. It could go in completely opposite direction, but I'm happy to be proven either way.

Sure. So at the moment it's literally a data capture model that you're using to kind of gauge any trends and hopefully.

See some upward lifts over time.

There's sort of markers in time. Are you sort of annotating the data somehow to call out you start a.

Lever project or whatever it might be?

Yeah. Not to the date, but within every retro that we capture, all the notes are captured in Confluence. So it's just put against that recording of here's the score for that two weeks.

So you're doing it an individual level every two week cycle, give or take.

How are you storing it?

Where's that data going at the moment?

So it's anonymized so I capture it all in Google forms.

Okay, cool.

The one that you created yogs ago, actually. And then I average all of those together and then just shove them in the Confluence page for each sprint that we capture. So it'd just be an average of like 3.67, 4.1, whatever it works out to be.

Okay, so how long you been doing this for now?

As interest?

Just over three months. I think I ran I didn't run the first retro for when I came in. I've been running them since I came in. So yeah, three months.

You got about five or six pieces.

Of data so far in that time.

Yeah.

And have you noticed any trends or anything that's looking?

I've noticed, yes, some dips down and then coming back up again here and there where there's been noticeable shift in people or like a big decision has been made around.

One other area I want to work on in the next couple of weeks is to tidy up some of that extra work that I was talking about with the content and privacy policy. There's some pieces under there I need to get in my head around.

So we need to put a cookie.

Message and banner on the website because I'm capturing some data. I want to make sure I'm using the right solution for that. I can either build it myself in NextJS or there might be some third party solutions that will make it easier. I'm just went up the options that work best for me right now. So it's not overcomplicated, but it's on there because I appreciate that it's quite important to get that covered early on rather than neglecting it. And the next email shots should be going out by the end of the month. Again, I just want to kind of remind people that that Google toolkit is out there, try and get some feedback from how people are using it, offer some sort of advice maybe, and some consultation time to jump on a call with them and understand how it can help. And I will also put some reminders out there about this content that I've been putting out because this is going out every two weeks a month in the newsletter, can pull in the last couple of episodes that have gone out. So that's the plan around the next email. So, as you've probably gathered, it's not been a bad couple of weeks since the last time. Not as productive as I'd like, as maybe as expected, but it's definitely making small progress here and there where I can. And ideally now coming out of the summer months, I can focus a bit more and get some of the good stuff going and find out how people are using Petals and how Petals can help their software engineering teams improve their general health and culture. Reach out to me if you want to know more about Petals. You can get hold of me on all the socials as at [email protected] as it is now. And you can obviously join the website Petals team to find out a lot more about what's going on. And I'll be back in two more weeks to talk about what I've been working on, all those challenges I've faced along the way, and ideally, how we are helping other software engineering teams improve their general health. Speak to you next time.