PETALS Snapshot 2 - Launch feedback & personalised scores with Brian Suda

This is the second Petals snapshot by me. Side jobbling looking over the last couple of weeks of how productive and effective I've been with my side projects. So, just a quick reminder, what is Petals? Petals is a simple but very powerful framework that I've been developing over the past year or so to regularly reflect over previous iterations. Ideally looking for those observations and wins going forward. Think of it as a complement to your regular retrospectives in software engineering. So this time around, it's been two weeks since I launched Petals and it's time to look over the last couple of weeks of what I've been doing since then and how it's all gone down. Let's get into the scores. So this time it is productivity three, enjoyment three, teamwork four, learning four, serenity three with an average of 3.4. Let's go into the context as to why. So, as I said, it's been quite a moment since I launched the website. A couple of weeks back it went public and I got great engagement from the community, from the tech community, from friends, from peers, from all sorts of different angles. Put it out on the obvious places twitter and Mastered on. Got some great responses and feedback. Quite a few people signed up to the newsletter, which is great news. However, I realized further down the line that the mail server wasn't quite configured for the opt in emails. So quick fixes here and there to set up CNAME records in DNS and hopefully it should all be working now. If you are not receiving opt in emails though, do let me know and I will send a reminder to you to just make sure that you are verified. I don't need spamming people without any acceptance into the newsletter. Some of the great feedback though, there's good interest. Some people are asking around suggestions on what would work well. For example, why should they sign up for the newsletter? Why would they give away their email address? Maybe a very simple TLDR as to what it's all about. There is that opening section that talks about what it is and why I've created it. But again, just maybe a very simple elevator pitch like a one liner just to kind of simplify what that means. And someone did call out there's no privacy policy on there, which again was a bit of an oversight from my part and a technical difficulty for me to actually introduce. One, the current website is set up as a single pager. There's lots of NextJS kind of templates and components that are pulled into a single page. The way it's set up is not very straightforward to create extra pages. So I am currently working on a view update to that, making sure that the template is more easier to create new pages. At the moment, it's not quite there yet, so work in progress at the moment. Another very simple but overlooked thing that I noticed on the last YouTube video that went out was some emoji fail. So when I was creating the content in Descript, I was trying to use the emojis as part of the text, which I tend to do in the framework as well, just to kind of complement the labels for productivity, enjoyment, teamwork learning and serenity. However, when I exported that to YouTube from Descript there were some encoding failures and I think it might be down to the font that I've been using, the Geigu Google Font. So I'm going to take them out for now while I work out an alternative approach to that and I might even raise a bug with Descript to see if it's something they can understand underneath the hood as well. Something else that I've been going on this week on the Google Fonts point with Geigu I've also been working on the first version of the Google Suite toolkit. So what you will be able to get soon is a Google Sheet and form to capture all your data and analyse it within your teams. Got nearly got the first version ready for testing. I'll be putting it out over the next week or so because I want to get that out in July and then hopefully I can get some fast feedback on how that works. Because it might not be straightforward, I've created an opening slide just to explain what it's for and how to use it and then hopefully there's tooltips around each tab to use. But also I just want to make sure that it makes sense on how to use this thing. So that will be going out very soon. What I didn't realize in Google Sheets you can actually import Google Fonts. There's quite a simple search mechanism at the top of the font library and it was nice that I could bring in that consistency that I've got with a website using the same fonts that are on the website. So Gegu is headings and I think it's consoles or whatever your local monospace font is if you haven't got that one available. Anyway for brand consistency, it's really nice and I've also got the colors in there and the logos and stuff like that so it feels very petals using the kind of brand guidelines that I've developed with this project. Another thing I've done in the last couple of weeks, the Friday after I launched, I had a quick chat with old friend Brian Suda. He had some interesting ideas around the framework, wanted to understand it a bit more, but really how to build like a custom web app that we can use to then analyze the data as an individual, as a team and as an organization, like as a whole level view as well. He's done a lot of really interesting projects with data analysis over the last few years, so he's keen to share his knowledge around that. We've worked together in the past as well on some big data and third party integrations. But yeah, it was great to just have a chat with him actually, just to throw some ideas around, brainstorm some thoughts. He has some interesting ideas around some personal kind of reflections, like how you can use the Petals data from an individual perspective or take it to your line manager. So it's not fully anonymized, but from a team level view it would be. So I'm just thinking how we can maybe build that into the flow at some point to maybe extract your personal scores that you can then take to your own conversations with your line manager, with your peers, or offline with other team members. So it's an interesting angle to this because ultimately the Petals data should be in a comfortable place to talk about. However, when you are quite new to the role or you're not in psychological safe space, then maybe it's not straightforward. So it's something we have to be cautious of. Maybe think of introducing that as a next level to the whole system.

Yeah. The other two things I had, I wrote out is it charitable for one on ones? Is this something where it's anonymous and it should be anonymous, but at the same time it might be like, maybe I can see what I wrote down the last quarter.

Yeah.

And then if I go into a.

One on one, you can have personalized scores. And this is something I've also been playing around with some of the one on one.

How did you get on with your Petto score recently?

Do you want to talk about any of it?

And nine times out of ten, they'll.

Be like, sure, in a safe place for a manager, it's cool. And going back to the original goal, everyone should be open about their scores and happy to talk about them. So you could almost say, do you want to opt into opt out of anonymous, if you get me. So you can sort of go, I'm anonymous by default, actually, I'm my name and now you can record it against me and see my personal trends over.

Time and then we start seeing those sort of things over.

Yeah, but you could also sort of make it anonymous in the sense that, well, you control the back end, so.

It'S a bit tricky.

Exactly. If this was a product, we can store both right, which work out whether they want to show it or not. And that might be an interesting toggle for some teams.

Yeah, but also maybe even just for the manager, it's always anonymous. The person who submits the data can always log in and see what they submit.

As mentioned earlier, I do need to get to the bottom of the Privacy policy page, getting something out there. I might just add a disclaimer on the page for now, just so you can actually view that. But ultimately I want to get the website stack into a state where I can add new pages quite easily because at the moment it's only one page and it's not built for multiple pages yet. And to complement this content, I have set up a brand new podcast feed to syndicate the content. Primarily it is available on YouTube, but I am syndicating the content as audio through a podcast feed as well. If you are subscribed to my original like Psycast feeds or something like that, it will be duplicated on that. I don't want to lose that feed, I don't want to kind of neglect it either, but I want to create a separate Petals feed purely for this content. So it's more searchable and indexable for anyone who's looking for this as well. So you will be able to find this on the popular podcast apps. When I've got that all confirmed and configured, it's still work in progress. Got too many things going on at the same time at the moment, so I'm mindful that I'm overdoing it, but still I don't want to be in a situation where things aren't ready. So the good thing with doing podcasts, it's recommended that you build up your content over a few releases before you start announcing it because otherwise it looks like a one single episode podcast. Ultimately this is going to be ongoing for I don't know how long, but at least a good six months and I want to make sure that the content feed is set up correctly. You can subscribe just to petal content rather than through all the other things that I might be doing to complement this as well. On that point, I have been distracted with a few other little side projects this last couple of weeks. Nothing big, but a bit of blogging here and there. My other music podcast that I have took up a lot of time last week, so I didn't get the time to spend on Petals as much as I'd like to. So hopefully that sets context as to why my scores have dipped a little bit in this snapshot. As I say, it's not bad. There's a good score of 3.4 overall, so I'm not completely upset about this and lots of great stuff going on but nothing necessarily finished. And that actually goes into one of the blog posts I put out there called Don't Be Arthur. I'll put a link in the show notes so you can see what the hell I'm on about going forward for the next couple of snapshots. I am going to be on shorter iterations as I go into the summer months, so I've got a ten day iteration coming up after this one goes out. Before I take my first holiday. I'm back for a week to do a bit of stuff and then I'm off for another week after that. So it's going to be a bit reduced cadences at the moment. I'm still going to make sure something goes out, even if it's very, very quick. If you are subscribed on YouTube, it may be a very quick short instead of an actual snapshot. And if you're on the podcast feed and things go a little bit quiet, that will be why. Anyway, I just want to give you a bit of context as to what's coming up and hopefully I'll get back into a better rhythm further down the line when it go into autumn, obviously. Get in touch if you are interested in all this stuff, go to the Website Petals team to see what's going on. Sign up to the newsletter if you want to get hold of that Google toolkit when it's released later this month, email me [email protected] or or hit the socials with Outside job link on most of them. All the details are in the show notes for later on. Thanks for watching and listening and I'll be back in a couple of weeks.