This is the third Petals snapshot with me. Side jobbling, talking about how Petals the framework is evolving over the past couple of weeks and reflecting on some of the good stuff and challenges I found along the way. Brief reminder what Petals is all about if you've not heard about it before. It's a framework I've been developing over the past year or so that allows software engineering teams to regularly reflect on some key factors and making them a really powerful and effective team and ideally encouraging the conversations along with it. Go and take in some of the previous snapshots to get an idea of what I've been doing with it so far. But this one is going to talk about the last couple of weeks of what's been going on. So let's do the scores for the past two weeks. Productivity is two, enjoyment is three, teamwork is three, learning is three, and serenity is three. Lots of threes brings out the average of about 2.8, which is down zero six on last time, I was having.

A one to one with one of my engineers, and we went down this kind of route of, are you really enjoying the work?

Are you satisfied with what you're doing? What is it?

And it led up to this question where I said, Where is your happy place? And it got me thinking about being a child, almost. Where is your ultimate friendly place? Where do you feel your best and at your best, where are you really content? Or do you really enjoy your being? And it made me think this is a really powerful question to use when you are in those conversations, those difficult conversations, maybe, where you just get in nowhere with someone. It presented some really interesting topics for this individual. We started deep diving into coding and pairing and mentoring, and that seemed to be his real happy place. I was like, this is cool. So I blogged about this. I put a post out on my own blog sitejoblin.com about Work is your Happy Place.

And I was just getting a little.

Bit more context as to why enjoyment is so important as part of Petals. It's not a case of just going to work, doing your job, being productive, and getting out. Are you actually enjoying your work? And can we try to capture any of those moments where there's a significant drop or any potential trends going down? What can we do to make sure people bring in their joy to the work they do? So that's where enjoyment comes from.

Let me explain what's been going on. So, as I said last time, I've been working on this Google toolkit for teams that are wanting to start using Petals in their situations, in their personal cycles, and on the Google suites, which a lot of teams have got access to. If they haven't, it's quite free to use anyway. So I spent a lot of time building this and refining it, getting it ready to go live. I launched it to the Mailing group this past week, sent it out as a mail shot through button down on the subscriber list. It's growing, but I've invited those early adopters along to test toolkit out and see how they get on with it. Now what I wanted to do actually was create a very brief landing page to explain the Google toolkit, but then I realized I just wanted to get the thing out there. It's just creating more blockers, giving this to the people that want to use it. So basically I just set up a quick redirect it's from the website straight through to the Google sheet and then it gives you instructions on there on how to use it. Now that is available at Petals TV Toolkit. Details are in the show notes and people are starting to use it. And it's great because I love to see how people are using it and if it's actually making sense. The instructions should be quite self explanatory. But as with all these things, there are going to be bugs and little challenges to make sure it works right. Anyway, that's out there. Now I gave the early adopters early access because I wanted them to get that power and that value of being on the subscriber list and now I'm putting it out to everyone else that is following along. The details are in the show notes and I'll put it out on the socials later this week as well. What got me thinking about writing that email is the art of writing a good email newsletter. Now we all get them, we all know how much we hit the sleep button, we all know how long and boring or pointless they can become across. I don't want it to be that. I'm trying to set an example that this is going to be sort of a monthly newsletter looking back over the past month of what's actually happened. And I want to get the language right. It's from me, it's not from an organization, it's not from a brand or anything like that. There is a brand tone, but it's generally how I sound. So I wanted to make sure that language is in there. I wanted to add a bit of color and style to this as well, making sure it's consistent with what I'm building on the whole experience. So I made sure there's some images in there, some suitable emojis, make sure the length wasn't too long, but it was enough to get the message across. So I'm hoping that it's actually engaging. Again, you don't get much response from this stuff, but if you have read the email or if you are curious and want to read the archives, it is available at petalsteam. There's some archive links on there to read. The previous episode, previous edition. I did get some comments from friends that are following along as well. Mike on the Side community mentioned that he didn't receive the email. But I think we have some problems with the early implementation on the configuration with all the DNS settings. I sent out the email and then I followed up some opt in reminders. So I think he just missed that email that went out. But I do want to hear back from anyone who's not getting this email that have subscribed because I want to make sure that it's getting out there. I can see there are some opens, but I don't think it's as many as it could be. So again, just really want to hear back from people that are taking in the email newsletter. I did look at some alternative newsletter tools as well. Mailerlite was one that came up looking across the market. I wanted to avoid MailChimp. I don't need that scale and that massive sort of toolkit. Mailerlite is free up to a thousand subscribers, which is enough for me to get started and make sure that I'm getting the framework out there. But when I played around with the UI and looked at the features and the differences, it wasn't worth migrating and changing my mindset and the tool in the process. So still in button down, just making sure that works well for me. Earlier this week, I also had a great chat or email chat with an old DJ friend, Paul Velocity. He's introducing Petals to his engineering teams. He works over in Vancouver now, and he's working with engineers from across the globe, over in Asia and across the States and some in Europe. And he's trying to work out how you can facilitate Petals in a global remote team setup. It's something that I've not really considered yet because I've not had to. It's always been localized or on site or in the same time zone, so it's easier to facilitate. However, when you have got that distributed team set up, it's really hard to kind of have that conversation around the Petal scores, which is the critical part of it. What he's been doing so far is using his one to ones with his engineers to understand how they're getting on with the Petals dimensions. And what he would like to see as well is like a live rolling score of how the team are getting on generally. So that's something I was like, I like the idea of, but I'm really struggling to get to that point of how do you have the conversation around the topics? I asked if he has retrospectives with his teams. It's normally at the end of a project, which makes sense. So maybe that's an opportunity to spend like 15 minutes on the project retrospective to pull out the scores over time and talk about what you can do to make those improvements going forward. I also thought about the idea of maybe having like an async thread in a constant app like Slack or Teams so you can sort of have those scores coming in, and when everyone's got their scores in, you share them and start just adding little points, going, oh, why were you a three? Or Why were you a two? Oh, what great to see the four and fives, what's going on there so you can maybe use comms apps to facilitate these asynchronous conversations. What I want to do when I eventually get around to building the app is to allow it to integrate into chat apps like Slack teams and all the other good stuff like that. So that's something for me to bear in mind in the future. But for now, what I would recommend is just looking at how to capture the scores in a conversation, even if it's a one to one or a very small sample group as a team, and then maybe sharing those scores out on the dashboards to the rest of the team to then start using async tools to have the conversations around them. I was also having a great chat with an agile coach the other day, and he mentioned that he's moving over to New York soon, and he mentioned that he loved the idea of taking Petals to his next role. But it's wonderful to hear those sort of little comments going, oh, yeah, I love the potential with Petals. I want to take it to my next job. I want to take it to my next gig, my next role. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that kind of extends and see how they integrate it into those New York organizations. It's just these little sound bites. And also noticed a friend from Google is curious about Petals. It's just seeing those little names dropping into the mailing list or coming out through conversations make me realize there's a lot of potential with this framework. And it's wonderful to hear the names being dropped. I'm not all about the brand engagement, but to hear that the concept is capturing their imagination and realizing actually, are we having these sort of conversations? Is it something we could introduce? And just really it's not just down to a single place and how it can work there. Great to hear that. And again, if I do hear any other comments from other people, I'd love to invite you along to talk about how you're using Petals in the future. Maybe we can have a conversation and put it out there on this feed of content. So on the content and on the socials last video I made, I started playing around with the YouTube thumbnails. I know this is quite a big thing. Now you make sure you've got an engaging, simple thumbnail available on your video. So I started playing around with some tools to get that working, and I managed to create a nice one using Adobe Express, which removed the background from the video call I had with Brian, I could identify a frame that looked good for him as best as I could, actually. And then I could use the current brand styles and guidelines that I've got from all the other content to kind of create that. So, yeah, I recommend Adobe Express to remove backgrounds. It's free to use and you don't get charged. There's a lot of other tools and apps out there that do this for you, but for different levels of quality. I was like, Actually, I like the Adobe suite generally, so it's nice that it's all integrated into that. And the podcast feed has now been set up directly from the website. If you go to Pezles Team Slash podcast, that takes you to the RSS feed for all the RSS podcast content. This is available in Apple, Spotify and all those other popular podcast apps. But just to get the feed, the Raw feed, that's what you can put in your app now. So there we go. It's not been a bad iteration. It's not that I've not achieved much, but that hopefully explains where I'm coming from with all those lower scores from the previous efforts. I am going to be taking a break now, just for the summer. I'm going on holiday tomorrow and I'll be away on and off for the next couple of weeks. So I don't want to commit to doing anything excessive, but when I am around, I will be chipping away on little things here and there around Petals, and ideally just capturing that sort of feedback from people that are using it. So do reach out and let me know if you have used Petals or how you're getting on with it. Send me your little comments, your questions, when I get an email at webmaster at petals team. I love it. It makes me realize someone's having to play with it and a little bit of endorphins kicks in to hear from real people about who's using this. Do get in touch. I'm on the socials as well at Psy on the Bird site. I've got the managingengineers net at Psy for Masterdon and then everywhere else. LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever, Instagram. I'm across all of them. So just reach out, give me a shout, even put it in the comments on YouTube if that's easier for you. And I'll be back later. In all us with the next snapshot. It will be the foot. This is the third, will be the fourth one, and we'll get back into the rhythm of some regular content after the summer break. Thanks for listening and watching and I'll be back later.