Snapshot 17 - Launching the redesigned PETALS app

This is the 17th petal snapshot and this is the big one. We have gone live with a whole new redesign that I've been talking about for the past year. Not really that long. But for the best part of all this content, we've been working away at the redesigned app and we're finally getting there. So I'm going to do things a.

Little bit differently today.

I'm going to just record a few bumpers to go around, but I've actually recorded content around the actual launch. I did like some B roll for before the launch. I recorded the whole launch as well. And then I'll do a bit of a wrap up afterwards as well. So I'm going to keep it short today and we're going to jump straight in to how I felt immediately before the launch.

Okay, so today is the day after what seems like years really. It's not been, it's actually three years since the original idea of a product on a page, pretty much to the week. We're going to flip the switch on the Petals app. On the brand new Petals app. We've had the prototype out there for a while now. I think it was last summer.

We put something out and it started.

To gain users and functionality and the functionality is there, so we knew that the concept was okay. But I was never quite happy with the, the visuals, the designs and all that sort of good stuff. So with Brian and Adrian, over the past, I want to say four or five months we've been chipping away at a brand new design, refining the flow a little bit and the functionality and today we are going to launch to the public. We've had it in beta for, I don't know, probably a few months now as well. Just tried it ourselves, eating dog food as they say in the tech startup world. But now it's time to get some real food eaten. So at 9 o' clock this morning, I want to launch the app. I want to tell some users and onboard them, make sure that they're happy with it. And then we're going to announce properly next week. But today is exciting and scary in all the feels, this will be quite a moment for me. It's my first real product that I'm launching after being in the game for many, many years. And I was just redoing a book about startups and the reality of startups. How the illusion of tech Bros is not necessarily all that. It's actually the exception. Most successful startup founders are in their late 30s, early 40s, so that's reassuring. They say it's because it's based on more experience and confidence and risk awareness. You're looking for opportunities that you've actually lived. And this is where I feel like Petals has come from. I've worked in the tech game for 20 plus years now and now I'm a leader and trying to look after teams and manage projects and all that sort of thing. And now we're in a more hybrid, remote world. That's why I've seen the opportunity with Petals. Yes, the concept is a freebie. It's not necessarily tied to a product, but the product is an outcome where we can refine it and use our vision and our technical skills and our ideas to make it a real world thing. I want to save the rest of the speech for our launch party, which I'll be doing in a few weeks time. I did plan something for tomorrow but.

I decided against it.

I put, I put teasers out. I've got some feelers, a couple of people signed up, which was lovely, but I was like, it's not quite the big bang I want to go for.

So I'll build the hype a bit.

More, I think, and make sure that we make a bigger presence of it all and do some launch plans on the. A lot of the apps and socials as well. So you've done it properly. Not just hacking away at a quick win, more for quick wins when you can, but like the app, I'm like, nah, I won't do this properly anyway.

It's going to be a good day.

It'S going to be exciting and hopefully not too problematic.

I'm ready for the problem.

So I've always integral long enough. I know.

So it is the moment I'm going to launch the Petals redesigned app. We've had the app going out there for probably about a year now, give or take. It was an initial prototype that I built with Brian and then I was really keen to give it a proper design effort, redesign and change some of the functionality, make it a bit more streamlined. So over the past, say, five, six months, we've been working together with Atride as well to get this over the line and with their encouragement, we are going to flip the switch this week. I made a few font changes yesterday just to make sure things were working. We got all the relief branch ready, so now I just want to go live. It's two minutes to nine on Thursday 8th May, so I plan to do this for nine o' clock and that's why I was like, yeah, let's record this and see how it goes though I am screen recording as well. So you'll probably see my face here now as well. I'm just going to keep this one going. Other sort of be be cut. Right. So as you can see, this is the current app. Yeah, it works. It's relatively clean. And as you can see the. The footer even said 2024. We got. Get with the times, man. Let's get the 2025 liquor paint going on. Boosting the production environment. What we did yesterday, Brian and I went through the code in cursor. We made sure that we got all the branches merge. Original approach we wanted to take was literally merge staging to master. As we did that we realized, wow, there's some conflicts and it was difficult to understand in GitHub cause there's about 500. Yeah, you can see here 5000 files have changed. It was struggling to flag the conflicts so we decided to take a different angle and went into my local version and you can see here, not there, but if you see in cursor. So I basically went to staging branch. I pulled. Well, I went to main. Pull that down, merged it into staging. So we had the latest main to staging. Resolved any conflicts. There were a couple minor ones that were really easy to fix and then we made sure staging was up to date by doing that. We've also got this pull request open on GitHub. So it's all up to date. I was checking this morning. The last update was. Yeah, last night. So we did it. I just did a little bit of housekeeping. Took out some of the old tracking that we were using. Not necessarily anymore. We did its auto deployments to dev and I can see in our dev environment that we are all up to date. Ignoring the prompts here. This is the new login page which takes you to the registration as well. It's got the. I know it's up to date because these icons were added very recently and just make sure it works.

So let's just log in.

Great. And I know I've got the latest version because this welcome message was relatively fresh as well. I know it's not logging in so this is on dev. Now I'm going to go back to our PR and I am going to merge the pull request. I did have a check yesterday so I'm not preemptively there. This is deployed to dev. I'm going to. Yeah, merge. We are from staging to main. The big one. I know this is not the most verbose one, but I'm just going to. I Want to get it in there now? Hopefully no errors. Okay, cool. So progress successfully merged and close.

Wow.

Okay, cool. So that is pull request done. Main had recent pushes that are less than. Yeah, here we go. So let's go back to code and switch to main. Let's do a bit of housekeeping in this. Once we tidy it up, there's a load of dead branches that just need deleted. Cool. Made recent pushes 24, 7 seconds ago. So that should mean in Heroku, on the production environment we are deploying automatically. Let's have a look at the activity. There we go. Building progress. If that's successful, it's deploying and building progress. What's one of those messages?

Weird.

The ordering of them. Then we should see in a moment. Is this looking like that? So we'll go. We'll see how it goes in a moment. I also check. Yeah, the build is successful. Brilliant. So that's deploying. We also checked yesterday. We've got some environment variables here. I'm not going to reveal them because there's some secrets in there, but at least I know they're correct and I've got the reference there that we're deploying still. The other thing we had to double check yesterday was roll back to here. If there are any problems, we'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed. This all just happens now because it's the first main release to Main. It's going to be. You might have a few hiccups in the process, but it's going okay. Not complaining so far. I also made sure that I've got the right metrics in place. We're using post hog to track users usage, what's going on. So let's have a go back to Heroku. We are still deploying. Exciting, isn't it? I wanted to do it at 9am on Thursday because people are starting work today. It's a good day to do changes and releases. Fridays you can. You should be able to. Especially smaller fixes. I'm not a big fan of big changes on Fridays, but the other advantage is social media. Posts are a lot more engaging and responsive on Thursdays for my parents. I've done some research into this before as well. Tuesdays and Thursdays are quite popular for podcasts and social media though. I am going to mark this occasion on LinkedIn later today. Hopefully get a few more likes and follows on that and other things. This deployment's taking a while, isn't it? Let's just double check. It's not cached. Still going. Oh, it's Deployed. Okay, cool. So if I go to that. Yay, error. Great. So there is a thing here that I'm mindful might be causing this and it's a very funky one. I don't want to show too much because I'm going to reveal some stuff here. I was worried about this. Let's try this because we've noticed in some of the local builds, capitals debug, refresh. Still an arrow. Right. I'm going to need Brian on this. There might be something in activity. It's hard to know where to look here, but I think he's got full access to logs and I don't necessarily know where to look. That's interesting. Right. I'm going to roll back and try again later. Let's do a rollback.

Worth a try though, wasn't it?

So I managed to catch up with Brian on the failing errors on the production website. It was a very simple fix that I thought it might be in the end anyway. So we just had to set some environment variables explicitly call out a debug variable. There's something funky going on in the code that we can't work out why it's required. But end of the day we are now up and running. So this is our new production environment. I'll just show you the journey from logging in. Typical sort of login. Do my thing. Yep. So I'm gonna log in with that account and you'll get this welcome message. Great. Welcome to the new design. A little bit of functionality, but you can always get in touch with our support network here. What you can see straight away is what your latest team petal scores look like and what your personal scores were for that as well. Not always the same, but generally there will be. So you generally see. Okay, well, I got. I voted five for productivity, but the team brought it down to 3.5.

I did a lot of five.

Literally just did one to test it out for launch. I can jump straight through. I'll get a few snapshots of how many I've done so far. Any teams I'm involved in, I'm across quite a few. Most people would just be involved in one. And we can jump straight into that snapshot to see the general flower for the whole team, how it compares to previously participation rate. So just in case people are missing or can't make it. And then we go through the team data tab, which gives you a better matrix of how the team scored across the board. It is anonymized, so you don't necessarily need to name and Shame, everyone, but at least you can say, oh, I'm number two, and I'll talk about why I've given those scores again. Another detailed view of the differences between the current scores and last time. So we can see productivity has actually dropped a little bit. Enjoyment's dropped a little bit, but teamwork has gone up a little bit. Serenity is probably the best one. It's gone up. I need to check. There's a little bug there I need to fix. Yeah, I want to capture that while I see it, because that is wrong. It's down one, but it's saying plus prefix. Anyway, you get to see now the scores and the deltas, and if you've made any notes for your team lead, you can see them here. We didn't this time. What we also encourage, as well as part of a new snapshot, when you go back to your team view, you get last five snapshots, a glance of how it's looking over time, and then a nice chart as well, which is interactive. You can see. Oh, let's just focus on the averages. Double click that. Okay. It's coming down a little bit at the moment. Let's just. Productivity, that's definitely going up. Double click. You can zoom in and do all this good stuff and then literally take a. Save it as a PNG as well. Even better. So you can drop that into whatever you want to use and then you can just jump into these snapshots, which is quite nice. Back to the dev team again. You can quickly create a new snapshot as well. So starting your snapshot, give it a name. We'll give you some suggestions. Automatic counter on there. Who's in it? If someone's unavailable, then you can do it to take them out. And if you want, you can say, I want to do it in the next 24 hours. Want to do it in the next two days or over a week, you know, depending on how your team's set up. Default is normally within 24 hours. You want to get it straight away. But appreciate not every team is the same. But when you hit that, I'll take these two out just for demo purposes. It's ready. You get a nice big banner saying, it's open. We've got the rotating gray flower to show it's not ready yet. I can go in, give my scores. No, I'm not. It's been a pretty productive morning. Really enjoyed myself. Teamwork's been fantastic. Learned a few things. So I'll bring that up to a three. Maybe a serenity. Yeah, let's hover around the middle mark. It's not been very. Let's add a little note though. Launch happened with a few bugs booked. Works amount demo time and and then for my team lead, I am the.

Team lead so it's a little bit.

Different but it's limited to view just by to whoever is leading your team. Right. Ah, fix that bug on the learning delta. Save your scores. Just tells you you've updated and you can still update them if you want. All participants are in so I can close it early and then you can see my scores are pretty good. It's a bit different when you do it for yourself, but obviously at least you've got the record for your team then as well and that comes into the latest shot there. So there we go.

We are good.

We are live. I'm quite satisfied with where it's at now. I can relax this week now make a few notes of what I want to do next week and we'll also elaborate on this a bit more in the snapshot for next week as well. In the meantime, if you are an active user, please let me know what.

You think, send me some thoughts and.

Comments, maybe even use the little chat window on the bottom corner.

I will be on hand.

I'll get push notifications to my phone if you ever start that. So it's pretty instant and we'll work on the next version, the next few features which will include more team level details, some more visualizations that are easier for you to use and then we are working towards the enterprise plan which will be ready in the summer.

So there we have it. The app went live to fanfare, but I did get some initial feedback from Mike, one of our regular followers and loyal users, behind the scenes to tell me what's been going on. He gave us some interesting feedback, some useful ideas and it's added to the backlog. So it's good news. We didn't do the launch party as originally planned, but I want to do that properly.

I think we'll do something in June.

When we've got a bit more time to process what's been going on. If you are following this journey though, keep following along. I'll be continuing to do this every two weeks. I want to shake the format up a little bit though. I like the fact there's been a.

Bit of a story to this episode.

But I'd prefer to hear from the followers if that is actually resonating. Obviously it's quite a pivotal moment, so probably have better engagement anyway. But at the same time. I'm playing with different ideas here. I like to keep things fresh and try to keep it on top of it, but I am doing this for you, not me. Get in touch Email me Site Petals Team to let me know what you think. Sign up to the app Obviously if you go to App Petals Team that will take you into the new login page with user registration that's free to everyone Right now our goal for the next quarter season is to look at a commercial version, so we're not sure what is involved with that yet. We've got some ideas. The free version gives you plenty to do and to understand how the content works and make sure that you've got the right data to play with with your teams. We're looking at like enterprise startup models as well to see what those demographics actually need. So watch this space but do let me know what features we can introduce.

To this new design, what we're missing.

Any bugs you might see. Always love to hear about the books so we can fix them quickly based on user need. That's it and I'll be back in two weeks with another petal snapshot what's been going on behind the scenes. Take care and look after your teams.

Sam.