How should leaders be using Puzzle's data? This is something that I've recently been discussing with other leaders and it got us all thinking about the importance of how data can be misused, but also the importance of whether it's work or non work related. This is something I want to bring to the community, so let's discuss it in the 16th petal snapshot. Okay, we are back in the two weekly cadence. So obviously not as regular as we used to have it, but hopefully a little bit better quality and it gives me more space and time to actually focus on product. All that said and done, I am keen to get back into this and bring you some regular content. So as you can tell, we are on that two weekly snapshot now. I've got rid of the word weekly. Made no sense. So we're going back to snapshots and as you can tell, weather is beautiful. I thought I might as well record this outdoors, make the most of it. So before we get into all the details, let's do some of them scores. Productivity is 4, enjoyment is 5, teamwork is 5, learning is 4 and serenity is 4. Overall average of 4.4, which is a huge jump from last time from 3.4. A lot. This comes down to the fact that I am feeling a lot more productive because I'm getting more work done. The teamwork is brilliant because if we are facing problems, we're literally solving them pretty much straight away, not waiting for the weekly checkpoints. Address a lot of our bugs that we've had in the pipeline as well and in the backlog and also some of the little improvements we want to apply before we go live next week. I said that right. We are going to go live next week. So the plan is to tidy up all the loose ends this week. There are a couple, but nothing that's major and significant. Get everything ready to go live next week and we'll switch it on to a select few next Monday. It is a back holiday, so we will give us the space to actually make sure we have some downtime, but it also allows us to make sure that things are working before people return to work on the Tuesday uk. Obviously not everywhere. It's exciting though, and the pressure is hitting. Serenity will probably be taking a bit of a hit next time though, so I'm planning for it. Hopefully it won't be too bad, but as you know, with all these things, when things go live it can be quite stressful. I think everyone's used to that whenever they do a big project that goes Live, but I'm still learning loads. Even this morning I was doing a bit of pairing with Brian and working out how Django pulls data through and how we map it together. Every day is a school day and especially when you're working with tech, it should be right. So, yeah, the app's coming together nicely. I've made sure that this, the design is good, in a good place as well. I'm very particular with designs. Nothing's ever perfect, but I want to make sure that there's plenty of breathing space around all the elements that are on the page, making sure that the journey is clean and seamless. I'll never be perfectly happy with this, but the guys who love playing with this are going, it works, man, just ship it. And even back to a point we had last week when I was thinking, I'm not ready, they're like, you can do this, come on. So having two people to just sense check me on these things, do I need to do these things or am I just wanting to do them, is a nice way to make sure that we are focused on the right things. Some other big news, actually. We have been featured in another book, so this one hasn't been published yet. It's early days, but I have got wind of the fact that it is coming. It's about design leadership and they've talked about how they use Petals for distributed teams to make sure that their teams are happy. They're actually being productive and learning and I'm actually improving retention in the organization as well. So it's really reassuring to hear another story where Petals is working well, getting it into print and getting that love out there to the rest of the community for them to understand how Petals can work for them as well. So early days, I will do proper announcements when I can, but again, I'm just really kind of reassured that we're doing something right here just to make sure that teams are thinking about Team Hell. Leaders are seeing the potential in this as well, but also how we can get everyone bringing Petals to their conversations. So, as I mentioned earlier, we are getting ready to go live. We're going to roll out to some existing users to see how they find it, but we're also going to invite some brand new users along as well to make sure that we are providing journeys for both new and existing users. So if you want to get up that beta list, make sure you reach out, send me a comment or, you know, reach out on the socials, send us an email siteetools team and I'll make sure that you get that early invite and then you can start playing with our brand new app from next week when we go live. So let's bring back to that original question about leadership. How should leaders be using data from Petals? I was in a session recently where we were looking at teams across a department and we were using team health metrics from Petals to understand how the teams were doing, how they were feeling about all these factors. But one of the interesting questions that came up was, well, serenity has taken a dip. What's happened there? And only by being in the conversation I knew that it was generally from personal circumstances. So this raised a question. One should we be including our work life situations in the petal scores? You probably need to discuss this with your team to see what they want to do. If you do want to use personal factors, absolutely understandable. We work in an environment now where work life balance is really important, mental health is really important. We talk about all these things and leadership generally do support it. But ultimately, when it comes to the fact that they're bringing these factors to the team conversations and the heat map suggests things aren't quite right. How do we use the heat maps just to get the conversation starting again? I was lucky to be in that conversation to say, well, actually the serenity took a dip because of other problems with team members, not necessarily within the team. And the leaders were saying, well, how can we help that? Which is a great way to start the conversation, but also you need to make sure someone is there to represent the data and talking about it. Which is why Petals is a conversation starter and not necessarily a hard number to use to measure. But yeah, also think about what other conversations do you want to have with your leaders? Why do leaders want to know about the data? I've always encouraged leaders to observe the metrics and be in the conversations, but don't take it on face value. Make sure you are in the conversations or having the conversations if you can't be, to find out why the scores are that way. This is what we do at the team level. It should do it at all levels as well. What we are building into the app actually is visuals to give leadership those sort of visibilities. But also we want to surface some of the key comments that are made publicly that the teams are happy to share. They are in a psychological safe space. There are notes available for team level, for team lead level, or even privately. And we also want to allow team external members to understand what's going on and allow teams to say, sure, we'll share our factors as to why we're doing these things. But for those of you that are using petals already and you are using other tools and mechanisms to do this, make sure that you're not just throwing data out there for leaders to get wind of and not know the full context. You want to take that story with them, not just the visuals and the numbers. You really want to explain why teams are feeling a certain way. So there's my question to you. What conversations do you have with your leaders? How do you surface that data to your leaders? And how do you make sure that your teams are comfortable taking that data to the leaders as well? Love to hear your feedback on this. Love to get your ideas and how you might do this. And obviously the Design Leadership book will give us some ideas on how to do that when it comes out. That's everything from me this week. I'll be back in two weeks, mid May after we've gone live. Everything's gone to plan and we will be building new stuff and thinking about the next version, what goes live. So get on the socials, send us your comments and thoughts, give us some love and likes and all that good stuff and I'll speak to you in two weeks.