PETALS Snapshot 10 - DevOps Notts, going beyond tech and language systems

You. This is the 10th Petals snapshot. It is Wednesday, the 29 November 2023. This is me reflecting on the past couple of weeks of what's going on with all the things Petals go. It's been quite a big week for me this week, actually. This is my final week in asos in my current role as an engineering manager, and I'm changing jobs next week over to Right Move. So a lot what's coming up and just a setting expectations. I'm probably going to take a little break over December just to kind of focus on the new job, come back in January with a vengeance, hopefully, and a lot of good updates. So I'll talk about that in a bit more detail later on. But with all that said, let's look back at the last two weeks of all things Petals. I want to do the quick five scores now. Productivity four, enjoyment five, teamwork five, learning four and enjoyment three brings out the average of 4.2, which is up again zero six. Let's talk about what's going on and why. So last night was DevOps Knots meetup in Nottingham. It was the second version of my talk to Meetup community, getting the word out there across the tech community and it was great. I really enjoyed myself. I presented very similar content to what I presented to the Manageops crew in Birmingham last month, but I kind of iterated it a little bit. I also changed the structure and it worked against me, unfortunately. So basically the Manageops one was all in Mentimeter, which is all online web based UI. I integrated Mentimeter into PowerPoint so I could actually have a bit more control over the presentation material. Unfortunately, my testing was not good enough. So we went into this and on the first interactive stage, it was on the wrong Mentimeter slide. So I was like, hang on a minute, let's jump around a bit. I persevered, I kept my call carried on regardless and it worked in the end, but it just made me realize, yeah, you need to use a test this stuff properly and maybe even just think about sticking in Mentimeter anyway, by the bike. The crowd enjoyed it. I think it resonated in many ways. Not everyone, but the best part was the conversation at the end. There was a lot of questions coming from the floor, lots of different kind of angles to consider. There was stuff about psychological safety, there was stuff about how to onboard people, how to introduce the concept to teams. So obviously I'll use some of those case studies that I've talked about previously from some different types of teams. But, yeah, it clearly engaged and resonated to these people. And the facts, like the conversations after the talk were quite positive as well. People going, I really want to try this with my team, like this week. And there were people that are outside of tech that really wanted to give it a go as well. So, again, I'm just really pleased that someone wants to try this out. They're willing to take it off and think about it and try it with their teams. It did give me a lot of food for thought, though. There are some moments I was like, I need to tidy this up. I need to work on the narrative and the pace a little bit. I need to think about some simpler hooks as to why people should use Petals. Maybe simplify and shorten the case studies a bit, because I do go into a Ramble mode a little bit at that point, even like the key takeaway at the end, just do this. Just one thing, don't overcomplicate things. But as I say, it was good conversation. It gave me an opportunity to try it in different platforms, in different environments, try and change little iterations of the content, and I'm really pleased that I've done it. Now, that's the second version of the talk this year. That's probably the last one for a while now, while I just get into the new role and then maybe in the new year, I'll look at some other opportunities to continue spreading the word. It was also good to put out another format of Petals content recently. So when I had a conversation with Laura Annabelle Toomes, about a month ago now, I wanted to put the whole conversation out. I put a very short clip into a previous episode, but that whole content is out there now on the YouTube channel if you want to watch it full back to back. But again, I just want to try and experiment with different types of content I'm putting out there. This was like a proper conversation. It's about 20 minutes long, 25 minutes long, and you get to hear the whole context of the story as well. So I recommend you looking through to that. And if you're watching this on YouTube, I'll put a link straight through to that video there. And as I alluded to last time as well, I planned to chat with friend Sinead. She's in between roles right now, but was really curious about Petals, how it works, what it's all about. So, again, I took her through the same slide pack that I had prepared for DevOps Knots, just to kind of structure the conversation and give her some ideas to jump around a bit. Again, really useful feedback from Sinead, some stuff around, like thinking about why I should do this, think about maybe clearer messaging in places as well. But again, if you're just a good conversation starter and this is what the call was for me from last night, the feedback was, these things are conversation starters. Petals is there to prompt and provoke conversations. It's not there to tell you what to do. It's to enable teams to become more self aware and ideally, structure those conversations in a better format elsewhere. So the Petals app is making good progress now. We've got into a rhythm of doing two weekly kind of sprints in a sense. So every Friday afternoon we'll put our heads together and see what's going on. Have a little quick of a demo, what we've been building, think about what's next for the next couple of weeks. But it's great to have that kind of regular rhythm of just looking at back at what we're doing, make sure we prioritize the right things. We do have a lot of async chat as well in the Slack channel, so we've built some good stuff around the homepage now, putting some structure to the onboarding. We've got a nice interactive visual on the form, filling in your Petal scores now. And I did some small changes to the styles that I talked about previously as well. So it's getting there. We've got all our items tracked in the GitHub project, which is helping give us a bit of kind of visibility of what's going on. But also I'mixing it up with all this other content stuff I'm doing. So it's not like all or nothing, just apps. So the app's making good progress. I'm really pleased with how it's getting there. Now we'll probably aim to get like a beat an Alpha out in the new year, just allowing for some Christmas lulls and breaks. I'm really pleased with how that's getting along and based on a lot of the feedback I've been getting recently from Sinead, from the DevOps community, I've realized I need to kind of create like a getting started page on the website. Something just kind of go, so I get it, what do I do next? And I feel like that's the missing piece at the moment because we haven't got the app set up yet. This will be another interim solution, but basically say this is how you present it to your team, this is the tool you want to probably use, this is how you should use it going forward. So I want to keep it quite straightforward but very sort of one, two, three clear instruction points on how to proceed and get started with Petal. So I want to look at maybe doing a bit of content around that in the next couple of weeks. And what I also want to try and create is a talks page so people can request talks in their communities or I can sort of put a bit of a link through to previous conversations I've had. It will be try to keep it in the UK for now so I can get there because I prefer to do this in person. We can do it remote and online, but I realized last night it makes it very hard to have the conversation in both environments. It's really difficult to sort of channel online comments through to the floor and vice versa. Questions from the floor. We're not getting resonated through to the online community. So I feel like if I'm doing it. It's going to be either all online or all in person. The hybrid model I don't think will work for what I'm trying to do with this and I really want to get that conversation flowing and get into a good environment for really honest thoughts and opinions. The other thing I just want to flag is there's been a lot of appetite for Petals beyond Tech. This was originally built for software engineering teams because that's my remit and it's landed quite well there. But the amount of people I've spoken to recently that have said I don't even work in tech and I'm going to give it a go. People in recruitment, people in occupational health, people in business development, people in HR teams. A lot of these sort of different environments like these factors resonate with us as well as what you do in tech. And I think that's the beauty and simplicity of Petals, it's such a high level but clear definition of what you're looking to review and ideally improve. Anyone can pick this up. So, yeah, having these conversations with different people has been really quite eye opening and it also takes me back to when I was talking to Sinead. This all happened in a similar time and I made a note at the time of how I felt about it. Have a listen. Also had a really good conversation with someone outside of Tech in Azos today. So these are around business development areas, around people and culture. They were instantly bought into the concept and how it could grow out into other teams and departments, not necessarily Tech. They love how Tech kind of got an idea, built a thing, made it work and will fit it around our kind of existing sort of setups and cultures. And they want to learn from that and how that can scale out into other departments and team different hierarchies and different department layouts and meeting cadencies and stuff like that. They obviously were sold on the name. They've got a nice packaged name like Petals and it's very clear and visual and very thought out and very simple to follow, very simple to use, very simple to actually get your head around. So it's been one of those moments of realization and reassurance that there's something in Petals and people can see the value and the potential with it. And for me, it's always been about trying things. Stop being set in your ways and stop thinking you've got it perfect already, these sort of concepts a dime a dozen. There's so many out there. I'm not going to suggest this is the only way forward for kind of looking at team culture, but clearly there's an appetite to think about these things, care about these things, but also how to have some consistency and a bit of structure around something like this. There's so many systems and tools out there that do this. They're quite big and complicated, though, and very difficult to kind of bring it back together. For me, it's not about bringing it back together, it's just basically having a common language you can use when you start talking between departments and teams going, oh yeah, if you got problems with productivity, what are you doing about that? It doesn't go down to a specific and how it's been tracked or measured against a certain department, but at least you got common themes to talk about. Teamwork learning, productivity, enjoyment, very simple high level ingredients towards a healthy team that anyone can translate it to and you have their own versions of it. But equally you've got shared language. And I think that again, something I've learned from today is that there needs to be some sort of like a library or glossary of the language that we use with Petals. So that's something I might take away and think, right, how can I have like a common language? But again, think about to the I was talking about design systems previously, thinking about the language system that should be used, not the lexicon. That's the word I'm trying. Is there certain languages you should use, sort of languages you should avoid and maybe that should be another way of introducing it to new teams. It's like, do not go down this route, do it this way. Well, these are the best practices to use, avoid these areas. So there's a clear instruction and guidelines as to how to use Petals. Not necessarily a systematic approach, but best practices. So let's see what goes on with Petals. It's getting to that nice point now where there's a lot of appetite, a lot of people are aware of it. I want to focus on this core group now to see if it works and try to iterate around those kind of areas. As I said at the start, I'm going to probably take a little break through December now and come back in January to kind of get the ball rolling again. But it'll give me a bit of flexibility around new jobs and Christmas and all that sort of stuff. So plan to be back mid January, let's say. Just gives me that first few weeks to get back into the swing of things. We've hit ten. That's a nice milestone to kind of go take stop. I like to do things in batches and series and seasons, so it makes sense to kind of close it off for the year here and then go on from there. In the meantime, there will be small changes. So I recommend you follow along on the newsletter, sign up to Petals team slash newsletter or me on the socials at Psyjobling everywhere apart from Masterdom which is managingengineers net at Psy. So if you want to follow all the little updates in the meantime, do that. But I highly encourage you to register for the newsletter because that will give you the summaries of what's been going on and early access to the app when it's ready for user testing. Obviously, give me a little like and review and all that good stuff in your entertainment app and I'll be back in 2024 when And Petals will be going bigger and better for everyone. Thanks for following along and see you in the new year.