Weekly 15 - Resources, people or capabilities?

Have you ever been in one of those meetings where someone says we need more resources and you're cringing a little bit? I've been doing this recently, trying to challenge the language we use, but I'm also thinking, rather than talking people, what capabilities do we need? Let's dive into this in the 15th petals weekly. So before we get into all the details, let's do those scores and we'll go from there. Productivity is 3, enjoyment is 4, teamwork is 5, whereas learning is 3 and serenity is 3, which brings out an average of 3.6, which is down slightly on last time. Let me explain what's going on. So productivity took a bit of a hit this week because of weekend fun. I took an extra day off last week to enjoy the sunshine and some family time, but that obviously did impact my productivity. I also had another little side project that was having errors and so I had to go and look into that. It took up a lot of my time. I didn't get to the solution either, so not particularly happy with that output. It was productive, but wasn't in the best way possible. But teamwork soared because thankfully the team jumped on a few of my other challenges on the product on the Pedals project. So that is in a better place. Thank you team for resolving those issues. It was all in the pipeline and learning took a bit of a hit because I was not as learning as much as I was last week. So what's going on with the Petals project itself? Well, we are eating dog food as they say in the tech world. We are now doing twice weekly snapshots just to see if it's all working. It also gives us a lot more data to play with and a great way to see how the product works. It gets us into a better habit and we become the super users of the app. We know it inside out, we. We know where the challenges might be and we also not get to praise all the good stuff that's going on. Another nice little win for me personally is I get a sense check of the data across the team and if anyone's having problems or feeling taking a hit from a Serenity perspective or anywhere else, we can bring it up in our dev team sessions, what we do every other Friday. That said, we are going into Easter weekend this week, so what we will be doing is taking a break over the weekend, enjoy family time as we should and then when we come back next week, we'll be in a much better place, hopefully from serenity, enjoyment, all that sort of stuff. If you've got a capacity. We will chip away at the work that needs to be done, but we aren't setting ourselves up to fail here. We want to make sure that we're doing basic stuff. My personal goal for this next week will be to get the full end to end journeys tidied up because we've got a few more views to do. But what I'm also going to do is realign this weekly content. It'll have to change the name to a two weekly cycle so it aligns better with our dev team that we do on every other Friday. Yes, we have a soft check every in between week, but at the same time I want to make sure that I'm coming back to this content with more substantial content, maybe a few more extra learnings and maybe it'll be a little bit longer as well. But it also gives me the capacity to focus on the actual product rather than all the content, which does take a lot of my time up. I tend to spend most Mondays getting this content together, getting it ready for release, releasing on a Tuesday, then doing all the publicity around it as well. It adds opacity and to my time I don't necessarily have and I'm neglecting the product. I've talked about this before and I keep revisiting it. I need the occasional reminder let's do what's practical. So just to manage expectations, we'll be taking a break next Monday for Easter weekend and I'll be back the following Monday with the latest updates. And by then we should be in a much better place to start launching this app. One thing that I have been exploring recently within my day job is the idea of team topologies and how our teams are organized effectively from different scaled organizations. I've been reading some material to kind of understand this a bit more and looking at what I've done in the past as well. And as organizations scale, what I've seen is that there's different ways of doing this. There's some great material out there to kind of correlate this to other industries as well. I'm very limited to tech from my experience, but my background has also worked in other environments that aren't necessarily tech. First think about a HR team. Think about a personnel team or finance team, or even fulfillment or manufacturing. All these industries have different ways of organizing their teams to deliver and do good quality products, but they don't necessarily work like tech do. Tech have been very good at adjusting and finding better ways and experimenting with different ways as well. So it works both ways and how these teams organize. One thing I'm also conscious of is capability. Do we have the right capabilities in our teams to do what we're trying to achieve? And it's something I've been exploring recently within my day job as well. Where we have the right skills and capabilities and attitudes and behaviors, plus the domain expertise. How we fill the gaps potentially as well. We're going into an era of AI now, whether you like it or not. AI is here to support us as part of our environments. But are we using it to the best of our advantage? Let's bring this back to Petals. So we know we've got a very limited capacity in our delivery, in our time and our skills potentially. So what we're trying to do to complement that is using AI and other tooling to help us with that as well. I've been making the most of tools like cursor.com to provide assistive intelligence. That's the A in our AI for me. Assistive intelligence with context aware code editor. So it can resolve some problems for me really efficiently. I'm normally quite good at this as well and doing a better job than I possibly could. I'm also using ChatGPT quite a lot now to support me with all my daily habits and my admin. I'm just chucking in a quick prompt and getting the context down and maybe revisiting it later when I can. But it's given me the tools to kind of have like an assistant to help me get things done. Not always work related or petals, but at least I've got that consistent place to go to on my phone, on my laptop, wherever I'm working is ready to listen and help me. Another tool I've been looking at recently is how I can streamline the deployment pipelines from GitHub through to Heroku and actually getting visibility of what's going on. So what I've introduced recently in the last week is the ChatOps integration in Slack. So this actually plugs Heroku straight into our Slack workspace and gives us commands that we can run to do deployments and check status of things, but it also gives me push notifications of any deployments that have happened. We don't necessarily get this feedback loop at the moment from GitHub or Heroku. You have to log into either panel to see what's going on. But now I've got this integrated with Slack, which we all use all the time to keep on top of everything. It's giving me that feedback loop straight away that something's been deployed, I can test it in the browser and see what's going on. It also gives me better visibility of anything that's going on that I'm not necessarily working on, but it also gives me visibility of what the rest of the team are working on. Then I can go and do a bit of sign off or feedback based on what they've been working on. This all comes back to that capability and team topology arrangement stuff for me. We've got a very slim streamlined team. Some might call it lean to build the Petals app, but I've got some fundamental strong skills in there and then we've also got great tooling and systems in place to support us with that as well. It's something you could probably consider when you are looking at your team topology in your organization or work or even inside projects. Who have you got available to help you? What skills do you have, what do you need, where are the gaps and what tooling or other people do you need to help you do that? I'd also recommend the Team Onion exercise from Emily Weber is a book that I got many years ago. She published it. I think it's just before lockdown, but it's a really interesting concept of looking about what people and skills do you have in your team, who is around your team supporting that and who actually needs to be brought in closer to your core team rather than being on the outside as stakeholders. It's something that I looked at with one of my teams. I've been working on the day job as well. Last year we made sure that we have got the right people as part of the team rather than being outside dependencies and actually bring them into the core team instead. Okay, so that's this week's snapshots. Lots to do over around your team arrangement and capabilities. Just as a reminder, I will be taking this back to a fortnightly cycle to align with our fortnightly checkpoints and delivery timelines with our sprints and iterations. Gives me the capacity to focus on product development and actually bring something to the conversation when I do these. Hopefully a bit more quality content as well. It will align nicely with those timelines as well. But for season two or our spring season, that's what we're going to be doing and then come the summer we'll see if it's working or if I need to change it again. So my prompt to you, as it were, is to go and ask your team, are you using the right language? And just make sure you're thinking about the language that you use when you speak with your teams, do your thing on all the socials, do the like subscribe and notify thing that you do across all your apps. And I'll be back in two weeks time with another Petals update.