PETALS Snapshot 8 - Sharing at ManageOps & team trust with Laura Annabel

You. This is the 8th Petals snapshot. It is Wednesday, the 25 October 2023. This is all the things that I've been getting up to with Petals over the past two weeks. So we're back after a three week cadence. I decided last week to push it back a week. We had a lot of things coming up that I wanted to cover. I thought it makes sense just to offset by we to make sure I captured all those major highlights and updates. So without getting into the detail just too much yet, I want to give you some scores and we'll talk about the reasons why. Again, rapid succession today. Let's go for it. Productivity four, enjoyment five, teamwork three. Learning three, and serenity three. Average of 3.6, which is down zero eight. But let's get into the details as to why. Okay, little bit of up min. I realize I can ramble quite a bit on these things. I don't want it to be an ongoing long monologue thing, but I don't want to skip over the details. So if it is getting a bit to that point, give me the knowledge and I will try to bring it back in. I like to adlib these sessions. I've got a very loose outline as to what I want to talk about. Obviously, I'll just play it by ear. I don't like scripts. I don't like to go into long form kind of narratives as much as possible. But there's obviously some areas that I'd like to deep dive a bit more. And so I really would appreciate the feedback. Whether it is too much or too little or is about right, let me know. So the big one was last night I went to a meetup in Birmingham called Manageops, hosted by good old friend Steve Hayes from my old multi pack days. He invited me along to give a talk when he found out about the Petals thing. And I was quite happy too. So I jumped at the chance, made sure I was free and I could make it over there. All good. Great audience, great participation. And when I knew that the audience was very tech leadership heavy, I wanted to make sure that the tone was right for them as well. So I prepared the deck. I would try to make it interactive as well. I'm mindful of long, boring presentations without any audience participation. I looked at using mentee.com or Mentimeter.com to do this. I've used it in the past for the random occasional interactives workshop. And I knew it worked quite well from a technical perspective because you can present and then you can get people to scan a QR code or put in a code to get the live interactions on their phones. And it allowed me to kind of use that concept of fast feedback, live data, results and stuff like that. So it was quite in tune to the whole petal's vision and approach to how we like to do the data sharing. So, yes, it was great. I'm not going to give too much away on what the talk was about because I would like people to follow up on the future sessions as well. This was version one of the talk. It landed quite well. The feedback straight after was I loved the tool, the distraction of playing around and actually seeing the results. A lot of people saw the potential. With petals, there's some interesting questions around how to facilitate the sessions, how to introduce it to teams. Was there appetites to reduce the cadence or turn up the cadence? And because I provided three or four case studies of how it's landed and how different teams have interpreted it and used it, I think that gave everyone the opportunity to go. So I can make it my own and that's what it's about for me. It's a framework that people can use in their own way. Do not find it a prescriptive like method that you have to go through line by line. It's the concept of having a really fast feedback mechanism to get a pulse of a team health and ideally act on those numbers. Those numbers are very subjective. They're not very reliable for metrics like type metrics, but they are a radiator. They are just a gauge as to how teams are feeling at the moment. So I'd say the audience really enjoyed the talk. It was great to give it. It's been a while for me to actually provide and present a talk, but I really did enjoy getting into that and meeting local fellow tech leaders as well. It's nice to just kind of mingle around that community a bit more. I did have to leave quite early, so I couldn't hang around for the coffee roulette sort of mode on the second half. So I had to unfortunately leave them at that point. But next time I will be hanging around. Definitely recommend manageops as a community if you're in the Birmingham or West Midlands area, but ultimately I'm going to be digging this talk a little bit more. Anyway, I've got Nottingham lined up for next month and watch this space, so hopefully in the new year there'll be more confirmed as well. Another thing that I enjoyed last week, I had a chat with one of my local colleagues, nora Annabelle Tombs. She is on a leadership apprenticeship and she introduced petals to her team and she went through the details as to how she went about that. I'm not going to tell you too much about that. I'm just going to pull out a little snapshot from our conversation that we had last week, have a listen to how it went.

So they're a really modest, humble, incredibly talented group of engineers and QAS. So we have a lead engineer, senior engineer, a senior QA and a midway QA, and then myself sort of like tagging along throughout the team. It's interesting actually, because as part of my course. I think they're a bit tired of me having to do so much analysis on them. I've actually had a lot of personality tests. I get feedback from them. They were probably the most self aware team in the web because I keep these tests. So actually, if you know anything about Honey and Mumford's learning styles, a lot of my team are quite big reflectors. So they care about data, they're theoretical, but they really like to stop and think about things. I'm not really like that. I'm a lot more big picture. I'm what we call like an activist. So I'm about linking people in and sort of driving things forward. My attention to Dealer isn't always amazing, which is an engineer is a bit of a shame. For this, I thought I need to make it applicable to the reflectors in.

My team, if that makes that makes perfect sense. And I think that the fact. You've done a lot of this groundwork, really, with your teammates. They are right now. Right. I know you want to become a manager, but you really are part of the team and they respect you for that. And they're like, cool, sure, we want to reflect. You got another thing. Let's go through. It quite nice that you've got that culture in the team because not all teams and engineer, especially software engineering, are like that.

Oh, no. They're incredibly supportive. I know I'm really, really lucky and I try and pay it forward by sort of sharing any best practice I've learned, sharing any methods and models that I've learned, and doing sort of fun tech sharing things. So this almost formed part of my work on Petals and sort of promoting that.

Cool. So there we go. As you can tell, it was a really great conversation with Laura. I've got a lot of time for her. I'm really kind of passionate to support her in her career aspirations, but really make sure that her team are relating and engaging with Petals and using it in the right way. And it sounds like they're getting to a good shape now. So I like the fact that they are doing this fortnightly health check and then every four sprints having a deep dive conversation in their retrospectives to really get to the detail of as to what they can do better next. But again, I love that kind of approach of just taking a framework and making it your own because that's what it's all about. The final thing that made it like a productive session that I had to push back, we introduced a fortnightly Dev time with the Dev team. I call it the team. It's just me and Brian at the moment, but that might grow in the future. Every Friday evening, we will check in with each other and see how things are progressing with the app that we're building. So it is making great progress. We've got some great architecture in place. Now it's all built in Python. It's version controlling GitHub at the moment on a private repo. But what I am thinking next is to open it up as an open source solution when it's ready. At the moment it's not ready for that, but I am thinking about how we can allow the tech community to take this and use it themselves. I was off the back of a conversation last night at Manageops actually and with the fact that they suggested this Apache Dev Lake framework which allows you to kind of capture data and analyze it in different ways. I like the idea that you can maybe use Petals in your own tech stack or in your own frameworks or within your own workflows. So it's one I'm going to take forward and really have a think about. I've got no firm details on this yet, but I do like the idea of open sourcing the framework in some shape or form. This is for the tech community and this is where I find that tech really takes off and concepts and frameworks can grow really quickly. I don't want it to be a closed network solution, but we can look at maybe building a self hosted version of the app for teams that don't have the luxury of building their own. But really we can get anyone to create their own version of Petals and own their data. This is what it came down to for me. It was like the fact that we don't care what your data is, the data means nothing to us. What the data we like to see is engagement and frequencies and stuff like that. What we don't care about are the actual scores. So if we can give teams the autonomy to own that data in their own environment, in their own setup, in their own infrastructure, that might entrust them and empower them to own that and be more responsible for their information as well. Anyway, very early days, lots of food for thought around that area. But I am a big evangelist of like open source solutions and the open web and giving back to the community. This is what Petals is all about for me. So as you can see, we've had a lot of good things going on over the last two or three weeks, making significant progress in many ways and lots of good stuff coming down the line as well. Nice little win that we had recently as well. We have stickers, so I ordered some holographic stickers from Sticker Mule. I've used them in the past. They're great for creating little sort of batches of stickers and I'm really quite pleased with how they come out. Some of the colors are a little bit watered down, I think on the shiny background. So I might have to do a version two at some point. If you would like a sticker, I will be sending them out. If you join the newsletter at Petals Team newsletter. I will then reach out to you personally to get your postal address and send one out to you. I want to make it. It's not like a bulk mass mailing list. It's quite a small group and as I alluded to on manageops last night, it's a nice captive group of people that are passionate about this thing right now. And I am directly communicating with individuals that sign up just to find out what they're interested in and see if I can help them at all. So that's it for this week. Good stuff going on. As I say, I've really enjoyed it but not feeling as productive as maybe as I could have been. Hopefully I can turn it up a little bit next time and feel a bit more productive about things going on with all the things petals. If you want to find out more and you want to get some coaching time in with me, sign up on the newsletter I mentioned earlier, Petals TV slash newsletter. You can reach out on Mastodon managingengineers. Net at Psy or all the other social networks at psyjobling or you can obviously visit the website Petals Team and all the details are on there. If you are following along on YouTube or Spotify, give us a little like review. Follow along just so I know who's joining up the conversation and I'll be back in two weeks with the next Petals snapshot. See you then.