We record our regular dev catch-ups on Google Meet, mostly so we don't forget what we agreed to by the following week. Here's what came out of the latest one.
The biggest idea: PETALS is great at capturing numbers — scores, trends, snapshots — but not so great at capturing what you agreed to actually do about them. So we're building a lightweight "wrap-up notes" feature for the end of each snapshot. One line per item rather than a wall of text, so it stays scannable and searchable later. Whatever you write shows up automatically at the start of your next snapshot, so the team can see what was agreed last time, with a one-click "carry this forward" instead of retyping. We're keeping v1 deliberately simple — no assignees, no due dates, no mini task-tracker, that's what Jira and Trello are for. This is just about not losing the thread between retros. We're trialling it with our own team first. (Naming still up for grabs — "wrap-up notes" and "petal bouquets" were both on the table. No promises.)
A couple of smaller, overdue fixes are queued up too: any team member will be able to create a snapshot, and Team History gets a trend chart of its own — individual snapshot views already have one, and the inconsistency has been bugging us. We're also testing whether extending it from the last 5 entries to the last 10 still reads cleanly.
Further out, we're scoping Slack integration — notifications when a retro or snapshot opens, results coming through automatically, and eventually submitting your score without leaving Slack. And behind the scenes, we're working through a backlog of security and GDPR-related issues: re-verifying what's still live, scanning for anything storing personal data we shouldn't be, and checking our data-processing agreements with the tools we rely on. Less flashy, equally important.
Not every minute of a dev call is spent talking shop, for the record. A few tangents from this one: a round of remote tech support for a physical, LED-lit model tower being built in New York, conducted entirely over the phone ("put it in hole number two, what do you see?"); a nostalgia trip through pre-Google-Analytics tools nobody under 30 has heard of — Urchin, Jeffrey Veen's Measure Map, and the much-missed Mint; and an extended, entirely unresolved debate about whether Iceland's import duties make it cheaper to fly a person out for coffee than to post them a bag of beans. Make of that what you will.
We're also talking to one of our beta users about turning their experience with PETALS into a proper case study for the blog — more on that soon. In the meantime, if there's a feature above you'd like to see sooner rather than later, let us know.