4 months in: Lessons learned on agile, data, and writing

June 2024 progress vs. my STELLAR roadmap goals for writing here on Substack: recap on post sizes, new lesson learned, actions, and plan for July

Jul 03, 2024

This post was originally published on agileteams.substack.com on July 3, 2024. As of July 12, all agile Teams content has moved to the agile section of karensmiley.substack.com. Please join us there!

I committed in March to doing (and sharing) a retrospective each month on how I’m doing vs. my “STELLAR” goals. Here’s what I’ve learned in my 4th full month on Substack, and what I’m going to do differently in July.

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How It Started

My plan as of early March 2024, based on the STELLAR Agile Strategy Canvas:

ST=writing online regularly (quality rating=2)
E=publishing new content (3-5x/week, quality rating=7)
LL=write drafts on my phone to 80-90% completeness, and then move to the desktop site (Substack or LinkedIn) for publishing.
A=set up my Substack presence; build a post log in Google Docs
R=review monthly to see if I hit my target of 12-20 new posts for the month

In retrospective #3, these were the goals I set for June:

15-20 Posts in a mix of lengths: 3-7 Short or Medium, 11 Medium, 1-2 Long
24-32 Notes or Comments (size not measured, assumed to be Very Short)

How It’s Going

How’d I do in June? Here’s a look at each element of the STELLAR framework (other than ST, which isn’t changing).

E - Progress towards End goal

I hit the high ranges of my goals for June by publishing:

20 posts on LinkedIn and 3 Substack publications - 6 Very Short, 4 Short, 7 Medium, and 3 Long
34 Substack Notes (most brief; I didn’t measure sizes of these) plus some uncounted comments and restacks without comments.

Archive links are below in the References.1

As I did in May, I finished some of my

6 'P's in AI Pods

WIP and published it. I carved off an article about the uncertified genAI music companies in Asia and profiled 4 of them.

I’m happy that my WIP is now lower. Two more draft sections of PART 3 are still in the works. Each will also involve individual profile pages for uncertified genAI music companies.

As of the month 3 retro, I had written and logged 65 posts and over 54,000 words (as counted by MS Word). During June, I added 20 more posts and 21,254 words (as counted by RF, not including footnotes).

In terms of my quality level target, I estimate that I stayed at level 6 in June. I’ve been working on improving the quality of my writing (more on that below).

LL - Lessons and Limits

During June I worked on the ongoing lesson about improving my writing. For action (A10), I scored all 20 of my June posts, and a sample of 9 March-May posts, with both Readability Formulas (RF) and Grammarly free (GR). This gave me pairs of values for FRE (Flesch Reading Ease score) and FKGL (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level). RF also provided 6 other grade level metrics and a composite “Average Reading Grade level Consensus Calc” value from the 7 grade level metrics. Then I analyzed the data.

This post 2 shows how I used the June data to make a few tool-related decisions:
Q1. How do Readability Formulas measurements compare to Grammarly? Can I safely use just RF? (Short answer: Yes)
Q2. Is FKGL the most useful grade level metric for me to use? If not, which Readability Formulas measurement looks most relevant for my writing? (Short answer: use the RF composite, called “AvgGL” in my data)

Here’s what the data on counts, sizes, reading ease, and grade levels is showing me about my goal of writing better and having a good distribution of post sizes.

Readability: For these 29 posts, I wrote on average at 9th grade level or below (8.93, 7.7, and 8.5 across 3 measures). My average FRE score for June was 64, which is solidly in the target range of 60-70, and AvgGL of 8.7. I’m pretty happy with those numbers!
Sizes: The average length for my 29 posts is 1249 words. My average for 20 June posts was 1063 words. (My average for March-May with MS Word was 895, including footnotes. The numbers aren’t comparable, though.) I’m ok with this ballpark.
Size Distribution: My post sizes for June were 30% Very Short (1-199), 20% Short (200-799), 35% Medium (800-2499), and 15% Long (2500+). That’s right on target for my original March goal of 50% “short” and 50% “long”!

Here’s a graph with my post size distributions through June.

**Figure 1. Percent of posts in each of 4 size categories for March through June 2024**

Here are a few more things the readability data is currently telling me about my writing.

My FRE scores for
6 'P's in AI Pods
tailed off in June and dropped a bit below 60. It might be due to the nature of the detailed company profiles, but I need to watch that. They’re still coming in below 10th grade AvgGL, though.
My June posts in Agile Analytics and Beyond (AAaB) averaged FRE=66 and AvgGL=8.45. That’s not bad. Paying attention is making a difference. My average size has gone up to 1614, though. It’s probably due to the readability tool research focus. I don’t expect that to last.
Readability scores on
agile Teams
(aT) posts — basically, these retrospectives — have been stable. (AvgGL scores so far are 8.26, 8.04, and 7.95.) That’s probably because they have similar structures & content. I’m working on making them more concise. I know not everyone is as much of a data geek as me 😊 And graphs and data tables make voiceovers hard! So I’ll spin some data details off to a separate post (like this one), or move them to the footnotes (or both).
Scores on LinkedIn posts tend to be at the extremes. For the 3 LIN posts I scored in June, the FRE scores were 83 (all-time high), 58 (very low), and 72. LinkedIn posts are by far the shortest, averaging under 100 words. Just 1 or 2 big words or long sentences can have a big impact on the scores. I’m not going to worry about these too much.

A - Actions

Here are updates on my self-assigned actions from the end of May.

April-May Lesson 1: Connecting better with readers - Voiceovers

(A9) Change my publication process when adding voiceovers: Hold off on sending posts to my subscriber list until I’ve added the audio. (pending)

I didn’t record any voiceovers during June. They weren’t an explicit goal, though. If you would find audio useful for these or other posts, please let me know and I’ll prioritize a few for July!

April-May Lesson 2: Becoming a better writer: readability

(A10) Investigate alternatives to Microsoft Word for calculating readability statistics on my posts. (done)

This took a huge amount of research, analysis, and writing time, but it was fun. (Yeah, data geek. 😊) Results were summarized in multiple posts about readability metrics.

(A10) is completed and I’m now using Readability Formulas for scoring and tracking the quality of my writing.

May Lesson 3: Improving UX for my readers

For the charts, graphs, and tables in my posts, I gave myself an action to:

(A11) Find a better way to embed interactive data visualizations into my posts. (done)

As this May post explained 3, I investigated Datawrapper.de and liked it. I committed to start using it on posts in June. And I did 👍. See these 5 posts on readability in the References 4. The June readability data post linked above also uses Datawrapper.

Let me know what YOU think of these Datawrapper tables & charts - were they useful?

R - Review (Retrospective)

I committed to do a monthly review at the end of June to see where I stand on my goals and actions - status: this article is it 😊

Bottom line:

I made good progress on my Actions. I spent lots of June time finding a better tool for measuring readability. It was worth it.
I reduced my WIP further by finishing and posting some draft content I’d already written. Thanks to using my WIP, and writing about my readability actions, I met my posting targets for June.

I’ll reassess my targets and plan in my next monthly retro.

Photo of a dartboard with 4 darts: 1 'bullseye', 3 off-center

New Targets for July 2024 (month 5)

My June goals felt “aggressive but achievable”. Considering the US July 4 holiday time off, I’m going to keep my July goals the same as June.

15-20 Posts in a mix of lengths (still aiming for 50/50 overall)

24-32 Notes plus Comments

My effort budget for July posts will remain at 6-8 hours/day, or 30-40 hours/week.

New Actions for July 2024

June Lesson 1: Becoming a better writer: content planning

Although (A10) on readability is complete, I don’t feel like I’m done with this lesson. I want to keep working towards better quality. Good scores aren’t enough to make writing truly good - or excellent. Here’s my new self-assigned action.

(A12) Revisit my publication plans from May and realign. For July, be more intentional about thinking through my target audience and what I want their takeaways to be, before I dive into writing more content.

I think that’s enough to keep me busy in July, along with using RF now for scoring my posts and using Datawrapper in them. And writing!