This post was co-written by Raha Rotabi and Emily Yost.
This article was inspired by an article by Nicole Rushton. Thank you to Christina Von Stroh for your insightful comments.
Retrospectives are a time for teams or groups to reflect and find ways to work better together. The goal of a retrospective is to pause and introspect about how things might be going well or could be better, then identify ways to make that happen. This article is for champions who are searching for ways to improve their business practices, not just software teams!
What is a retro?
A retrospective (retro) is a working session that encourages team members to share an interaction or result, then talk about how and why we should make things better going forward. At VMware Tanzu Labs, we typically reflect on issues ranging from technical choices, to communication between roles, to the working environment. We then group our reflections into themes, brainstorm around those themes, and assign action items to remedy any issues. To improve accountability, sometimes each retro begins with a review of the prior retro’s action items.
Why use a retro?
The purpose of a retro is to create a safe space for the team to celebrate the past iteration’s successes, discuss points of confusion, and reflect on challenges with a focus on improving how the team feels and functions.
Your role
It’s important to know how to interact in retros to maximize your impact. The following are a few tips to guide you.
- Openly and honestly share your experiences from the iteration
- Dig deeper on items raised by others to understand root causes
- Listen and be open to learn from the experiences of others with an empathetic mindset
Why this seems familiar
You have probably already seen retros. In fact, it’s possible you might already be conducting retros on your team! Anytime we look back and ask ourselves, “How did that go?” we are doing some form of a retrospective. This might have been in the form of
- Watching films of past physical performances to improve techniques
- Journaling to better understand the choices we made, why we made those decisions, and what we might change in the future
- Start, stop, continue: Retros can take many names, yet they smell just as sweet
High-performing teams always look at how they work with the intention to improve. The format of a retro is highly flexible to match the circumstances that are right for your team at that time. So whether you’re in marketing, software, human resources, or any other discipline (even at home!), groups who are high-performing find value in reflecting and identifying actions that will help them improve as a team. Great retros will improve any project or task you’re tackling.
Step 1. Setting the Stage
Here we’ll discuss some precursors to the meeting that will help ensure you get the most out of your retrospective.
Audience
Your audience should include everyone on the team or anyone who works with team members in a daily capacity. We suggest inviting the individuals that are involved daily to help the team feel comfortable sharing. Retros are not the time for a leader outside of the core team to get updates on a project or learn how a team is working. We have observed decreased psychological safety in team retros when stakeholders or those in management attend, creating (at best) missed opportunities for the team to improve.
Retros are sessions where you want everyone to be fully present. It’s best to schedule these in advance and let folks know you want them to be able to engage as much as possible during the meeting. If this is a new concept for your team, introduce it as something new to try and even share an article like this one to help them understand the purpose and set expectations.
Frequency
For agile software development teams, the end of an iteration cycle can be an optimal time to hold a retrospective. For product groups or business units, you might see a calendar-based structure. Our goal is to hold retros frequently enough that the obstacles to success don’t fester, but instead allow for timely action.
Duration
We generally think an hour is a good amount of time for a successful retro, however, we have worked with shorter durations effectively. Teams that have not been holding retros regularly may need more time and more sessions early on in their new practice. The important thing is to allow enough time to let everyone be involved in a meaningful way. The format you choose can help this happen and supercharge a team’s progress.
Step 2. Pick a format
The format of your retro should support whatever the team wants to accomplish, given the current circumstances. Adding variety to how you run your retro can draw new energy and ideas out of a team. However, the format becomes less impactful (for better or worse) when the team is already aligned on working together towards continuous improvement. Anonymous feedback is an option with many tools, though ideally, your team has enough psychological safety that individuals feel they can speak up. Whatever tool you use, make sure the team is comfortable with the format and understand how they are expected to participate before you begin.
Creative options
Teams often default to a classic three-column retrospective, which is easy to quickly set up without preparation both in-person and online. The columns are simple to adjust to meet your team’s circumstances. Here are a few variations
- Liked, lacked, learned
- What went well (“I’m glad that…”), Questions (“I’m wondering about”), Opportunities (“It wasn’t so great that…”)
- and so many more
We love the following facilitation tools for three-column retros
- Your go-to digital whiteboard (e.g., Miro, Mural) or planner tool (e.g., Trello, Planner) likely has pre-built templates that can be implemented quickly
- EasyRetro makes it easy to merge similar comments, provides voting capabilities, and lets users have fun with GIFs!
- RetroTool – create an action list separate from the column feature
Digital whiteboards open up options for creative formats. Even if you are co-located, you can still use a digital whiteboard—just display the board on a wall with a projector and proceed with your stickies and markers. The following are a few of our favorite formats beyond the three-column retro:
- Reach a milestone – Sailboat retrospective
- Extend periods of time for the product – Timeline Retrospective
- Anytime you want team alignment – Pokémon Team Retro
- Because being heard doesn’t have to be verbal – Comment Storm Retro (This is a highly interactive, time efficient format. This is great for larger groups where discussing all the thoughts can be difficult as a facilitator.)
Step 3. Assume positive intent
Creating a psychologically safe meeting environment is so crucial to running good retrospectives that it deserves its own step. Retros both reflect and build psychological safety within a team, which is common to high-performing teams.
“Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
–Norman Kerth’s “Prime Directive,” Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews
The prime directive is often used to frame retros, especially when there is tension on the team. Assuming positive intent seems straightforward until it’s not—often when something crosses a personal value or boundary, so get clear on them! Approaching the retro with a generous mindset towards yourself and your team goes a long way to openly and constructively discuss how the team can get better. Start with your own personal reflection on the question, “Do I believe people are doing the best they can?”
Step 4. Discuss the items
Most retros go through a quiet generation phase and progress to discussion. The facilitator serves the team by selecting the next item to talk about. Alternating positive and constructive items can keep the team’s energy flowing, though some teams prefer to go through an entire category at once.
Clustering feedback (affinity mapping) into groups by similar themes can speed up the conversation, but should not come at the expense of everyone feeling like they have been heard. If it’s important enough for someone to have noted, it’s important enough to talk about. If your team is not participating very much, invest in improving your team health. A quiet retro is a red flag.
Step 5. Create action items
As discussions continue, identify action items that will help you proceed better as a team—then assign them. Additionally, when there are discussions in the constructive feedback category, work to identify an action to address them. The most helpful items are actionable and keep team members accountable.
Action items can be small. We are not looking for radical transformation after each retro, but rather, incremental improvements to the way we work as teams. Focus on ways your team can make marginal gains through small adjustments that accumulate into meaningful change. James Clear has an approach to continuous improvement in which he asks, “Can you improve by one percent?” Ask your team, “Is there something we can experiment with over the next iteration to improve on this?”
“There is power in small improvements and slow gains.”
–James Clear, Atomic Habits
Step 6. Make the change
The retro itself is an action the team takes to improve how it works together, but is a waste of time if the team does not use what it learns to iterate processes. Find ways to hold each other accountable to those actions:
- Make the action items accessible to the team, perhaps with a pinned channel post or shortcut from a tool you use daily.
- Follow up with action items at a greater frequency than the retrospective. For example, if you retro every iteration, send action item reminders/”helps” (requests for assistance) halfway through the iteration cycle. This simple, gentle reminder can dramatically improve the percentage of completed retro action items!
- Begin each retro with a review of the prior retro’s action items to improve accountability.
- Hold your retro midweek, rather than on a Friday, so that the team doesn’t lose momentum and context for the change.
Keep improving
Our commitment to continuously improve means that even if you are on a team that has an existing retro practice, consider doing a retro on your retros! Pick one aspect of your retro to refresh and try something new:
- Does the time we meet make sense?
- Did you try a new format? Add a short plus/delta or roman vote at the end of it.
- Are we working on/completing our action items?
- What is our return on the time invested in this activity?
Find opportunities to reinvigorate your retro even when things appear to be going well, but especially if you notice red flags. Continue trying to find what works for your team and don’t be afraid to iterate on your processes if needed. Happy retro’ing!
