I was shocked when I attended my first sprint retrospective.
Our software development team had been struggling to ship good features quickly. Worse, we had been struggling to communicate and coordinate with other teams. It felt like we were wading through mud, and we couldn't make progress we wanted to make—despite having a team of seven people.
Our team lead Becky led us in our first retro. She started with the same Prime Directive in this template, and guided us through the positives, negatives, and fixes for our next sprint. We had a chance to share problems in a constructive way with each other, and our communication got better every week.
Ever since I've been a huge believer in the power of retros, especially for highly collaborative teams.
In my opinion, there's no better way to create a culture of improvement than taking the time with these three questions every two weeks.
A retro usually has two big pieces: what's going well and what's not. The last, shorter slide is for the team to agree on a few things they'll start doing differently.
If you're a team of close collaborators—and especially if you're developing software—try a retrospective after your next deadline. It could make a world of difference for your team.
- Sam
Run this meeting live as simple, customizable, interactive slides.
I loved the lightweight experience of Shuffleboard. It felt like Jackbox for a business workshop… and it really did help us get productive input from a large group of people at once. I think I’d want to use this tool even if I was doing an in person session!
The best part of Shuffleboard is how everyone joins just by clicking a link. I can immediately collect everybody's ideas in a transparent way, but stay in control of the chaos and finish the meeting with an actionable, shareable plan.
