Sprint Retrospectives at Walker & Company

It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.

Ahhh, Sprint Retrospectives — such a touchy subject. Some people think of it as a waste of time. Others think of it as a vent session. And some think of it as an opportunity to get verbally jumped by other teams.

To be fair, in some cases, this is probably true. And, if this is the case, you have a bigger problem on your hands.

None of this is true at Walker and Company and there are many cultural reasons as to why, but I think how we conduct the Retrospectives helps a lot, too.

Before I dig into Sprint Retrospectives at W&Co, you should probably know how our Sprints work.

• Every Sprint runs for 2 weeks. No more. No less. Since I’ve joined, I don’t believe we’ve slipped this. There is no copping out and doing 3 week Sprints (which becomes a slippery slope leading into 4 week sprints). 1 week Sprints could work, but if you do Retrospectives, that means you’re burning 2+ hours in these meetings every week, and every hour counts in a startup.
• Retrospectives occur on Thursday. Sprint Planning occurs on Friday. Doing Retros on a Thursday gives us an opportunity to sleep on how we can do better, guiding us to better Sprint Planning sessions. And doing Sprint Planning on a Friday means we have the entire weekend to think things through. So, come Monday, we know what we have to do and just execute against them.
• Speaking of Scrums, we have one every day, except on Planning days. They are scheduled in the morning for 15 minutes, but usually take half that time. We keep things efficient by sticking to the standard model of:

What did you do yesterday?

What do you plan on doing today?

How can we help unblock you?

The moment an update sounds like it requires a lengthy conversation, we save it for the parking lot. (we keep parking lots focused, too)

Now that you know how our Sprints work, we can talk about our Retrospectives.

What’s a Retrospective you ask? Well, it’s an opportunity for the team to discuss the successes and failures of the last Sprint and how to improve them.

We do this by discussing 3 main topics:

• What went Awesome?
• What was Meh?
• And what was Bad?

The idea is that in future Sprints, your team should have moved things from the Bad column over to the Meh column, ultimately into the Awesome column.

It’s important to know…

YOU SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE THINGS IN THE BAD COLUMN.

If you don’t, that probably means people aren’t being honest, and that’s an entirely different problem altogether. These problems tend to stem at a higher level — a post for another day.

Or maybe you don’t have anything in the Bad column because everything is just amazing. In which case, there is at least one ticket that should be in the Bad column:

“Team may not be challenged to improve things”

Like I said, we do these every other Thursday. After I joined, we set these up and honestly I wasn’t consistently doing them bi-weekly. And guess what? 2 Retrospectives in, stickies went up in the Bad column saying “Inconsistent Retrospective schedule”.

Needless to say, I fixed that.

A play by play of how we do Retros

The Preparation

• A bi-weekly recurring meeting is setup with the immediate team members. For us that would be the Product, Creative, and Engineering teams.
• Each session is an hour long — 10 minutes to write up the stickies, 50 minutes to discuss them.
• We use our conference room which gives us a whiteboard for the stickies and a door to keep the noise out, and in.
• We use physical sticky notes.
• Post-it brand recommended since they stick much better than the generic stuff
• Assorted colors preferred so you can easily tell which person ties to which note
• Physical notes because they force people to be concise
• I have everyone bring their own pen. This saves us from having to re-order more. Because, you know, pens seem to walk away on their own…
• You’ll need somewhere to stick these things. We use a whiteboard because it’s readily available to us, but any wall should be fine
• When possible we try to bring snacks & drinks — this helps keep folks happy and willing to provide, and be provided, the good and bad, alike. Also, scheduling these later in the day means we can have whiskey, beer or Bubble Tea (seriously), without slowing down the rest of the day.

The Process

Once the team is present, we close the doors and kick things off.

• I literally sit my phone on the table, put the 10 minute timer on and tell the team they have 10 minutes to come up with their stickies
• After the 10 minutes are up, we stick them on the whiteboard in their respective columns
• Once they’re up, we take a picture of the board. The Post-its app will actually convert the stickies into digital stickies which is cool. Only one picture taker needed — send it to the team!
• I then start at the Awesome column and work my way down
• Some stickies are pretty self explanatory so they don’t need a lot of explanation, but we still reflect on them as a team. For example, if Rachel posts “Team Pair Programming” on the board, I look at Rachel and go “That sounds awesome. Mind explaining?”
• Another thing I do is couple stickies together that are very similar. So, if I notice a recurring theme as I read them, like,“Launching in Canada!” “CANADA!!!” or “Really excited to start hitting international”, I’ll pick them up and stick them right next to each other. This isn’t too important of a task, but it’s really helpful in easily identifying things that many people thought went great, or vice versa.
• The person explaining their note can usually do so in a brief sentence. However, it’s completely okay for the team to follow it up with a discussion. In fact, for important topics in the Meh and Bad columns, it’s encouraged.

Managing the Mehs & Bads

At first, going over Mehs & Bads may feel uncomfortable. After all, there are likely things that are going to be covered that involved you. This is okay! One way I work around this is to lead by example. I’ll be the first to post stickies up in these columns and I’ll make them about me. Examples include “Priorities shifting around” “Requirements weren’t clear” “Github tickets had too much chatter” then I discuss why I placed them in the Meh/Bad columns, and my plan to fix them. Usually the team will agree (lol) and offer ways on how they can help, too. Then, eventually, you won’t have to be the first to put up stickies because the team recognizes its usefulness.

The way I like to think of it is as follows:

A Sprint Planning is for the business — it’s where you meet to execute on goals that add value to the company.

A Sprint Retrospective is for the team — it’s where you meet to make sure the team is unblocked, improving, and ultimately, happy.

It’s extremely important to understand that teams setup for success are better apt to lead companies to glory. I mean, you do spend most of your time in the office, so “Happy team. Happy life.” right?

Some recommendations:

• Have these later in the day. This gives people the opportunity to think about things after work. It’s much easier to digest how awesome you are or how you can improve when you’re at home, relaxed, with a clear mind.
• Be honest with each other, but also be constructive. The intent of the meeting is to foster improvements; not to bash people or sulk. If you’re here for the latter, your team might want to skip the Retro and jump into a team bonding offsite.
• There’s usually a lead or two in these meetings. These leads should meet later to discuss how they can help move things over to the Awesome column. This includes tasking out who should meet with an external team member whether it be a person in Marketing, HR, Finance, or the CEO himself, to help where needed.

tl;dr

Meet as a team, be honest with each other, celebrate the wins, understand the misses, and always be improving.

Happy Teams Build a Dream™ #cornytshirtideas

Romy Macasieb

Director of Product Management