An Introduction to Outro
A new take on retrospectives for progressive teams.
I want to introduce you to a project called Outro. I’m on a mission to bring team retrospectives to the mainstream, where they belong, and it starts here.
Outro was built with ❤ by Taylor Crane, and designed with ❤ by Danny Pirajan.
Why Outro
First… What’s a Retrospective?
A retrospective is a recurring meeting with your team at work with a singular purpose: to look backwards in order to move forwards more effectively. Highly functioning teams host this meeting on a regular basis because they act as a forcing function for continuous improvement.
And they really, really work. As a Product Manager, I’ve hosted or participated in retros across four teams (and counting) since 2011… every single week. I’ve seen the difference it makes, and I’ve seen how few teams do it well.
(You can read more about the purpose of retros, including tips for how to host a great one, right here.)
Outro’s purpose
Outro is a dedicated tool designed to facilitate retros with three goals:
- Bring the whole team together to celebrate the hard work being done
- Create a dedicated place to recognize teammates for their accomplishments
- Identify where we can improve, both individually and as a team
How the meeting works
Teams like mine at Hello Alfred use Outro every week to reflect on the past week of work.
🍾 Our meeting starts with a celebration. For us, this means beers and snacks. (Choose the right way to celebrate based on the team. Obviously alcohol is not required.)
👍 Using Outro, We each give kudos to team members that had a great week, perhaps for launching a big project or just being a supportive team player.
☑️ We then share any concerns we have and discuss how we can collectively address or resolve them. We use Outro to record these concerns and assign owners to them where necessary.
The celebration is what brings the team together. The kudos serve to keep up the positivity and acknowledge that we see each other’s hard work. And discussing and resolving concerns ensures that we are getting better every single week.
We use Outro because it helps to hold us accountable to these goals, and it encourages us to get better together.
I’m on a mission
Do me a favor and forget the “Mad/Sad/Glad” crap from traditional retrospective best practices, or the copious note-taking that never gets looked at again. Even forget that retros are for software teams only… they aren’t. These are relics from the old “agile” playbook for iterative software development.
I created Outro to extract the couple of core concepts from retrospectives that are valuable, but leave behind the “agile” baggage. What we’re left with is simpler, more playful, and dare I say more valuable.
I’m on a mission to take retros to the mainstream. I want every team at every company in every industry to give this a shot. Outro is the start of this mission.
With this mission in mind, Danny & I centered the Outro experience around three main principles.
1. Make it engaging
Outro has a playful aesthetic that was designed to support a positive team dynamic. The “Kudos” button, for example, was specifically designed to be fun to click on over and over again. (Oh, and kudos to Medium.com for the animation inspiration 😉.)
It’s purpose is to count the shout-outs that team members give each other for jobs well done, so it was critical the interaction felt special and exciting.
2. Encourage the habit
The key to seeing the value in retros is to repeat it consistently so that it becomes a habit. To encourage this habit, at the end of every retro, Outro prominently highlights the team’s summary metrics. A full summary is also sent out to the team via email.
It’s great to see how we’re doing retro after retro. In every one, we discuss new concerns with the team and resolve concerns from past retros that are no longer issues. It feels especially rewarding when the number of completed concerns is higher than the new ones added 💪.
3. Keep it simple
Outro is simple by design, and without the bloat and bore of most “agile” tools. The point of Outro is to support the team, so we do our best to get out of the way. Only one team member ever needs to log in, there’s no elaborate note-taking required. Instead, the magic happens in the real-world conversations it sparks.
Do you want to join my mission? Are you interested in hosting a retro for the first time, or the n-th time? Pick a date and time to bring the team together. Start with just one. Don’t worry if you’re not the manager of the team (I’m not either). And don’t forget to celebrate 🍾.
Sign up at https://outro.co. We’d love to have you in our community.
Do you have feedback about Outro? Questions about how to run a retro or how to get your team on board? I’d love to help. Email me directly at taylor@outro.co.
To read more about retros, including tips for how to run a great one, head over to Hitting Reset on Retros.
Appendix
Time Tracker Experiment
I invested exactly 506 hours creating Outro over the course of 18 months (graph below). I logged all of my hours spent for two reasons:
- I wanted to track my progress as an experiment to understand my productivity and motivation
- I wanted to understand how much time it takes to build an app by myself (psssst: way longer than expected).
A great majority of my time was spent coding, of course. I also spent time working with Danny, conducting user research, writing, putting together a marketing plan, etc. In the graph below, it becomes painfully obvious which months I lost motivation, and which months I kicked myself to keep going. Perhaps worthy of its own blog post in the future.
Tech Stack
Outro was built using React + Firebase. It’s a serverless app that uses Firebase as a database, as a hosting provider, as authentication, and some cloud functions, too. I cannot recommend Firebase enough - without it this project would not exist. Other critical services include:
- ReBase
- Stripe
- Sendgrid
- Segment
Feel free to shoot over any tech questions to taylor@outro.co. Especially if you’re a beginner.
