Hitting Reset on Retros
How to build a more effective, more close-knit team in 30 minutes a week.
Before you begin reading, do me two favors:
- Forget what you may know about retrospectives. We’re going to hit the reset button. (If you’ve never heard of a retro, even better.)
- Think about your team at work. Are you proud of the work you do together? Are there ways you can improve?
Ready, set, reset.
Good Retro Bad Retro
A retro is a recurring meeting with your team at work with a singular purpose: to look backwards in order to move forwards more effectively.
We look backwards, first, by celebrating our work together as a team. We then have a candid discussion about how the team is doing, both our accomplishments and our challenges. From this discussion, We become more effective by understanding what isn’t going well, and then immediately working to improve it.
We repeat this process every meeting. For my team at Hello Alfred, that means every single week. It may sound fluffy ☁️ at first, but hear me out.
It’s easy to participate in a bad retro. A bad retro will feel like nothing is actually getting addressed, those in the room don’t want to be there, or the team is just going through the motions to check a box… 🤷️. If this sounds like your experience, I get it. Been there too.
It’s also easy to participate in a good retro, you just have to know how to do it, and surprisingly few teams do. I’m going to change that right now. Good retros do exist, they are incredibly valuable, and there are objectively good reasons why your team should start building the habit now.
A good, regularly scheduled retro has three basic steps:
- 🍾Bring our whole team together to celebrate the hard work being done
- 👍Create a dedicated place to recognize teammates for their accomplishments
- 🔍Identify what can be improved and hold our team accountable to it
When those three steps are taken, a good, regularly scheduled retro has three clear outcomes:
- 🤗 It builds a sense of camaraderie and makes us feel like we’re all in this together
- 🔑 We come to rely on the retro as an open forum for discussion with the whole team. Communication is key for a highly-functioning team
- 📈 Our team improves by 1% each time (1.01 ^ 365, etc.)
When done well, a retro is simple, it’s effective, and it becomes a forcing function for the team’s continuous improvement.
Want to host a retro? Start here.
- Opt for a real, live meeting
Invite the team together for a live and in person meeting, gathered around a communal table/conference room (or video call for remote folks). Avoid any temptation to do an “asynchronous” discussion via Google docs or some other tool. It misses the point. It’s critical that the team comes together to talk.
Pro-tip: Leave the computers and phones behind (with exception of the host, to be explained later). - Make it a celebration
The team is working hard! Recognize it. Maybe that means beer/wine, or snacks, whatever works. What’s important is that the team feels like this is not just another meeting, but also a celebration and conclusion.
Pro-tip: My team at Hello Alfred is on a bit of a whiskey kick. - Choose the right participants
Define who the “team” is, and then invite the whole dang team. What’s important is that it’s a consistent crew that works together closely. If it’s unclear who to invite, just start small, and add more as it goes.
You’ll also need a meeting host. I’ve just chosen you, the reader, to the be the host. Congrats!
Pro-tip: Retros work best for teams between 5–30 people. More than that, and the effectiveness begins to diminish as the team doesn’t share enough collaborative overlap. - Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
The most critical step for a good retro is to repeat it consistently. Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, sprint-ly, whatever-ly. It will take about four retros for your team to get into the rhythm. It will feel impactful after just one retro, but four is the tipping point, after which it becomes natural and relied on by the team.
Pro-tip: Do it every week — preferably at the end of the day on Friday. It’s the ideal time to reflect and a great way to close out the week, heading into the weekend on a high note. - Kudos & Concerns
The meeting does need a format, of course, lest the discussion spiral into one of weather and weekends plans. You may think the format doesn’t matter all that much, and in theory I’d agree, but in practice I’ve found one that resonates far better than the others. (And let’s be real, “Mad/Sad/Glad” sounds ridiculous.)
“Kudos & Concerns” is the format I’ve used and iterated on for years. Go around the room in a circle and give each team member a chance to share their kudos to others, and raise any concerns for discussion. It’s simple in concept, and below is a step-by-step walkthrough for how to pull it off effectively.
Pro-tip: Keep reading.
Kudos & Concerns, Expanded
So we have our team, we’re all in a room together (or video call), we have our celebratory drinks (or non-alcoholic equivalent), and we’re all tired from a week of hard work. Perfect. Let’s start!
Around the Horn
First, we go around the room in a circle, and give each other a chance to share our Kudos & Concerns.
“Kudos”
Kudos are shout-outs to team members for doing something positive. Kudos are an opportunity to recognize individuals for their great work, to remember that we’re all in this together, and let the positivity shine!
“Kudos to Maddy for the killer presentation you gave to the company. Everyone loved it.”
“Kudos to Kyle for taking the initiative to create a customer feedback form for the website. Excited to see the results.”
“Concerns”
Concerns are issues for our team to discuss and improve upon. Concerns are how our team identifies what’s not working, the issues that would otherwise go unaddressed, or the problems preventing us from succeeding.
“I’m concerned we’re not getting enough customer feedback before we launch. How do we know if they’ll like it?”
“There’s a bug in our software that customers are complaining about, and we don’t know the root cause.”
There are no invalid concerns. Let’s look at two other examples:
“I don’t feel like my team understands how much work I put into my designs when they give me critical feedback.”
“There aren’t enough healthy snacks in the office.”
Obviously one is more serious, but both are valid problems that our team wants to improve on. (I didn’t make either of these up, and I’ll always remember the very raw discussion that came after the first one. Huge turning point for our team at the time.)
Write down the concerns
We write down each concern as it gets expressed. Don’t discuss them yet! Just succinctly record the concern and who raised it. Wait until everyone’s spoken. Think of this as “agenda-building.”
Discuss the concerns
Once everybody has had a chance to share, we review the concerns and dive into each in more detail. Why is this a concern? Do others feel the same way? How can it be resolved?
Talk about the concern briefly, but recognize that the goal is not to resolve the concern in the meeting, since most are not that simple.
Assign an owner
Once you’ve talked briefly about a concern, try to identify a next step and an owner who can be responsible for resolving the concern. This helps to get the concern resolved more quickly. Accountability is powerful.
“Dylan to organize a group of friend-and-family beta testers before launch.”
“Steph to collect more information from our customer success team about the software bug being reported.”
Save the concerns for next time
We save every un-resolved concern from the retro, and then review them again during the next retro, along with any new ones. This becomes the list of “open concerns.” Each retro, check in on the list of open concerns. Was it resolved? Congrats! Remove it. If not, keep it open and try again next time.
The size of the open concerns list will ebb and flow, and our team will get that dopamine hit when a concern is resolved, especially a longstanding concern.
Wrap up
Retro over, enjoy the weekend! Make sure the owners of concerns know they have some homework before the next retro. This is best done in writing.
Out with the old, in with Outro
You can perhaps tell that this meeting is important to me. I’ve hosted or participated in retros every week since 2011. I’ve seen the difference it makes with all the teams I’ve been a part of. Beyond a shadow of a doubt it brings the team closer together, and makes us more effective.
I’m on a mission to convince every team at every company in every industry that retros can have a hugely positive effect on output and longevity. And I’ve done more than just write this blog post.
I built an app called Outro, over many nights and weekends, dedicated to running a productive retro like I describe above.
It’s a playful, simple tool that’s meant to support the discussion but otherwise get out of the way. You can read more about the Outro story here, including the benefit of using Outro with your team.
If you want to host a team retro for the first time (or the n-th time), if you like the sound of Kudos & Concerns, or if you think your team retros could use a tap of the reset button, consider giving Outro a shot.
Sign up at https://outro.co. We’d love to have you in our community.
Do you have questions about how to run a retro? Need advice on how to improve your existing one? I’d love to help. Reach out to me at taylor@outro.co.
Are you already a fan of retros? Already an Outro user perhaps? I challenge you to share this post with someone NOT in the tech industry and convince them to give retros a shot.
Appendix
Other miscellaneous retro tips:
- Use a big screen TV to showcase the list of open concerns. Participants should try to leave their computers and phones behind (we all know why), so this gives everyone a chance to read along
- Don’t force the concerns. Not everyone has to have a concern every retro. Additionally, some folks will be more willing to share than others, which is perfectly alright
- Limit the meeting to an hour. Longer than that risks losing a captive audience. Frankly though, once you get into the “retro rhythm,” you can finish in 30 to 45 minutes
- You don’t have to be the manager of your team to host retros. It’s actually quite nice when a team member steps up to host. There’s no authority needed. Your job is to keep a positive attitude, keep the meeting on track, and record the relevant information
- Does your team already have weekly rituals of sorts? Tack a retro onto it. At the beginning of every retro, my team at Hello Alfred spends about 15 minutes reviewing and providing status updates on in-progress projects. Find what “add-ons” work for you!
