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Stop Skipping Retros

Yes, I’m Talking To You!

Avi Siegel
Agile Insider
9 min readJan 26, 2021

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Photo by Taylor Grote on Unsplash

What Are Retros?

Retros are what we call retrospectives when we’re too busy sprinting and don’t have the time to use long words. But seriously, a retro is a purpose-built way to collaborate with your team to figure out what is going well, what could be done better, and what you’re going to do about it.

Similar to what you do when taking photos (e.g., using the seemingly unrelated retro Polaroid camera shown above), the team takes a figurative picture of how things are going, studies that image, improves the environment and settings, and hopes that the next shot will be a bit better.

The basic idea behind retros is that, since nothing and nobody is perfect, there’s always room for improvement. Plus, since you work in an Agile environment (which is called “Agile” for a reason), change is not just allowed, but also encouraged, to optimize for efficiency and quality and happiness.

While engineers may have a reputation for being logical to the degree of robotic behavior, that is an obvious exaggeration. And even if they are that logical, these droids are the living, breathing, thinking type of robots — ones that can improve their lot in life (or more relevantly, at work) and make changes to become better both personally in their roles and collaboratively with…

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Avi Siegel
Avi Siegel

Written by Avi Siegel

Applying real-world perspective to product management, leadership, agile, entrepreneurship, and startups. Co-Founder of Momentum (gainmomentum.ai)

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