More Fun Retrospectives — Emoji Retro
Ideas to liven up your Sprint Retrospectives!
I originally intended to write this blog post ahead of Taking Pride in your Retrospectives. However, due to time constraints, I ended up writing this post later and the other earlier whilst it made sense to post that article to coincide with the occurrence of Pride in London. You can think of this blog post as a prequel to that one.
Over the course of a number of sprints, we’d tried quite a few different formats for our sprint retrospectives. Miro has a template for putting together a retro on a shared digital board and whilst sites such as FunRetrospectives.com, EasyRetro, and particularly parabol are great for running an online retro and offer a number of different templates — ultimately, what tends to result is a board with (usually three) columns. When faced with a board with a fixed number of columns each sprint, retros can start to feel repetitive and wearying.
Retrospectives offer a means for team members to express themselves and given that we are a software development team it made sense to utilise software to enable self-expression as part of the retro. Technology and software in particular have developed a number of means of enabling users to express sentiment particularly whilst online. One of the earliest of these means was the emoji. The emoji was developed to allow individuals to better express themselves online than would otherwise be possible with typed text alone. Given this, it made sense to incorporate the use of emoji within a retro to facilitate self-expression.
How it Works
Round 1 — Expression
The first round is essentially about engaging the members of the team such that they feel able to participate and contribute to the discussion. It is also about giving each member of the team the opportunity to express themselves in some small way. If each team member gets a chance to speak near the start of the retro then the likelihood of them speaking up throughout is higher. In contrast, if one or two team members are louder and dominate conversation from the beginning then others may feel less inclined to speak up.
In this round, ask each team member one by one to pick one of the emoji from the following list (although you may wish to customise the selection of emoji used for your retro):
😊🤠🐌💨💩🥳😍🤯🤬🤣😭🙏
Next, ask them why they made their choice — the choice they made may correspond to their current mood or may have been made for some other amusing reason. Either way usually makes for a good conversation starter!
Asking each team member in turn also ensures that each team member gets the opportunity to speak without being talked over and also allows some minor self-expression.
For each emoji above, there is an associated icebreaker question to ask the team member. I’ve taken these questions from EasyRetro’s list of 300+ Icebreaker Questions to Try Today but you may prefer to use your own questions.
😊 — You’re stuck in a zombie apocalypse — which two famous people (living or dead) do you want to team up with to survive, and why?
🤠 — What fictional character would you like to be for a day, and what would you do?
🐌 — You have unlimited financing to invent the most ridiculous thing you can think of: what do you make?
💨 — If you could bring back any past fashion trend, what would it be?
💩 — What’s the most bizarre food you’ve ever eaten?
🥳 — Which TV show has the best theme song?
😍 — If you were stuck in a lift with a stranger, what song would you suggest you sing to keep your spirits up?
🤯 — If you had the freedom to commit a crime and were guaranteed to get away with it, what would you do?
🤬 — What would you prefer: Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility or Iron Man’s armour, and why?
🤣 — Which two politicians (living or dead) would you love to see in a cage fight?
😭 — What song would you be forced to listen to on repeat in hell?
🙏 — If you could add a silly new rule to your favourite sport, what would it be?
When you’ve asked each team member the icebreaker question associated with their choice of emoji the round ends.
I also ran this retro a second time in which I introduced an alternative first round. In the alternative first round, I provided everyone with a pen and paper and asked everyone to draw themselves as emoji. After providing everyone with enough time to draw, go around the room in turn and ask them to introduce what they’ve drawn.
Round 2— Reflection
The second round is the main event in the retro whereby the team reflects on the sprint that has just ended.
For this round, I purchased some sticker packs of emojis and placed the emoji listed below on a whiteboard. The team were then given 10–15 minutes to write their reflections on post-it notes clustered around the most relevant emoji e.g. things they were happy about would be clustered around the happy emoji whilst things they felt went too slowly would be placed around the snail emoji.
This works equally well remotely if the emoji are spread out on a virtual whiteboard e.g. Miro.
At the end of the round, the team goes through each post-it on the board and discusses the reflection written upon it. Inevitably, some of the reflections will be very similar to, or duplicates of one another. In this case, I recommend clustering these post-its together.
After running this retro for the first time I discovered that the funny emoji was the only which wasn’t used at all — it was originally intended to lighten the mood but on reflection was probably a poor choice. On running this retro a second time, the funny emoji was replaced with a worried emoji (see below).
After discussing each reflection on the whiteboard the round is considered complete.
Round 3— Consideration
The third round is very quick and in the spirit of continuous improvement, asks each team member which emoji they would remove and which they would add for next time.
This is how we ended up replacing the funny emoji with the worried emoji mentioned above. Asking these questions allows the retro itself to be improved for future iterations.
Round 4— Actuation
Round four is a discussion in which we ask the team, based on the reflections just covered (which should still be visible on the whiteboard) what actions could be generated to improve the sprint for the next time around.
Obvious candidates are where a number of post-its are clustered together because team members have shared the same thought or concern.
If each reflection only occurs once (has been echoed by multiple team members) or if there are too many actions to be tackled within the next sprint, then a dot voting mechanism may be applied to triage the most important actions.
In this round, it is also important to go through the actions that were generated as a result of the previous sprint’s retrospective (regardless of whether that retro was an emoji retro or not) and the outcomes of each.
If the team do not see outcomes generated as a result of the actions they will start to become disenfranchised with retrospectives and will be less inclined to contribute in future. Arguably, this makes this the most important round of the retrospective.
Round 5— Introspection
The final round is a very quick emotional check-in to see how each team member is feeling at the end of the retro. Has it been cathartic? Were some of the discussions heated? Are the team comforted by the fact that their concerns will be addressed?
Asking each team member to choose an emoji is essentially asking them to choose an emotion to describe their state at the end of the retro process so you may garner some quick insights here that will allow you to tailor how your retro is run the next time around. You may also get a sense of how the team is feeling more generally here — are they feeling pressure to deliver quickly? Do they feel as though their product suggestions are being heard?
Wrapping Up
At the end of this retro hopefully, you’ll have:
- Gained some insights into how the team felt about the previous sprint by discussing the reflections raised on the whiteboard (Reflection round)
- Discussed the actions generated as part of the previous retrospective and the progress on each (Actuation round)
- Generate some new actions to be tackled as part of the next sprint which can be reviewed as part of the next retro (Actuation round)
- Garnered some insight into how the team are feeling presently (Introspection round and to some extent via the Expression round as well)
Slides used for this retrospective can be found here and here.
