Running a social media Retrospective — an experiment

Here in our Redgate Product Development area we’re pretty good at running retrospectives. The combined knowledge of our facilitators, coaches, technical leads, engineers and designers must amount to well over 100 years of experience when it comes to running useful, insightful and actionable retrospectives. We learnt a long time ago that a good retrospective is about more than simply doing a Lean Coffee (Not that we have any problem with using this technique!)

Our retrospectives we run have been as small as three people in a room all the way up to our entire division (Check our Chris Smiths blog here on how that went)

But now we want to try something a bit larger…

The mission of this social media channel isn’t a particularly well kept secret to be honest. We feel like we have a wealth of knowledge and experience we can share with our followers. We’ve been doing this job of building ingeniously simple software for almost 20 years, and we’re not bad at it. Along the way we’ve made many mistakes. But a company doesn’t exist for almost 20 years without also making a lot of right choices along the way. So we want to give back to our community, our followers, other companies and anyone who wants to learn what we have found has worked. Its why this social media channel exists alongside our other outlets like our Medium page, YouTube channel and our Podcast.

So in order to give back to all of you at the right level, we want to try something we’ve not seen done before. We’re all about experimentation here, so we’re going to run this as an experiment next week and we’re making a very large unproven hypothesis that you will want to get involved!

All of next week we’ll be running an open retrospective on our Twitter page. Each day next week we’ll be focused on a specific question, the order being: -

• Monday — what things are we doing well? What’s working for you?
• Tuesday — what things could we be doing better? What do we need to pitch differently?
• Wednesday — what things do we need to stop doing?
• Thursday — what suggestions do you have that you want to see more of?
• Friday — retro write up, a roundup of the week and what actionable things we will do off the back of the week

This is a pretty brave step for us. We’re going to be putting ourselves out there for you to comment on. We may have no one respond, but this is the excitement of trying something new.

So, what do we need from you?

Your involvement, honesty and engagement with us.

We look forward to finding out what you think next week.