Inside Kahoot! — Five Step Retrospective
Following on from my first blog post here, here’s an inside look at how we work at Kahoot! As an agile company, our squads hold retrospectives at the end of each sprint. The aim for these is to ensure we are continually improving processes by highlighting problems and successes.
We sometimes switch up the retrospective formats but in this post I’ll briefly outline the one I use most frequently and will break it down into five steps.
- Relaxagiser (Relax + Energise)
The best way to kick off a retrospective is to create an environment that will get people relaxed and open to talking. I’ve come up with a winning combination for this — food and playing Kahoot! The food of choice is normally freshly baked croissants, fruit and Oreos! Whilst chewing and exclaiming how thankful they are for the food I’ve sourced (#huntergatherer), we play a fun Kahoot! game, usually one I’ve made or found from our trending list. You can check out my kahoots under my username!
2. Sprint Happenings
Prior to the retrospective, sprint data is collected from Jira and a poll I post on Slack. Showing this to the squad provides a bit of an overview of how the sprint went. We look at the data and discuss reasons for outliers (positive and negative), e.g:
- Why weren’t committed stories completed?
- Why were there no blockers this sprint?
- Why was time spent in ready for review higher this sprint?
- Why was our cycle time so much quicker this sprint?
- Why communication was rated higher than last sprint?
We also discuss open action items from previous sprints and squad members give an update on progress.
3. Reflection
We identify pain points and successes from the sprint by answering two questions:
- What can be improved or changed?
- What should we keep doing?
This is done individually (no more than three answers for each question) but discussed as a group. Answers are grouped together and we vote for three to discuss further.
4. Decide Next Steps
Next, we form some action items around the chosen discussion points. Once determined, the action items are assigned, summarised, and recorded on the Retro Time Jira board. This was created to track all action items across the different squads. There are a couple of extra columns such as ‘carparked’ which is for things we want to eventually address and ‘keeps’ for things we don’t want to forget.
5. Wrap Up
Before finishing, we have a recap of action items and a short break before we bust into sprint planning.
Using Kahoot! for Retrospectives
In the past I have used Kahoot! as a way of conducting retros. From searching through kahoots on our platform, I’ve seen some other companies do this too. Here are some that I found:
I look forward to exploring each step in more detail in future posts!
Over and out, the Agile Goose xx
