Making Sprint Retrospective Enjoyable and Meaningful

• The sprint retrospective is mostly ignored from the scrum ceremonies
• How to make scrum the sprint retrospective more fun and engaging
• Plus how to make feedback from the sprint retrospective actionable insights

Midnight Salilboat Retro template from Miroverse

During my last 15 years’ journey of Agile/Scrum practices I really struggled to find the best way to make the sprint retrospective enjoyable or meaningful. It was always a good start and motivating till you find everybody in a crunch mode and need excuses to avoid the sprint retrospective.

Based on Google’s definition, the sprint retrospective is a recurring meeting dedicated to discussing what went well and what can be improved in a sprint. It also gives a chance to recover from a sprint and prepare for the next one. With a sprint retrospective, you can make each sprint more streamlined and successful than the last. But this event is most ignored as we typically run out of time and rush into the next sprint.

Here is what I found how turn the sprint retrospective more fun and meaningful.

1. Try to make the experience of the retrospective enjoyable and fun. For example, if you try to create atmosphere around each retro session with unique theme/template the experience can be engaging. Plus you can play background music while participants move around the sticky notes (espeically if the activity happens virtually over Zoom or other type of collaboration tool). Even offline mode you can play music and find some projectable background for users to move around their sticky notes based on the retrospective theme. One of interesting templates you can use is here. https://miro.com/miroverse/midnight-sailboat-retro/
2. Feedback should be complied in a meaningful way. For example, you can move all actionable feedback into scrum backlog as soft backlog items (not deliverable ticket but more of reminder) so that those feedback can be baked into each sprint as a reminder during the given period of time till the scrum team feel like it’s no longer needed.
3. Feedback can be visualized over time. Scrum master can spend sometime after each quarter to visualize on how those feedback got integrated into sprint practices or company initiatives. Those matrix can bring productivity and motivation to the scrum team ultimately.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave your comments or questions.