Product Retrospectives
Sometimes you work for a long time on a product. Let’s say more than a year. And despite all the Sprint Retrospectives you feel the need to take a step back and look at the larger picture, zoom out and see how we have grown over the months? years? What are the trend-lines and what can we learn from that.
This is also a great moment to bring in all the product teams, and not just the software teams, but perhaps those that helped with launch, shipments, supply, legal, marketing, operations etc. How would you run a Product Retrospective?
Who is here?
In such large groups it makes sense to start off with some introductions. So a liberating structure like Impromptu Networking can help with that. A twist would be not (just) to look for what one brings but more reflective:
“What challenges have you faced in this period? what did you get and gave to the product”
It should take about 15 min, but I am taking the assumption that there is a level of psychological safety in the group, if not you may need to adress that first.
Examine the timeline
Before starting this part, the facilitator will need to claim a piece of empty wall and create a timeline. Label the horizontal axis with either dates or significant milestones the team will be familiar with, such as a sprint start/end date, a release date, and so on. This also sets the bounderies of your retrospective.
Generate events:
Make sure there are enough post-its and sharpies for everyone. Not that you need three colors. Each color should be used for a particular type of event that occurred during the specified timeline, where:
- Green represents good events
- Yellow represents significant or memorable events
- Orange represents problematic events
Start with 4 minutes silent writing, then have them post their events on the timeline explain what they mean by that. Avoid duplicates but let everyone share their ideas. Encourage open conversation. The events go below the timeline.
Create Insights
Create a vertical axis using 3 smiley post-its: draw a happy, neutral and sad smiley face. Now let each team member to draw a dot indicating how they felt about things at that particular point in time, where they felt:
- Happy
- Sad
- Neutral
This will give you a scatter plot on team happiness over the run of the project, you can use this to dig deeper into improvements.
What, so what, now what
The What, So What, Now What libertating structure is a great way to dig deeper in these events. What did you really factually see? What does that mean? What actions make sense based on those conclusions?
This allows participants to reflect and inspect their actions. Take a look at the following angles:
- The Discovery Process: how did we know this was valuable?
- The Development Process: how did we know we made in the right way?
- The Planning Process: how good were we in forecasting and what was the effect of that?
- The Delivery Process: how did the product end up in the hands of the customer? what additional steps were covered and how did we perform on those?
- The Launch Process: once we started shipping the product, how did that go?
- How did we measuring value? could we steer properly on that?
- How did we validate hypothesis? could we have done that more, faster, cheaper?
- What about optimisation? how did we respond when the product started to get traction?
- The facilitation of events and meetings, did we improve or stagnate in our ways of cooperation with the organisation and stakeholders?
- How was our Stakeholder Management? Were we being led or did we lead?
Sow, reap, discard
Go back to the timeline, explore what you have learned and divide them into three buckets:
- Sow, great learnings that need more maturing to bring value or potential value
- Reap, which learnings are we going to turn into a poster and share with the world
- Discard, what are we never going to do again. Again classify and perhaps share for the sake of transparency
Use 1–2–4-ALL if there is too much or the group is too large.
That’s it, enjoy and keep delivering awesome products
