Efficient format for facilitating remote retrospective meetings

PM findings #2: Remote retrospective meetings, Pitch example for Shaping phase, Books subscription service 60 days free trial

👋 Hi all,

I am posting weekly story to highlight interesting findings in Project Management, Startups, also my own experiences and lessons learnt. I hope this would add value reading.

Lets start …

Screenshot from MURAL LDJ Template by AJ&Smart

✨ Remote retrospective meeting format which worked for our team

1. Background

As we all know retrospectives are not the most easy going meetings in Scrum, especially in some cultural conditions where people don’t feel that open to share true issues with each other and also in any team there is case that some people usually speak up and the rest just stay quiet.

These issues are more severe when doing that remote, when you don’t have emotional connection with the audience when facilitating workshop.

2. Method and tool selected

Prior I made research of remote retrospective tools, general methodologies and have chosen the Lighting Jam Session method shared by AJ&Smart, which was inspired by Design Sprint workshops.

For running meeting remotely we have chose to use the tool Mural.

👾 btw, Design Sprint is great method for new features, products faciliation. Highly recommend studying that, not sure why mostly UX designers are talking about it but to me, this can be great toolset for Project Managers to arrange facilitation especially in Discovery phase. Let me know your feedback, if you run DS.

3. Knowledge materials

• The original guidance on Lighting Jam Session can be found here:

• PDF and other materials can be found here: Workshopper playbook.
• Mural has existing template “LJD” which you can use easily.

4. Why have chosen this method and tool?

• Method of workshop has the concept that we work together but also alone, so it gives chance for everyone to share their thoughts.
• It has good structure to be solution oriented, ideating on problems together and defining real actions to solve the issue.
• Mural allows participants to have interactive board.
• Mural allows participants to stay anonymous.
• Mural supports timer and voting functionalities, which we need here.
• Mural has Consultants program, which I have applied and passed, which allows to use the product 1 year for free (https://www.mural.co/consultants).

5. My working plan of workshop exercises and approx duration

With this initial plan it is to last 55 minutes, but in reality for us it takes shorter, since we don’t have yet too many ideas on problems, so there is no need to do Diagram, we simply talk through on ideas and define action plan.

🎬 Shape up: Case study of writing a pitch

In my previous story [PM Week #1] I have been talking about Shape up process, which we want to use in our product development. Here is case study shared by Ryan Singer, showcasing how he actually writes the pitch.

📚 Subscription service for books, 60 days free trial

I have created list of books to be read and was looking for subscription service rather than buying individual books.

I have checked Kindle Unlimited, but for 2 books which I was looking for (Oversubscribed and Storyworthy) were not in the unlimited library, those were still available with additional cost. Then I found Scribd, which has those books and also gives chance to get 60 days of free trial, you can get that option with my reference link as well: https://www.scribd.com/g/8vhu6v

Thanks for reading through. Share your thoughts and own experience with us.

We can keep in touch via email aavetissyan@gmail.com or Twitter @meniem. If you got interested and would like to get notified about new publications via email, subscribe here.