Making Retrospectives more Personal
About Retrospectives
Based on the Scrum Guide by Scrum.org, a retrospective is a meeting held after a sprint, or after a product ships, to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness for the next one.
Retrospectives are a great tool to improve work quality and team collaboration. They enable team members to be more open with each other, promote relationship-building, and serve as a marker for monitoring team health. Although they are typically practiced within an Agile or Scrum process, retrospectives can benefit any team, even if you are not part of the scrum team.
More details about retrospective can be found here.
Retrospectives in ShopBack’s Product Design Team
At ShopBack, we try to be disciplined in conducting retrospectives. Our research team conducts a retrospective once every two weeks to get a sense of how the team is doing.
I personally perceive retrospectives as a safe space for team members to communicate their thoughts, opinions, and frustrations. Just like conducting user interviews, trust is the overarching objective. It’s important to make the user as comfortable as possible so that they can communicate their feedback as honestly as possible. I believe a retrospective that is more personal can encourage honesty, openness, and as a result, progress.
If you plan to facilitate a retrospective, here are a few things we have been doing to make ours more personal, that you could consider. This list is definitely not exhaustive, and every team may have a different organisational or cultural setting, so adapt it to the needs of your team.
Tips to make retrospectives more personal
Ask team members individually before the session for their honesty
People tend to be more open with sharing when the rest of their team members open up as well. Before the session, it’s useful to individually approach team members to ask for their honesty and to assure them that their feedback will be kept confidential. This is not meant to drive the conversation during the retro, but this step helps to prepare and persuade team members to open up. It’s also important to demonstrate how you ensure that the retro is a safe space to be honest, and that safeguards are in place to protect the privacy of feedback given.
Break the ice
To start the retro on a positive note and to get everyone comfortable with sharing, you can use a quick ice-breaker. Ice-breakers can be as simple as asking team members to share how their week was, telling a lame joke, or asking absurd questions.
My personal favourite ice-breaker questions as they generate hilarious discussions:
- Do you brush your teeth before or after having breakfast?
- Do you scrub the bottom of your feet with soap every time you shower?
Run a Safety Check before the retrospective
If this is your first time running a retrospective or if you rarely run retrospectives, Safety Checks are a good way to assess if your team members plan to voice their honest opinions during the retro. We do the following before starting our retros:
It is also important to figure out with the team how you can increase the Safety Check score from time to time. There’s a lot of resources on the internet on how to run safety checks, like this one.
Use retro boards that are more focused on feelings
There are different retro board templates that you can use to categorise the tickets. The ones that categorise the feedback based on the feelings tend to drive team members to reflect on specific emotions.
Some other examples of the board that are more focused on the feelings are Glad-Sad-Mad and Love-Want-Hate-Learn.
Use mellow music as a backdrop for writing retro tickets
Use mellow or ambient music to encourage a neutral perspective and to create focus on the task at hand. From my past experience, upbeat music may have created a positive atmosphere and resulted in the sharing of overly positive feedback. Some people also tend to get distracted by upbeat music with lyrics. However, beware of using music that’s too slow, as some participants may get sleepy.
Some suggestion of music genres to play (and my personal favourites):
- Lofi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A
- Airport music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNwYtllyt3Q
- Music with rain ambiance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0_ejQQcrwI
- Game music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6veMGLpol0
Deep dive into the feedback
During retrospectives, all expressed feelings should be considered as valid. However, it is crucial for the facilitators to remain neutral, even while demonstrating empathy as we run the retrospective.
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review
As a researcher, some methods to create questions during user interviews are useful to dive deeper into specific feedback. Show empathy by probing the entire experience, instead of focusing only on their frustrations. Ask questions about the details of the experience, and how they feel, to show that you are listening and feel for them. Deep-dive into the problem, and not into the people that are involved in the matter. As retrospective is a team event, it is also important to involve everyone in the discussion. Example of questions:
- What happened at that time?
- What do you think about this?
- You are telling the story about what happened. But how does that make you feel?
- This is more of a suggestion. Could you focus on the cause? Why is this a problem for you?
- Why do you think this is bad/good?
- What was your expectation on this matter? What did you expect would happen when we started this?
- Has anyone had a similar issue previously? What do you think about his/her issue?
These are some things we can do to make retrospectives more personal. It’s also important for you to make sure the action items are clear, and are followed up on by the owners of the action items so that the retro doesn’t disappoint your team members.
Other than all tips above, it’s important to prevent your team members feeling like their efforts to join the retro and to be honest were pointless. Being honest and being able to communicate what one is feeling is not natural for everyone. Thank your team for putting effort into being honest for you (as the facilitator) and for the team.
Lastly, all the best to you for running the retro! I hope these tips can be useful for your team.
Special thanks to Shanty for editing. Also thank you so much for our uh-ma-zing researchers Jasmine, Amy and Iju for always being honest and transparent in every of our retros.
If you’ve stayed till the end, know that I’m very thankful for your time. I hope you could take a thing or two away from my experiences! Anyway, I’m always excited to meet new people, so hit me up for coffee or tea anytime. You can also find me in ADPList. 😁
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