How I Tried To Spice Up Retrospectives and Ended Up Making My Own Card Game

Hello there. I’m Kirill, and I work for Wrike. I’ve been a developer for almost my entire adult life, and I’ve never believed in Scrum. However, Scrum has worked well in every company I’ve been a part of, so it’s just my preference. Corporate culture, quarterly goals, reflection on successes and failures during the workflow — these are all fine ideas but as a regular developer who just likes writing code, I’ve never taken any of these seriously. I would regret wasting an hour of my time on yet another meeting because I could have spent it on completing tasks.

I bet many of you reading this agree with me. And I want to appeal to people like me: “Don’t blame yourself or Scrum. Blame boring people.” Who wants to discuss their problems at a meeting with other people who have also been torn away from their usual work and want to quickly return to their main tasks? That’s right, nobody.

How it all started

Since joining Wrike, the number of meetings I’ve had to attend has grown dramatically. It’s noteworthy that when there’s a Scrum master who’s really passionate about their job, these meetings are actually engaging and every team member participates. After a while, I began to understand the importance of most of these meetings, but the retrospectives still haunted me. At that time, we conducted retrospectives according to these simple rules:

1. Each team member notes pros and cons of the previous sprint on separate sheets of paper or stickers.
2. When everyone is finished, each team member talks about what they wrote and hangs their paper up on the whiteboard.
3. Everyone puts checkmarks on the pieces of paper to vote for the most important pros or cons. Each pro or con has a limited number of votes (from three to five depending on how many sheets of paper are on the whiteboard).
4. All the sheets of paper are sorted from most to least popular.
5. Finally, the whole team brainstorms action items for each point from top to bottom.

Overall, this meeting format was really successful. We created an action item for each problem that needed some kind of one-time action and a rule to fix an issue that required an update (e.g., extending the definition of ‘done’ for tasks).

At the same time, there were several flaws in this new meeting format:

1. In rare cases, someone thought about someone else’s problems instead of their own. And there may not be such problems at all on the scale of a two-week sprint. I got lost when this happened, didn’t know what to write, and wrote down some problems that didn’t really bother me, but it was better than nothing. If I didn’t, I thought the rest of the team might’ve thought I didn’t care about them.
2. Highlighted pros are devalued. Each sprint we wrote that the whole team or a certain person did well. Focusing on our colleague’s is great and very encouraging, but only for the first few times. After several months, such praise no longer seems to be of any value.
3. Those who wrote or voted a little faster always found time to take their phone or check emails. Focus and engagement are lost. People might have felt they were involved in something that wasn’t very important.

And then one day I pulled myself together and at a retrospective. While writing down drawbacks, I mentioned that I considered these events boring. I was surprised that this sheet received the most number of votes. As an action item, we decided that team members would each get a turn to host the next few retrospectives. Everyone would come up with or take a ready-made format of their choice.

I can definitely say that this is the best option not only to come up with fresh angles on old approaches but also to involve even the most passive team members as much as possible.

After a few sprints, it was my turn. I wanted to do some kind of game. It was also clear that our classic retro format gave good results, but the process itself had the disadvantages I described above. After thinking it all over, I wrote down the rules for a card game called “Retro King”.

Fundamental rules

The whole gameplay is split into several stages. For a balanced game, the number of cards in the deck must match the number of players.

In the beginning, the first player takes a deck of cards and chooses the role they like. Then they pass the face-down deck to the next player clockwise, who also chooses the card they like before passing it on. This continues until the deck runs out of cards. It’s important that players don’t reveal their roles until they have to.

After all the owners of the Problems Detector cards have spoken, players with Strict Voter cards enter the game. They should vote for what they believe to be the most important problem, and also explain their choice. If the number of voters is even and the votes are divided equally, the rest of the team members take part in the voting.

The author of the winning problem gets 2 points.

Then the second phase of the game begins, and the players with the Positiveness cards name one positive aspect of their work in the last sprint. The sequence and rules of voting in this phase are similar to the previous one, and the winner of the vote gets 1 point.

The game ends when every team member has gotten the chance to play each role, or your meeting time ends. The player with the most points becomes the Retro King!

I highlighted several important points in the rules to help fix the existing problems of retrospectives:

1. If a team member doesn’t know any problems that they want to discuss, they can take a card with a different role.
2. As initially it’s unknown who’s going to vote, players with the Problems Detector card need to explain the problem for each participant as clearly as possible.
3. Voting adds competition. Every presenter of pros, cons, and solutions wants to be chosen.
4. Praise is much more pleasant if someone calls it an advantage and others also vote for it. Of course, it may turn out that new water for the cooler will gain more votes than the praise addressed to you, but this is more of a problem of the praiser.

Manufacturing process

“Of course, no card game is complete without the cards themselves”, I thought, and began to search for printing offices that were ready to take on a small order. Apparently, a dozen small cards don’t interfere with large orders. So I’m sure most of you will be able to find a printing office that can print these cards for you.

In order to make the cards of your dream, you need to decide not only on the size but also on many other factors.

The first thing we start with is the card material. The average printing office provides a fairly wide selection: glossy carton, matte carton, several types of splendorgel, pearlescent paper, glossy paper, craft paper, and coated paper. The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to know how dense the material is or how it feels just from the pictures on the website and text description. So don’t be lazy; you should go to a printing office to touch the material. For my cards, I chose coated paper with 300 g/m2 grammage. It makes the cards feel as close as possible to those used in board games. The paint doesn’t rub off, and is dense and smooth to the touch.

The second factor is the CMYK colors, which are indicated by a set of numbers: 4 + 0, 1 + 1, and 4 + 4. The digits indicate the number of CMYK colors. That is, 4 is for color and 1 is for black and white. In turn, a number before the plus sign indicates how vibrant the color is on the front side of the page, and the number after the plus sign is the opposite side. So 1 + 0 is black and white simplex printing.

Last but not least is the size of the cards. I settled on a size of 70x100 cm. These cards fit comfortably in your hand and pocket.

Outcome

Due to the pandemic, holding meetings offline is quite dangerous and I don’t recommend doing this, especially if one of your colleagues isn’t feeling well. However, the team and I found ourselves in good health on the day before the retrospective and decided to meet in a park for the card game to reach its full potential.

It took only about 10 minutes to get acquainted with the rules of the game, and after the first round, all participants understood the nuances of the format: Someone actively began to accumulate points to win, and others argued about choosing a more important problem. But most importantly, the whole team was involved in what was happening. Overall, the feedback from the team was positive. Due to the simple rules, even people who didn’t really like board or card games were enjoying the game.

After some time, our Scrum master tried to play this game with a neighboring team in an online format, but the lack of a suitable platform and live communication made it less effective. So, try to do something like this offline.

At the end of my story, I want to invite you to fantasize about how you can make routine meetings a little more fun for your colleagues. But if nothing comes to mind right away, you can use the game from this article! By the way, you can find the source for these cards in the links below.

I’d love to read about your success stories in the comment section, so make sure you share them.

Links

Cards: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V7-_lWj18or0WsaXIEldgQbJFxPI_dRo/view

Card generator: https://www.eternalcardforge.com/

Card background pattern generator: http://bg.siteorigin.com/