How to lead an efficient retrospective
This article aims to give you the keys to organising efficient and impactful retrospectives — and avoiding the situation above ⬆️.
The retrospective is a privileged communication time. It allows the team to congratulate itself on recent successes and take time to reflect on what didn’t work so well and could be improved.
Ultimately, the objective of the retrospective is to identify improvements or new practices to help the team to be more efficient.
At Yousign, 3 types of retrospectives are organised regularly.
1) Squad’s retrospective
Why: Create a team spirit within the Squad and review the past iteration to improve the delivery practices with specific actions.
Who: All squad members (developers, product managers, engineering manager, quality assistance).
When: Once at the end of the sprint or every 2–3 weeks if you work in Kanban.
How long: 1 hour is usually enough.
2) End-of-initiative’s retrospective
Why: Reflect on a finished initiative and identify what went well and what could be done better next time to capitalise on our experience.
Who: Acting members of the initiative and stakeholders involved.
When: One week or two after the end of an initiative or after an important release.
How long: it depends on the initiative but usually it takes between 1,5 and 2 hours.
3) Product team’s retrospective
Why: Identify the key factors leading to the team’s success and agree on actions to drive even better results.
Who: Product Team members (Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, Product Designers).
When: Once every quarter.
How long: it depends on the team’s size but it usually takes between 2 and 3 hours.
How to prepare the retrospective
You can consider this part as a step-by-step guide to follow to organise a retrospective — of course, it should be adapted to your context, needs and organisation.
This guide is focused on “End-of-initiative retrospective” but it can easily be adapted to any kind of retrospective.
Good preparation is a key factor for the success of your retrospective. All in all, it should take you around one hour and will ensure that everyone attending this meeting has the right mindset when the time of the retrospective comes.
List the attendants
Work on your casting. The retrospective is a privileged time to put all stakeholders in a room for a short period: don’t forget anyone. You should include both people who have been working as contributors and decision-makers.
Don’t invite too many people. Having more than 12 people in a retrospective may induce animation difficulties and people might speak less freely. Three options can be considered if you feel that too many people are invited :
- Choose a representative for each team, or ask their manager who should be included.
- Organise for the engineering team a separate retrospective focused on the delivery part of the project. Even in that case, at least one person from the engineering team should be invited, it is usually the engineering manager.
- Split the group into two balanced sub-groups and organise two retrospectives at the same time.
Find a pilot
A good animator has to be as neutral as possible and is ideally not involved in the project to avoid biases. That’s why it is challenging to both animate and participate in a retrospective.
The best solution here is to ask for help from one of your favourite colleagues who is not involved in this project. Beware, you will have to return the favour sooner or later. Starting here the pilot should be involved in all the following steps of the preparation.
Choose the format
Many retrospective formats exist and I won’t advise any of them. However, two things have to be considered:
- Choose a format which fits with the type of output that you aim for. For example, you may want to have an action-oriented retrospective or just focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the team.
- Consider that it may be the first retrospective for some of the attendants so avoid a more advanced format like the Sailboat.
The pilot may help you to find the right format.
From my experience, the Keep Drop Start is a good start and is very action-oriented. If you have regular retrospectives with your squad then you have many opportunities to explore new formats and take turns animating.
Book a slot in the calendar
This step may be the trickiest of the entire process and should be anticipated. You have to choose a date which fits everyone’s schedule and which is not too far from the end of the project.
If few people can’t make it at all, you can consider gathering their feedback before the main event. The pilot will be the right person to share the feedback with the group.
Prepare the slide deck
The slide deck is an essential tool to convey key messages to the participant. It should always — at least — include those three parts, even for the most experienced teams :
- Why it’s important to do a retrospective. What are the expected outcomes and how those learnings will be leveraged to be better in the future.
- A short reminder of the project’s timeline. Not all people worked full-time on the project and know what happened in detail. It is even more important if it was a long-term project
- The basic but essential rules to follow to have an efficient retrospective. This part may seem odd or obvious but it is always useful to remind people that we are not here to finger-point people and that we expect everyone to be in a positive and constructive mindset. It doesn’t mean that we can’t disagree but it means that we have to do it constructively. Here is an example of guidelines.
Here are the basic rules to share and apply :
- People shouldn’t be interrupted
- Mocking people is not acceptable
- What is said can be kept private
By following these rules you set up the right conditions for the success of the retrospective. As the animator, you are the one in charge to make sure that those rules are applied.
Once again, the pilot may help you to build this slide deck but he is not the main player here.
Share the slide deck with all the participants
Sharing the slides beforehand helps people to know what to expect and this should be done around one week before the retrospective. A reminder should also be sent two days before D-Day.
Two things should be asked of the participants as you share the slide deck:
- Give feedback about the timeline since everyone can have a different perspective on past events.
- Prepare what they plan to say, so when they arrive at the meeting with the most important things to share in mind.
The preparation level highly depends on the profile of the people you invited, so don’t be harsh on yourself if some (or all) of them haven’t prepared anything. If the slide deck has been shared and a reminder has been sent then you did your job!
How to animate the retrospective
Tools
I won’t earn anything by saying that - but my favourite tool so far is metroretro.io. It is a free and easy-to-use tool which has this amazing feature to hide or show sticky notes. For those who plan to lead a retrospective in real life, sticky notes and markers are your friends, just make sure to have a wall (not made of brick otherwise the sticky notes won’t stick) or a board at your disposal.
Animation
For this step, I will assume that you chose the Keep Drop Start. However, what follows can be applied to all formats with a divergent and a convergent part.
The animation of this meeting should be led by the pilot, the project leader will only intervene to present the timeline of the project.
1) Introduction
This part should last around ten minutes and is dedicated to presenting the slide deck prepared beforehand. It is a perfect occasion to remind everyone what is expected and what is going to happen.
2) Divergence
People list what they have in mind for each category (Keep, Drop, Start and questions). If you have many participants or a short timeframe, you can set a limit of 3 or 5 post-its by category per person.
Then, participants share one after another what they wrote explaining shortly what they have in mind. At this point, it’s very important to be as brief as possible because you will have time after to discuss each topic. Shared sticky notes should not be discussed by the group just yet, a dedicated time comes for that right after.
3) Convergence
Actually, for the pilot and yourself, the convergence phase begins when people start to share their sticky notes. The objective is to group feedback by theme in real time so once everyone has presented their ideas, you just have to decide with the team which topic should be discussed first.
Don’t hesitate to ask people for their opinion about each topic, ask questions, ask “why ?”, and make sure that everyone has the opportunity to speak out. The result of those discussions for each topic should be a list of actions to improve the way the group works together. If you don’t find the solution right away, a good idea may be to wonder what should be done to tend to a better situation, it may be “organise a workshop to gather ideas” or “speak with Axelle the CTO about this problem”.
Three things are important when you define an action :
- It should contain a verb otherwise it’s not an action
- Someone should be responsible for this action
- A deadline or timing should be set
During this step, you should speak about the most important topics first since it’s highly probable that you won’t have time to go through all the topics.
If some topics are not addressed, you can propose to deal with them asynchronously or set a short dedicated meeting with the people concerned.
A retrospective meeting is also a place to celebrate successes. Before jumping to what should be improved, take some time to summarise what went well.
I’m leading a retrospective with people I’m working with, what could go wrong?
Not everything always goes as planned, here is a list of common situations that you may face and ideas to solve them:
—
People not wanting to share or not finding the space to share 🤐
Explanation: It can come from many reasons. Some people might be shy, and afraid to speak in public, in front of stakeholders or in front of their manager. Some people might also not have a specific opinion about a specific topic. Others might not be as invested as you could expect and don’t want to actively participate in this kind of meeting.
Possible solutions: make sure to regularly ask this participant if he wants to share something about the current topic.
—
People being aggressive 🔫
Explanation: It can be a symptom of pressurised people or just a defence mechanism. Keep in mind that people have different ways to communicate, which means that a sentence that you perceived as aggressive might not be perceived the same by the one saying it.
Possible solutions: Don’t let it go once, as soon as you spot someone being aggressive remind the group of the golden rules of the retrospective. Do it several times if needed. If it doesn’t work it might be useful to make feedback to this person after the meeting. Hopefully, this situation is very rare.
—
People pointing out someone’s responsibility 🫵
Explanation: It can be a symptom of pressurised people or just a defence mechanism. It might also be due to a poor understanding of the retrospective objectives and rules or a lack of experience with this workshop.
Possible solutions: same as above. You can also try to lead the group to focus on concrete actions that they might take, leading them to think about the future instead of dwelling on the past.
—
People wanting to share A LOT 🗣
Explanation: Some people just like to speak a lot and share their points of view. It can also come from people who are not comfortable with silence. Most of the time they don’t even realise it. It also often comes from stakeholders or leaders who are eager to share their points of view.
Possible solutions: You have to make sure that during the meeting everyone has the opportunity to speak and give their opinion about the different topics. You can for example remind the group that time flies and ask if other people have other opinions. Just make sure that opinions from people who speak the most are not over-represented in the retrospective summary shared with the company.
After the workshop
As the retrospective’s animator, your role here is to summarise the learnings from the retrospective and share them with the company.
Be careful with the granularity level. It’s important to have in mind that most people in the company haven’t worked on the project: don’t be too technical and try to present the content comprehensively. It doesn’t mean hiding information, it means having different levels of granularity in your document.
The group decides what should be shared and what shouldn’t. If you want the retrospective to be a space of free speech and honesty you must agree with them about what should be shared and what should be kept within the group. Ask people for consent and feedback before sharing anything.
The retrospective is only useful if actions are taken and a follow-up is done on regular basis. This responsibility is shared between the animator, the attendants and the manager.
I hope this article will help you to organise better retrospectives or just guide you through your first one. Anyway, if you want to share your experience, good practices or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the comment section below.
How to lead an efficient retrospective checklist
