Retro Methods

https://retromat.org

Hello,

Below are the few cool ideas people are using now a days.

Let’s take a look at a few of them:

1) Happy, Confused, Sad :

Team members will discuss the current team’s context in terms of what they are happy, sad, or confused about.Start with a whiteboard or a place where you can label three columns with Happy, Confused, and Sad.

Prompts for this retro can be:

• What were you happy about this week?
• Are there some things that made you sad this week?
• Are you confused about something the team is doing?

2) Liked, Longed, Lacked, Learned: (4L Retro)

This retro is good after a week where the team struggled with a hard problem. The importance of calling out items that the team learned during a week where they struggled with something is a good way to focus on positive outcomes that they can use going forward.

Prompts for this retro can be:

• What did you like about this week?
• Was anything lacking this week?
• What are you longing for in the coming weeks?
• Did you learn something this week?

3) Sailboat Retro:

The idea is to use a sailing metaphor to think about what’s propelling the team forward toward a specific goal. The team is a boat, and the goal is represented by an island. Wind represents what’s propelling the team toward the goal. An anchor indicates what’s slowing or dragging the team down. We also use rocks as a way to indicate risks to the project.This is a fun retro, too.

Prompts for this retro can be:

• What is the wind in our sails propelling us toward our goal?
• Are there risks (rocks) we might hit that will stop us from achieving the goal?
• What are the anchors dragging us down and preventing us from getting there faster?

And here’s how to run it:

• Draw the sailboat, island, wind, rocks, and anchor.
• Explain the prompts to the team, and give the team members five to 10 minutes to write down ideas.
• Have the team place the ideas on the appropriate parts of the drawing. More so than the other retrospectives, this might take some facilitation and help to make sure the stickies are in the right spot. People often confuse what’s currently dragging the team down with risks that might cause problems in the future.
• After doing the grouping, discuss each aspect of the analogy, one at a time.
• Discuss outcomes related to enhancing the wind cards, mitigating the rock cards, and reducing the effect of the anchor cards.

4) DIY Retro:

I included this section mainly because I think that everyone should come up with their own retro formats. Experiment with different things. To get the best feedback from your retros, you have to get people outside of their normal thought process.Take the team outside or to a different space. Bring some sticky notes and markers and come up with your own prompt.

Apart from this you can have someone volunteer to facilitate the next retro at the end of every retro we do. So by rotating facilitator, you get everyone involved and build your team with less boredom.

Here are 5 Sprint Retrospectives you can try, along with the facilitation instructions: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2017/12/spotify-retro-kit/