Meta-retrospective

• Hey, Yev, are you ready for our retro?
• Oh, yes, I guess…But, actually, I don’t have any points to discuss.
• Cool, me too! So, let’s just continue in our current format. We have so much work to do.

Don’t you think this situation is quite wrong? It’s obvious that retrospective is really useful and skipping it would be a bad choice for the team. But what if I say that this is not the worst case. Those guys from the dialogue above realize that holding a retro, as it is, will be a waste of time but a lot of other teams around the world would still hold a retro in this situation. Retro without much sense. Retro with empty words. Zombi retro.

We are accustomed to thinking retro is useful and all articles unanimously say “just do it”. They even give a guide on how it should look like — with points, discussions and thoughts on how to improve productivity even by 1%. But this does not work in such a way! Especially if your team is remote.

This approach expects an ideal team that will do it with enthusiasm and thirst for improvement. That all participants are acquainted and they at least crossed the threshold from complete strangers to a cohesive team. That is almost impossible in remote teams. The world has changed but retrospective didn’t.

In the real world, only a small percentage of teams can really unleash the full potential of retrospective. Others either get retro advantages partially or do it just because it’s a strong rule — and this is the worst case actually. With this approach, retro becomes a waste of time.

So my goal is to build a better approach to do retro that will be more effective, interesting and unleashes the team’s potential to the maximum.

Prepare an environment Retro environment is a complex of tools with configured templates for board, documentation and other things that will be used during a retrospective.

Every team is unique, but does the same statement hold for retros? Some teams are active and the default board could be effective for them, but some are quiet so they need a host. We shouldn’t just say what the team should do but also give a flexible environment for each participant to add something from themselves and finally, make a unique representation of a team.

First of all, we need a whiteboard platform where all our boards will be stored. I found the Miro service pretty useful for these reasons. A couple of Miro’s features:

Free plan which is more than enough for us. Real-time scalable big board A lot of tools Integration with Google docs, spreadsheets, Confluence, Jira and many others. No lags and a beautiful interface. If you are accustomed to using another tool you can write down its name in the comments. However, Miro is enough for us and I really recommend you to give it a chance.

Miro has a user-friendly interface so let’s get started with creating a whiteboard. Take a couple of minutes trying out Miro’s functionality to become more or less familiar with it.

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Blank whiteboard Here we are, this is the beginning of our adventure titled “Next-gen retrospective”

I’ll show you an example as a team member of “Chi”. Chi is an imaginary product company that provides services for analyzing user data and generating “success roadmaps”.

Let’s start from the MVP and create our retro board template.

Chi Retro board template Take a “frame” and make the shape of your board. The name of the frame could be the retro date and colour could be based on the style of your company.

Then fill the main part of the frame with a white rectangular and add a title with a retro name.

I’m not a designer but it already seems pretty good. However, it’s very formal, isn’t it? Let’s add a few unique decorations.

Chi Retro board with decorations Change the font family Using the “IconFinder” Miro app for icons, find icons that somehow correlate to your project and make your unique design! You shouldn’t restrict yourself here. Your board can be a pink circle whatever you think can represent your team. Just turn on your imagination.

Our board template seems ready hence we can move forward and start working on the most exciting part of our retrospective — activities.

Create your own activities Our retro won’t be like one big board for points, it will be a step by step roadmap where one step is an activity. Commonly retros have from 3 to 5 activities. Which activity you should choose and in which order is completely up to you.

Activities can be grouped by their purposes:

Discussion activities force participants to discuss topics. E.g. common retro points board. Introductory activities provide information that is useful for everyone in the team. E.g. “personalize your sprint”, “news minute”. This activity doesn’t require any discussions and is aimed at providing information about you and about your sprint. Metric activities collect metrics for making charts and analyzing work performance. E.g. “Score your retro”, “Satisfying level” and so on. The more important part of retro that is unfortunately ignored by most of the teams. This is for sure not the full list and if you dive deeper into the world of activities, you will find much more types of activities.

Let’s take a look at examples and create activities for our first retro in Chi.

First of all, we should introduce the Marketplace. If we consider our board to be from lego, activities are the lego blocks. Marketplace is a place where we can see all available blocks with description and copy-paste it to our board. During the creation of the new activity, you should add it to the marketplace for everyone to be able to read the description and use it in the future boards.

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Chi marketplace Chi has a perfect board where we already can see our first activity — “Personalize your sprint”. The important thing to notice is the legend of the marketplace at the bottom right corner. We should consider that marketplace will become large and having a convention facilitates the board creation process and makes it easy for new team members to “come into the game”.

Now, let’s take a look at our very first activity. By clicking on the bottom box in the marketplace activity we can open a full card with an exhaustive description of how and why use this activity.

Let me give you more activity examples by adding a couple of new ones to our Marketplace.

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Small talk is a 5-minute activity at the start of the retro for everyone to tune into the chilly discussion atmosphere. The themes should be general and well known.

Health check. Even in the most professional teams, it’s hard to control and remember all aspects of the “healthy” project. The disease detected on early stages can be easily cured but it’s important to not be too late… That is why we need “Health check”, to detect the weak parts of a product in time and predict consequences we may have if these issues won’t be fixed.

Road to success. Create a team goal. Don’t make long term goals like finishing the project or taking 10000 users, it should be rather a short term goal.

For instance, at one of the retros, we noticed that our documentation is bad and obsolete. Make a goal — “Make documentation great again” and come up with a gift that your team will receive when this goal is reached. It could be some team activity or even a day off.

Open microphone is an activity everyone knows perfectly but with additional features. Just categorized points discussion.

Next actions is the most straightforward and important activity. Take a look at everything that was discussed before and ask yourself “Is our project perfect?”. In case of a negative answer try to write down what you could do to make your project ideal. If your answer is “yes”, then open your eyes and dive deeper into the abyss of your mind. Don’t generate senseless points thinking “Oh, I should generate at least 1 point”. Make your work better and it will better your whole life.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. — Oscar Wilde

The end of the adventure. The world around us depends on our perception and beliefs. It does matter if it’s a fairytale adventure or boring routine… just STOP! Empty your mind, make a deep breath and sum up…no, not the previous sprint, evaluate yourself! What you, as a part of the team, did to make your team ideal? Analyze what you did during the sprint and more importantly, what you haven’t done. Sprint can’t be bad just because of a production issue. A sprint is always bad because you didn’t detect that bug earlier. Yes, you are guilty, embrace it, set a low score and learn! Those who always have a high score just don’t realize their mistakes.

As you may have already noticed, each activity has a deep context and can be extremely useful in the right hands. Now, everything we need is put all the “Lego blocks” together and make our first complete retro board.

Here we are. Chi team is ready for their first next-gen retro. We barely unleashed Miro’s full potential but despite this, we made a great board. Confluence, Google suite, Microsoft teams, Slack, Asana, GitHub is not even the whole list of service integration that Miro supports.

Conclusion Let’s summarize and define the main ideas of the next-gen retro:

Retro is not just a points discussion. It’s a process which consists of activities that are different from retro to retro. Make your team unique. A feeling of uniqueness adds motivation and forces everyone to think not as a “task — task doer” but as a “team — part of the team” Less formality. Let it be fun. Make retro the day everyone is waiting for. Сollection of metrics. Do you have a good retro? Prove it! Using metrics you can track the development process and see its weaknesses in time. Each country has its own history book, so why not write it for a project? Just by keeping all the retro in 1 place, you can create a real story that gives the feeling that behind you is history and you are a part of it. Enthusiasm drives progress. Whatever you do with enthusiasm will give you a great result. It’s very important to have a motivated team. If it is not, motivate them! Each retro is unique. There are so many approaches and activities that can be used in retro on the Internet. Try them all, and find the best for your team. The important thing is not your process, the important thing is your process for improving your process — Henrik Kniberg

One of the key ideas is that we apply an Agile approach to an Agile process! We don’t just create a product but we create a unique process that is the best for a particular product and team. How do we know what retro is the best? Metrics! By collecting metrics and making dashboards, the team, the customer, managers, everyone has a precise understanding of what is going on on the project.

I hope this article is useful for you and you are going to try it out with your team. Wish you good luck and share your results and thoughts with the #nextgen_retro hashtag. Using this link you can view Chi retro in Miro.