What your Retrospectives should look like

Today I'll talk a little bit about Scrum Retrospective meetings. This is one of the most important Scrum ceremonies and there are some tips you can use to drive a productive meeting and to pull important action items from your team.


If you have a new team, the first thing you should do is an ice breaker activity. I'll provide some examples in later posts.


After that, you can start the Retrospective by explaining the technique you are going to use. One of the techniques that I like most is the Rocket Retrospective. I got the idea from here and I have already used it lots of times, always with good outputs.

Just follow these steps:

1. Draw a rocket on the board, following the example in the picture.

2. Provide team members with pens and post its in 2 colors.

3. Explain the technique, mentioning:


3.1: Team is gathered in the rocket. We are coming together from a place (last sprints, last whatever) and we're going together to another one (the goal, the next sprint, the next release, wherever you are going). This step gives a sense of objective and team union: "we are all on the same boat".


3.2: To move a rocket, there are driving forces (enablers) and pulling forces (disablers). Also, in the team we have enablers and disablers helping, and that is exactly what we are trying to gather from the team.


4. Ask them to write enablers and disablers in the post its - and make sure you tell them that it can be just anything that comes to their minds. The evaluation will come later.


They can place the post its in the board themselves.

The most important thing that people usually forget is to capture action items according to the provided feedback. The action items should provide some kind of team improvement. They should be tracked by the Scrum Master and sent to the team. Also, it's a nice practice to keep them at a visible location. Depending on the action item, you might also want to add an ending date and an owner - one or more, actually. Don't forget that sometimes it's desirable to have the whole team as the owner.


So, in short words, to run a good retrospective:



0. Choose and study the technique

1. [Optional] Ice breaker activity

2. Explain the chosen technique

3. Gather team input

4. Gather action items


Distributed team only: If you work with a distributed team, you can adjust this technique. If some members are physically near you, get a room, use a board and ask the local team members to gather input from the distributed members via chat. If all your team members are away, make an online meeting and share a slide presentation with them.


One more Retrospective technique can be found in this post.