An Agile retrospective is a meeting held at the end of an iteration in Agile project management. It’s when the team can assess past work and plan future project goals. During an effective retrospective, the team is engaged and there is a clear follow-up plan. We spoke to David Horowitz—co-founder and CEO of Retrium, a company with a mission to improve Agile retrospectives—about how to structure a retrospective, how to make retrospectives more effective and engaging as well as the top reasons they fall short.
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What Is an Agile Retrospective?
A retrospective is a stage of the overarching Agile project management framework. It’s a chance for a team to get together and ask what’s going well, what’s not going well and what can be improved moving forward. To get the most out of the retrospective, it’s important that the team is on the same page, has a shared mental model, feels encouraged to participate and that there are systems set up to follow through on what’s discussed.
How To Run an Effective Retrospective Meeting
Horowitz breaks down the process of an effective retrospective into five phases.
Setting the Stage
To create an effective meeting, it’s important to set the stage. During this phase, you’d do a brief check-in to get the temperature of the room and get everyone on the same page and mindset so they are better prepared for reflection. “The idea is if you just take a group of software developers who are doing deep technical work and throw them all the sudden from that mindset into [asking], ‘What’s going well and what’s not going well?’ Of course, there’ll be low engagement because it’s too hard to switch how your brain is operating that fast,” he explained.
To do this, you might ask everyone to share one word about their emotions right now or to take some deep breaths together as a team. The prompt can be short and serve as a way to separate the previous tasks from the conversation to come.
Gather Data
In the Gather Data phase of the retrospective, the purpose is to make sure everyone agrees on the common set of facts that will be discussed in the meeting. “It’s very common at work that people remember different things about what occurred,” Horowitz said.
To help illustrate this phase, Horowitz used a simple example outside of work. A husband and wife may be trying to decide what to cook for dinner the following week. The husband may say last week’s dinner didn’t have enough flavor, while the wife thinks last week’s dinner tasted great, so they disagree about what meal to prepare. But it’s possible that the disagreement is really about what they actually ate for dinner last week, simply because they remember differently. Rather than launching into the disagreement about what to cook, during the Gather Data phase, the couple would start by discussing the facts about each meal they ate last week.
Horowitz explained that this phase is important in a retrospective because when teams skip the process of making sure there’s a shared mental model before trying to fix an issue, they are setting themselves up for failure. In a retrospective, the Gather Data phase may involve listing out all the bugs that came out in the previous two weeks or showing the burndown chart for the previous two weeks.
Generate Insights
Once the team is on the same page about the data, the next step is to generate insight. In this phase, you can ask simple questions like:
- What patterns do you see in the data?
- What surprises you about the data?
- What did you learn?
- What’s something new that you didn’t know before by looking at the data?
The questions are simple but the idea is that they can spur insights you weren’t previously aware of.
Decide Next Steps
In this phase, the team takes the insights they’ve discovered and translates them into a plan about how to move forward.
Closing the Retrospective
Once the team has determined a course of action, they can close the retrospective. This phase could include giving feedback to the facilitator or your appreciations to thank people for their time, Horowitz explained.
These five stages are discussed in further detail in the book, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Horowitz is working on the updated edition as co-author.
Reasons Retrospective Meetings May Be Ineffective
Through interviewing hundreds of companies over the last six years, Horowitz discovered three of the most common reasons retrospective meetings can be ineffective: low participation, lack of psychological safety and lack of follow-through. We outline these reasons below and discuss how to address these challenges in the following section.
Low Participation
Generally, low participation or engagement happens when people view the retrospective meeting as a checklist item, without necessarily buying into the process. “As a result, they tend to be quiet and not participate. You end up with only the extroverts or the senior leaders of the team being the ones who are vocal, and everyone else just kind of sits back and waits for the hour to pass and get back to work,” Horowitz said. When this happens, you risk following the idea of the loudest or most convincing person in the room, rather than considering the collective intelligence of the team.
Lack of Psychological Safety
Another common issue in retrospectives is that even if people do speak up, they may withhold from sharing what they actually are thinking. Rather, they’ll say what they think the team wants to hear. “While on the surface there’s a good conversation, everybody has their spidey-sense going off. They know that something underneath the surface isn’t being discussed, but no one feels comfortable enough to talk about whatever it is,” Horowitz explained. This can slow down the team’s progress and make it difficult to address the issues the team needs to move forward.
Lack of Follow-Through
Even when teams are actively engaged and people feel they can say what’s on their minds, retrospectives are ineffective when there’s no follow-through to implement the result of the discussion.
Tips To Run a Successful Retrospective
To help fix a lack of follow-through, Horowitz encourages team leaders to pay attention to what people are most excited about and to follow the energy in the room. “In other words, even if [an idea] is not the best, if it’s actually something people feel energized to work on, that’s better than a perfect idea that won’t get worked on at all,” he said. “So, following the energy is a great way of catalyzing change to set yourself up for success.”
Another way to encourage follow-through is through electing an action item ambassador, someone on the team who volunteers to drive a particular change. The ambassador doesn’t have to commit to actually doing this task, but to being the person who keeps track of the action plan and asks the team what’s getting done, who is working on what, and tracks the progress. This can also serve as a telling indicator of the team’s interests and motivations. “If no one volunteers for that role, it’s a sign that there isn’t actually energy in the room to do it,” Horowitz shared.
Visualizations are another effective way to implement the changes and action plans and to ensure follow-through, Horowitz said. “If you can come up with a way to make a big visualization of that change, it encourages people to act,” he said.
For example, let’s say after a retrospective, a team determines that they are not speaking with their stakeholders enough. During the meeting, the team decides the action item is to speak with the stakeholder every day. A simple visualization might be a big flip chart listing each day of the week. Every time you talk with the stakeholder, you’d put a checkmark near that day. It will more easily help the team track progress.
A visualization also encourages conversation about a lack of follow-through about the action item and what needs to be adjusted or improved. For different action plans, it may be more challenging to come up with a visualization plan, but Horowitz added that it’s almost always possible to visualize change if you think through the goal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is an agile retrospective important?
The biggest advantage of agile is that you can adapt to changes quickly. An agile retrospective is a vital tool in adapting to change, providing the entire team with a venue to identify and rectify problems and make smarter plans for the future.
How do you start a retrospective?
David Horowitz, co-founder and CEO of Retrium, a company with a mission to improve agile retrospectives, suggests starting a retrospective by setting the stage. This will ensure the team is on the same page, with enough time to switch focus from their current work. This could be as simple as asking everyone to share one word that’s on their mind.
How do you make a retrospective fun?
To make a retrospective fun, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page. Encouraging participation from the whole team is another way to make the meetings interesting and engaging for the whole team. Ensuring follow-through is another way to make sure the team stays engaged and motivated to move forward.
Who attends an Agile retrospective?
The entire team should attend the Agile retrospective. The retrospectives usually last between 30 minutes to an hour.
