The most important retrospective question that almost never gets asked
If you have ever been part of a product team that follows an agile process like scrum, you have likely taken part in a retrospective.
A retrospective or “retro”, as those who are close to the practice would say, is simply an opportunity for a team to come together to learn and improve. It is time set aside to pause and reflect on how the work being done is going. It’s most similar to a project post-mortem that happens after a long initiative is complete. Retros cover a much shorter time horizon and have a tighter feedback loop.
Traditionally a retrospective is set around the following three questions that the team asks of itself:
- What’s going well?
- What’s not going so well?
- What should we do differently?
Creative facilitators will mix these questions up and vary the format slightly. I’ve seen pictures, candy and generally wacky questions used to illicit input. At the end of the day though, a retro still comes back to learning and improvement.
The quality of a retro is directly proportional to what the team gives to it. If there is no trust in the team or people don’t feel safe, not much will come out of a retrospective other than the general feeling that it was a waste of…
