
Ask HN: How do you make a sprint/project retro awesome? - phprecovery
What were some practices, questions, or exercises that led to your best experiences with retros?
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sethammons
I've been told you should play around with new ways to retro. Meh. We have a
spreadsheet with columns: went well, wishy washy, needs improvement, action
items, and give thanks. People can fill it out as things come up in the sprint
or in the fisrt few minutes of retro.

It guides discussion, but requires active participation and a shared knowledge
that this is a "safe place" to call out issues. We try to make action items
around things that are frustrations for improvement. The give thanks is a good
time to reflect on help you've gotten. Personally, I'll reach out to
individuals called out in that column (who are on other teams) and their
manager to say how they helped me or the team.

Really, we learn by making mistakes. Spotting them and discussing them and
coming up with actionable, trackable remediations is what makes retros
valuable to us. Bigger mistakes and being honest about lapses in meeting
expectations lead to better retros.

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pensatoio
We iterate or try new things in retro often, but recently my team has been
sticking with a RealtimeBoard (or sticky notes, if in person,) where each
person fills out a success/praise, a frustration, and an idea or improvement.

This method of presenting things that worked and things that didn’t cuts out a
lot of wasted meeting time by jumping straight to pain points.

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fiftyacorn
I try to make sure people leave with an improvement to work on - however
small. Then start by assessing that - otherwise it just becomes a moan-fest
and nothing gets better

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icedchai
By not having one? This must be a trick question.

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lewisflude
Just curious, why wouldn't you want to have retrospectives? They take up time,
sure, but they're also incredible times to share lessons learned and look back
at a block of work.

~~~
icedchai
I'm very cynical. I've rarely seen anything useful come out of a
retrospective.

