A problem I've run into at a couple past companies is say you have a team of 6 people with a manager. But this team is really working on 3 individual projects with a couple members on each project.
Our daily stand-ups and retros seem to be so mixed between the projects that they don't make sense and often seem like a waste of time for people not working on that specific project. You can see people disengaging.
But splitting up the team would mean multiple 2 member teams which seem too small for things like a weekly retro, but maybe that's my misconception.
Have others had this experience and how do you handle sub teams within teams? Is splitting them up the only real solution?
My advice: Get them in a room, co-located, with a clear directive. Standups and retros can and should happen organically if we're talking about 2-3 people (or even 6). Thats a small enough group of people such that they can actually talk to each other throughout the day (think about how startup engineering works... 5-7 people, at a table, coding, talking whiteboarding, testing, deploying concurrently, beautiful mess style.
It's not clear the real problem you're trying to solve.