In our post on how to run a sprint retrospective (based on Danny Varner’s method), we discussed how to avoid this issue by staggering your retrospective across four days: However, there’s often a lack of follow-through, as many of these ideas are discussed during the retrospective but never implemented in the next sprint. Retrospectives can produce a lot of great ideas for improving your work processes. From here, everyone can easily skim through their colleagues’ answers and discuss specific issues in a thread. For example, you can post them in a channel like #general or #dev, or create a dedicated #retrospectives channel to have all answers in one place. Their answers get posted to a channel of your choosing. Just like the questions, the schedule is also fully customizable.Īt the specified date and time, participants get a Slack or Microsoft Teams DM with the retrospective questions. Next, you select when Geekbot should send these questions to the retrospective participants (e.g., every last Friday of the month at 2 PM). However, you can fully customize the template by adding, changing, or removing any questions. There’s also no limit to the number of questions you can ask. You can also use Geekbot to replace asynchronous retrospectives, with faster and less-disruptive asynchronous ones.įirst, our tool has a “ Retrospective” template, which helps teams reflect on previous sprints.īy default, this template includes four questions: In fact, these benefits prompted us to create Geekbot - an asynchronous meeting tool used by over 170,000 users, including remote teams within Shopify, GitHub, and Zapier. Overly-long meetings, since answering the retrospective questions only takes a few minutes out of everyone’s workday.Īs a distributed team, we know the benefits of asynchronous meetings first-hand.Workflow disruptions, since participants don’t have to stop what they’re doing to join the retrospective.Scheduling difficulties, since you don’t have to worry about multiple people on the same call.Asynchronous RetrospectivesĪs we’ve discussed before, asynchronous retrospectives - where people answer retrospective questions on their own time - help you avoid the serious drawbacks of synchronous meetings, including:
![sprint retrospective sailboat sprint retrospective sailboat](https://conceptboard.com/wp-content/uploads/Sailboat-retro-template-container_V2-01.png)
Note: We’ll be using Geekbot - our free retrospective tool for Slack and Microsoft Teams - to show how you can implement some of the ideas in this article. With that in mind, let’s look at the 12 sprint retrospective ideas in more detail. You can incorporate them at different points of your retrospective, e.g., before it starts, in order to set the mood, or, at the end, to leave on a high note. Using retrospective games and icebreakers (Ideas #9 - #11). Games and other fun retrospective activities are often the best ways to engage the whole team.These can get repetitive, so changing them from time to time is key for keeping your retrospectives interesting. Asking different retrospective questions (Ideas #3 - #7). The classic sprint retrospective has three questions - “What went well?”, “What have you learned?”, and “What didn’t go well?”.That’s why switching up the format is essential for running faster retrospectives that actually lead to valuable outcomes. Additionally, the good ideas that come up during one-day retrospectives often don’t get implemented.
![sprint retrospective sailboat sprint retrospective sailboat](https://assets.plan.io/images/blog/titel_effective_sprint_retrospective.png)
This synchronous format has some downsides, as it often leads to overly long and disruptive meetings. Traditionally, retrospectives are held during one-time video calls or live meetings.