Facilitating a Retrospective Meeting

Different developers, managers, and scrum masters may be used to a variety of retrospective flows or have slightly different targets. GoRetro is customizable and provides many useful tools to promise a productive meeting with actionable takeaways.

Here is a short guide based on the 5 phase model introduced in the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great that you can use to take your retrospectives to the next level 🪄

1. Set the stage

The goal in this phase is to bring your team's attention to the work at hand and create an environment where your team feels comfortable and excited to engage.

How do I set the stage with GoRetro?

Create your retro board at the start of your sprint and share it with your team.
Choose a template out of our pre-defined templates gallery or create your own template that fits your retrospective's goal the best.
Adjust your board settings according to your preferences. For example, you can hide cards and votes to help your participants be unbiased, or you can limit the number of votes and show top-voted cards to keep the meeting focused.
When the meeting kicks off, use an ice breaker to get everyone comfortable speaking, anyway, and for some team fun!

Pro Tip 🚀

Change the retro template every now and then to trigger different types of reflections and conversations, and keep your team excited and engaged.

2. Gather data

Once you've set up your retro, the next phase is designed to bring the facts of the sprint to the table, so that every team member is on the same page about what actually happened.

This phase can be split up into two steps:

"Hard" data - facts and statistics based on the sprint results.
"Soft" data - The team's personal insights and opinions.

Combining "hard" and "soft" data will produce a complete picture of your sprint.

How do I gather my team's "hard" data with GoRetro?

GoRetro's Jira integration collects the sprint work results, including work by priority, spill-over, planned vs actual and so much more with a click of a button. Once your Sprint Monitoring is set up - the Joker analyzes your sprint work and adds insightful data-driven cards to your board before your retro meeting so you do not need to spend any time preparing and analyzing the charts! Chat with us to learn more about the Joker.

P.S. Not using Jira? Send us a message to let us know which tool you're using.

How do I gather my team's "soft" data with GoRetro?

There are many ways to do so within GoRetro, to name a few :

Let your team add cards to share their feedback, comment to add context or an explanation, and vote to let you know what matters the most to them.
Create polls to encourage your team to share their thoughts and feelings in a super simple and fun way.
Use the timer during your meeting to dedicate time for your team to contribute.

Pro Tips 🚀

Encourage your team to add cards throughout the sprint to ensure important insights don't get left behind. Also, use our anonymity options to avoid biased and assure everyone feels safe to share his thoughts.
Review your action item history to see if you completed your action items from your previous retro and leave feedback about their outcomes or reasons why they weren't completed.

3. Generate insights

Now it’s time to analyze the data. The goal in this phase is to uncover the root causes of what happened during your sprint and surface solutions for your team's continuous improvement.

How do I generate insights with GoRetro?

If you were using the hide cards feature, now you can reveal the cards.
Bring together cards that are related to the same topic by merging them. Classify cards based on topics by adding tags.
Sort by votes and start your discussion with the top-voted cards.
Go through your Joker cards with the team. These AI-infused insights will bring context to your data and generate new discussion topics that are objective, productive and priceless!

Pro Tip 🚀

Try limiting the number of votes to ensure that people only vote on what really matters.

4. Decide what to do

You've discovered all the issues and understand what needs to be done, it's time to make it actionable!

How do I turn our plan into action with GoRetro?

Create action items to ensure that your teams follow through on all the insights and solutions that were discussed in the retro. Make sure your action items are assigned a due date to ensure your team’s continued improvement.

Pro Tips 🚀

Set SMART goals and create your action items as the next steps to reaching your goals.
Use your action items history to keep track of open/previous action items and guarantee the right actions are created for the upcoming sprint.

5. Wrap up the retrospective

Congratulations, you've just run an amazing retrospective!

Before you wrap up the meeting it's important to reflect as a team on how the retro went, close the feedback loop, and thank the team for their participation.

How do I wrap up the meeting with GoRetro?

Before you finish the meeting, encourage your team to choose a happiness score to get a clear picture of your team's overall feel of the sprint.
Export the meeting recap and share it with your teams and other stakeholders.
Check out your analytics page to review your retro results.
Head over to your action items page to follow up and manage all of your action items.