Agile Retrospectives: How To Make Your Team 37x More Productive

without retrospectives the digital product agency that i worked for could not have become the number one in the netherlands so in this video i will show you how retrospectives helped us increase team happiness from a 6. 4 to an 8. 2 improve team productivity and have better business outcomes as a result and to make it easy for you i've created a cheat sheet with the five three principles which you can download via the link below to have a quick overview of the lessons and the principles in this video but first a really quick definition of what a retrospective is a retrospective is a moment that takes place at the end of a period of time in which the team reflects on what went well and what can be improved so that might sound familiar like a team evaluation or maybe what you do at the end of most projects where you might know it as a lessons learned but what's different about a retrospective is that you do it way more frequent and that is more structured so that you can improve one small thing with your team every week in the agile community this is called kaizen which stands for continuous improvement which is exactly the same principle as james clear describes in his book atomic habits i made a video about the complete atomic habits retrospective that you can do in miro which i will put a link to in the description below but the main idea is that a retrospective is an opportunity for the team to get one percent better every day so that's why you want to do a retrospective every week because it can be a quick team building activity that allows you and your team to take immediate action and build a compounding effect of all the improvements that you made and while that sounds simple it actually happens quite often that retrospectives are misunderstood and that teams don't get the maximum value out of it but actually retrospectives are great also for teams that are already performing really well and it's pretty easy to solve these problems once you understand the five basic principles of azure retrospectives they will help you run retros that are fun energizing and help the team achieve results that they didn't believe were possible and principle number one is to use a facilitator for the retrospective if you're watching this video then this is probably you or you might be thinking about someone in your team that you want to support doing this the facilitator is one person responsible for keeping the retrospective on track and ensuring that everyone has a chance to share their thoughts they should also be able to keep the team focused on the topic at hand as a facilitator you bring a lot of failure to the team because your work makes the retrospective fun engaging and valuable and that helps the team to keep improving that one percent every day it's best if the facilitator is the same person for a longer period of time before you swap this role to someone else in your team to give an example when i introduced retros at the digital product agency where i worked for it was usually me who facilitated all the retrospectives at the beginning at least and after a couple of months when a team really got the hang of it they slowly started to take over and started to prepare and facilitate their own retrospectives and that's great because being a facilitator takes practice and skills where you need to be able to ask open-ended questions master digital tools learn to read the room and choose the right topic for your team to work on and the more often you do this the better you get but if you want to speed up your learning journey you can find a link to our run retrospectives like a pro course in the description down below the bite-sized videos and the ready-to-made templates will enable you to run great retrospectives today and that course will also help you with principle number two choose the right topic to focus on with your team the topic you focus on depends on the needs of your team and what stage they're in as your team just started working together maybe you should focus on getting to know each other and how you can best leverage each other's skills or maybe your team is already working together for a long time and they are struggling to meet specific goals that were set and maybe not met whatever topic you choose it's important to keep the focus on continuous improvement so that the team can learn and grow together now don't forget to involve your team in choosing the topic and don't make the same mistake as i did once because one of the retrospectives that i will never forget was with one of the teams at the agency where things became pretty heated in a workshop and while it's encouraged to disagree with each other in a retro it came to a point that the conversation was no longer constructive so we took a quick break and that allowed me to reflect and what i realized was that all my good intentions aside i did not involve the team and choose the topic for the retro by myself so they felt there was clearly a more important issue to solve first before working on the topic that i prepared and if i checked in with them one or two days before the retro we could have made a decision about the topic then and to make sure that we were aligned before starting the retro and to finish the story after the break that we took we threw out the original plan that i made and focused on the issue that the team felt was more important now one of the best ways to define a topic is with principle number three make it a challenge you might be familiar with how my two questions from design thinking and this format is also great for retrospectives instead of starting with a problem that might feel difficult to solve turn it into a how might we question this helps you to keep the team engaged and focused on the topic of the retro so instead of starting with we're being distracted all the time turn it into a challenge with how might we have long blocks of productive focus and meaningful collaboration and instead of we have so many things to do at the same time try asking how might we have less work in progress and improve our outcomes this helps the team to brainstorm possible solutions and it improves their problem-solving skills which allows them to come up with lots of ideas and then experiment with the ones they think are the best for the next week and now that you have a facilitator and a great starting point which how might we question we have principle number four to get the most value out of the retro itself follow the structure if not done well retrospectives can go on for hours without actually improving anything it's important to set a time box so that everyone can stay focused and this also ensures that the meeting doesn't drag on while still making sure that everyone has a chance to share their thoughts there's actually a great formula to retrospectives which comes from this book from esther derby and diana larsen and i have extended this formula with two extra steps which i also have applied to all the templates in run retrospectives like a pro course as well but in a nutshell you first clarify the goal of the retro then you break the ice before you quickly follow up on the action items of the last retro and once you have done that you get a data for the topic of this retro so you can generate insights and then decide what to do and finally you do a quick checkout to reflect on the workshop itself and see how you can improve it the next time you can also find an overview of these steps in a retrospective cheat sheet find the link down below in the description as well for every step you can then change the activities that you do based on the retro's goal and the needs of the team and that brings us to principle number five and with actions if you spend 30 to 60 minutes talking about problems and ideas but don't have a plan for how to do an experiment the day after your retrospective was a waste of time because then next week you will have exactly the same discussion again because no progress has been made and the only exception to this is if you were able to solve the problems or try out the new ideas in the retro itself so make sure you always take five to ten minutes where you take the conversation and the insights out of it and you turn them into actionable items for the next week you can use this template to write them in such a way that it makes it as easy as possible to get started now you might feel a little bit overwhelmed by all this info but don't worry because once you've facilitated your first retrospective you will see that if you take some time to prepare your retrospective then the workshop itself will be fun and engaging to do so before you run your first retro you should watch this video because in it i explain how to prepare for your first retrospective in less than 30 minutes while making sure you don't have to worry about forgetting a step this video will make your team thank you and they want to continue doing regular retros so click it