Doing a Timeline Retrospective to Reflect on OKRs

- A retrospective meeting gives your team superpowers. And a timeline retrospective allows you and your team to take a moment to reflect and to look back at important milestones, like successes, learning opportunities, data and feedback from your customers. Taking the time for a online retrospective meeting will give you a lot of benefits and that will help your team to move away from reactive mode to proactive mode.

And in this way, you can put yourself in the driver seat, instead of running around and putting out fires the whole day. However, it's easy to skip to take the time for a retrospective and then once you do take the time for it, then it's hard to remember what happened a couple of months ago. That's why I created this timeline retrospective, which you can do online in Miro and this will help you to reflect with your team, to recollect events in a timeframe, capture and prioritize problems and to decide on next steps.

This type of retrospective is great for reflecting on a longer period of time, for example, after launching a new product, what can you learn from the past period and how do you want to move forward? Or at the end of a quarter, when you want to reflect on your objectives and key results, your OKR. If you want to learn more about setting goals with your team using OKRs, objectives and key results, then I've made a video about this in the past, which I will link down below in the description for you to have a look at.

But enough talking already, let's move into Miro and have a look at the workshop you can do with your team to reflect and to do an online retrospective. So we're now in Miro, our digital whiteboard and you can see the building blocks over here. I'm gonna talk about the past, the present and the future.

This last step is optional but I would recommend it if you want to set a goal for your team for the coming period and then you can make use of the OKRs, which I just mentioned. But let's start in the past and that's step one of the workshop and let us to recollect events. And this template will help you to recollect the big events and the milestones of a specific period.

In this case, from December up until now. And then think about the successes, the learning opportunities. I don't like to call them mistakes. The insights and the data that you gathered in that period. And I've added in some examples from the Workshop Wednesday YouTube community. I think the 10 video mark was around here somewhere.

So this is definitely a success. We got 100 YouTube subscribers. I think it was somewhere over here. But I also added some really nice emails that I got in my inbox regarding some videos that I made. You can do this pretty easily just by taking a screenshot on your phone, sending it to Miro and in this way, you have a really nice timeline of the successes.

If we look at learning opportunities, then I see there's still some confusion about downloading the free templates for the videos. So there's some opportunity over there and also balancing the paid work with YouTube. The struggle with that is sometimes difficult to find the right balance. So that's also an opportunity to improve.

For the insights, there are some topics that I see that are becoming quite popular now and getting some traction on YouTube. So that's something I want to do more of. For example, the retrospective video I made in the past gets some traction now. So apparently, this is a topic that people like, so I want to do more of that.

And for the data, you can also take screenshots of the actual data that you have. So in the beginning of the year, I set a goal, to grow the Workshop Wednesday community. That was my objective and key result. And below that, there were some numbers to make it more specific what growing the Workshop Wednesday community meant.

For example, the number of views on YouTube. And if you put in a screenshot of the number of views, then it makes it really easy to see what you actually achieved. So let's do that. So these are the actual YouTube views for 2021. So it's a little bit longer than the period that I set for myself but I'm super happy that there are almost 4,000 views in 2021, and that the number of subscribers is growing steadily.

So thank you for that. And if you're not subscribed already, then smash the Subscribe button down below because this will help to grow the channel even more. But this is an example of data that you can show and then I think there was another example over here. Yeah, so for example, the members that sign up to the mailing list.

The goal was to get to 50 members and also here, there has been a steady growth of subscribers or members to the mailing list. So that's also really nice to see. And having this data next to the insights and the learning opportunities and the successes will help your team to define better next steps.

I would recommend to do step one of this workshop outside of the workshop so that you can do it asynchronously and this will help you to save a lot of time in the workshop itself and also to come in better prepared. So ask people to fill in the digital whiteboard, the Miro board before starting actually the workshop.

And in this way, they are getting into the mood already and they are thinking also about the past period. So this will give some benefits in the workshop as well. And then in step two, it's time to capture and to prioritize problems that happened with the events in the past period. You've now a timeline overview of all the major milestones, of the successes, the learning opportunities, the insights and the data and this will also help you to spot patterns and to see what are certain problems which you want to solve.

And the next step is to basically write down every problem that you can think of that occurred in a previous period or problems that you see ahead of you. So just write down as many problems that you can think of. Everyone has the opportunity to write things down and do this step in silence first. Give everyone 5 to 10 minutes to write down as many things as they can think of and then group the Post-its that are common or related to each other into categories or into groups.

And once you have done that, still in silence, then you ask people to pick two votes and to use their votes to vote on the problems, which they think are most urgent right now, which are most pressing right now. And these are the problems that we're gonna pick up in the next steps. So in this case, there's a group of problems with a similar theme over here.

These two problems are related and this is a standalone problem. And what you can ask of the group then is to pick a vote and to place it on a specific Post-it that they think is the most urgent one. In this case, this is the winner. So that's the one we bring to the next step. And the next step is to reframe the problem into challenges.

We're now in the present and we want to see if we can reframe the problem into a how might we question. A how might we question helps people to turn the problem into a positive challenge that you can solve and it suggests that we do not have the answer yet but we can explore it. Might, it's an opportunity to solve it and we, it's something that we're gonna do in collaboration.

If you want learn more about how might we questions, then have a look at this video where I will explain that more in depth. But the goal is that you end here with one or two how might we questions that you want to solve in the next period. And the next period is the future and that's where we're gonna decide on a goal for the coming period.

In this case, I've decided to make use of OKRs and the objectives and key results workshop format. So that's the video that I'll link down below. But the idea here is that you decide on a goal for a longer period of time. If you want to focus on a shorter period of time, then you can also make an action list of possible solutions that you want to implement.

And there you have it. A workshop you can do with your team, an online retrospective meeting where you can look back at the past events, the major milestones. You can identify the biggest problems that are stopping you from making more progress and then reframe them into a challenge so that you can decide on a goal for the coming period.

I hope that this video helped you and am really curious about your goal for the coming months. So write that down below in the comments and let me know. That's it for now. Thank you for watching and see you in the next one. Peace. (lively music)