It empowers teams to inspect and adapt to the way they work rather than the work itself,” says Vanessa Sequeira, head of people design at Miro. “In my opinion, the retrospective is the most important Agile ceremony – and it’s often the one that most teams skip. Sarah is passionate about positive collaboration, team-building, and content.Īnd in practice, one of the ways we commit to always learning and getting better is by running retrospectives: on the team level, the company level, and on specific projects. The company’s philosophy of continuous improvement is displayed in our core value of “Create a better version of ourselves every day.” I used to dismiss them as irrelevant for non-engineering teams, or as a twin of the post-mortem (which typically only takes place when something goes wrong, and too often involves feelings of regret and blame).īut my attitude changed immediately when I started taking part in retros at Miro. Even with just the goals, we can use them to reflect on how things are going, what changed, what we can start experimenting with as potential improvements.Įven though other teams may have different outcomes, I'm looking forward for the opportunity to bring the lessons I learned to other teams and hopefully they'll get something out of it as well.I never thought I’d be such a huge fan of team retrospectives. Lastly, I came to the conclusion that what the team learned during the retrospective would be good inputs in upcoming retrospectives.

Imagine getting that kind of information without the overhead of everyone in the team squeezing their brains out just to try to formulate the answers to those classical questions.Īnother interesting lesson I got out of the whole exercise was that encouraging everyone to reflect on what the team's goals are makes it easier for them to take ownership of their work considering they have a better understanding as to how it affects the fulfillment of the objectives they themselves identified and discussed. Identifying the goals of the team revealed answers to the classical retrospective questions such as what went well, what we can improve on, and what we can do in the next sprint. By the end of the discussion, I immediately saw that the simple act of extracting and discussing the goals provided the sailboat (the team) a strong wind helping it draw nearer to its destination.

There may already be certain expectations coming from among them or from outside the team but for this particular exercise, I encouraged them to be creative, write on as many sticky notes as they can, and not overthink.Īfter the allotted time, we discussed each item. When it was time for the team to provide their inputs regarding the destination, I reminded them to think outside the box. However, I spent a bit more time making an emphasis on the destination which represents where the team is headed or what its goals/objectives are. I immediately tried the format out and at the beginning, I explained carefully to the team the different concepts commonly used in this format. I'm not exactly a fan of sailing but I saw that the concepts (e.g sailboat, wind, anchor, rock) behind this particular format is an opportunity to really draw insights out. I'm not referring only to the particular outcomes but how I help the team identify crucial points and what specific activities we did together in order to come up with a fruitful retrospective.Īnyway, I recently came across the idea of the sailboat retrospective which was pretty interesting for me. Recently, I told myself that I needed to make an effort in making sure that no two retrospectives are alike.

The sailboat retrospective