Discuss, learn, implement, improve.
Repeat.
This process sums up how many teams approach retrospectives following their two-week sprints, with the ultimate goal being to improve efficiency through the next work cycle. But sometimes, it’s not that easy. Agile teams can face a number of challenges in their retros: working through disagreements and complaints, keeping employees engaged, and ensuring goals aren’t too unrealistic, to name a few.
But perhaps the most significant challenge of sprint retros? Making sure they aren’t all talk.
For Chicago tech companies, individual ownership is a major part of ensuring action items are acted upon and sprints improve. Teams will often let an individual contributor take charge of ensuring a specific task born from a retro is completed, or ensure other team members are adopting a practice agreed upon during a meeting.
Sometimes, contributors volunteer to be an action item overseer and other times, duties are assigned by role and seniority. But in every case, individuals are empowered to supervise aspects of how upcoming sprints are refined.
Snapsheet Software Engineering Manager Lionel Luchez said retros for his team at the auto claims management company are a combination of laid-back and structured. The meeting is divided into three phases, with the latter two stages involving open dialogue and team members signing up to own an action item.
How do you structure sprint retrospectives to ensure they’re productive and action-oriented?
As we move through the three phases of the retro, we come up with resolutions, which then become our action items.
Phase one is reviewing closed gaps since the last meeting. We will pull out notes from the previous retrospective and share the progress on those items. Completed items are marked as “done” from the meeting page while outstanding items are copied over into the new meeting page so we don’t lose track of them.
Phase two is where the meeting becomes an open dialogue. Everyone is encouraged to share their thoughts on what they liked or disliked during the sprint. We praise positive contributions and work to correct mistakes and inefficiencies.
The format of phase three is fairly similar to the previous phase, except that we brainstorm on topics from open questions like recent changes, current projects and any issues we encountered. The goal is to get feedback from the team to increase our efficiency while making sure to create an environment that allows each individual to thrive.
Assignments are determined based on volunteering.”
How does your team decide what the action items should be at the end of a meeting?
For any discussion, we try to dive as deep as possible in order to understand the root cause of each issue. We discuss what should have been the right thing to do in each case and check whether that could be applied to other projects. If that solution cannot be applied on a larger scale, we look for opportunities to standardize our processes and learn from our mistakes. The team then agrees upon the best solution for our current case and lists the resulting action items.
What do you do when there’s a disagreement among the team?
The best retros are the ones with disagreements. We encourage everyone to share their thoughts and debate until we reach a mutual agreement. We also weigh each option’s benefits against its costs to make sure we don’t add unnecessary overhead to the team.
In the end, if there is no clear winning proposal, we either pause the debate or agree to try one of the solutions for some time before appraising it again during a future retro.
How do you decide which team members will handle various action items?
Assignments are determined based on volunteering. We want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to own something — be it a feature, process or something else — that they are excited about. Additionally, failure isn’t counted against you; it’s applauded as long as we learn from it and create something better. Because of that idea, our people are willing to take on action items that are out of their comfort zone. People are more willing to give their best when they feel empowered and when they have chances to show or develop their strengths.
If a task has a decent level of complexity we encourage developers to pair up, preferably with different seniority levels. This kind of collaboration allows younger programmers to benefit from the experience of more senior ones and gives mentoring experiences to the more senior developers.
Retros at financial trading company TopstepTrader are designed around the idea that the right action items should go to the correct contributor. Marketing Manager Emily Erdman said role-specific action items are assigned based on an accountability matrix that ensures responsibilities are given to the person most qualified to see them through.
How do you structure sprint retrospectives to ensure they’re action-oriented?
Our marketing team recently switched over to a “stop, start, continue” model. This is the process of team members reflecting on what they would stop, start or continue doing based on outcomes and learnings of the past two-week sprint. These can be process-oriented takeaways or results-driven outcomes.
Once documented, we assign these tasks to an owner who is most closely related to them. That individual is responsible for keeping individuals or the entire team accountable for these actions. Larger action items discovered in retrospectives are implemented. Smaller actions are noted for the future and acted upon more casually as needed.
Meetings are designed to understand learnings from the perspective of each team member.”
How does your team decide what the action items should be at the end of a meeting?
These meetings are designed to understand learnings from the perspective of each team member and identify any ways the leadership team can help them improve. So we empower individuals to identify what went well, or not so well, and create their own action items for the future.
What do you do when there’s a disagreement among the team?
There are rarely disagreements between team members, but when there are, we’ll have healthy discussions to understand why something did not go quite as planned. Usually, these discussions end up in a modified action item for the future that accounts for various perspectives.
How do you decide which team members will handle various action items?
One of our core values is “empowered people yield great results.” It was with this belief in mind that we tied a set of accountabilities to each individual role. Regularly auditing the chain of accountabilities ensures that each project is put in the right hands. It then becomes the responsibility of the individual team member to own the project to achieve those key results.
