Retrospectives 🔄

How to have them, which tools to use, and why they are crucial to your team's health.

Kaizen is a Japanese term that stands for continuous improvement.

In business, it is a philosophy that sees productivity improvements as a gradual and methodical process. This approach was born in the late 1940s, and became popular as a cornerstone of The Toyota Way.

It was not invented in Japan, though.

As part of the Marshall Plan after World War II, United States brought in experts to help with the rebuilding of Japanese industry. These experts were also tasked with improving Japanese management skills, and developed a 10-hour training program that was rapidly adopted within the private industry.

This program was titled Improvement in Four Steps, or, in Japanese, Kaizen eno Yon Dankai.

🧘 Kaizen and Retrospectives

The Kaizen philosophy is often represented by a cycle, which should look familiar to anyone working with lean principles today. The late stage of each iteration is used to check results from previous actions and act on these findings to improve the process.

This step takes different names in different industries (e.g. NASA calls it Pause and Learn). In software, we usually call it retrospective.

This article covers:

• 🎯 What is a Retrospective — and how it differs from post-mortems and similar practices.

• 🔍 How to have a Retrospective — four fundamental steps, specific frameworks and formats.

• 🗓️ When to have a Retrospective — the different between short and long retros, and how to apply them to projects and people.

• 🔨 Tools — the four best tools to hold retros remotely or in-person.

• 📚 Case studies — from successful companies like Intercom and Spotify, and direct experiences from members of the community.

Let’s dive in 👇

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🎯 What is a Retrospective

A retrospective is a meeting where the whole team reflects on how they have been working recently and defines actions to do better in the future.

Retrospectives focus on improving the process, rather than the product. People discuss the way they work together, identify bottlenecks, and find ways to overcome them.

Also, retrospectives are intended to help you while the project is still in progress. This is the main difference with post-mortems, which are instead conducted after the project is over.

• Retrospectives produce action items to be executed over the next iterations.

• Post-mortems produce lessons learned to be applied in the next projects.

All of this looks rather straightforward, so you may be tempted to jump into a retro without much preparation, expecting a productive discussion to unfold by itself.

This is probably not going to happen. Especially in teams larger than 3-4 members.

Most of us are good at problem-solving individually, but when we’re in a group setting, divergent personalities make decision making hard.

Good retrospectives are mini workshops — they should follow well-defined rules.

Let’s see them 👇

🔍 How to have a Retrospective

Successful retrospectives are made by four main elements:

• 💂‍♀️ Facilitator — to run the meeting properly.

• 📋 Context — to recap recent results and events.

• 🔀 Diverge — to gather ideas from participants.

• 🤝 Converge — to decide what to do and make a shared action plan.

Different companies may implement these in different ways, but there is always some version of them.

💂‍♀️ Facilitator

Having someone who clearly runs the meeting is crucial to making it successful. This role may be embodied by an engineering manager or someone with managerial responsibilities within the team.

The facilitator has three main responsibilities: