5 tips for retrospectives for beginners & advanced

You want to have some sprint retrospective tips? No problem, as a Scrum Master, Psychologist and founder of the retrospective tool Echometer, I have quite many of them!

Sprint Retrospective Tips

Things you should get right in any retrospective

There are many things I can give you tips on. But there a few broader things that are more important to get right as a successful Scrum Master. These are the things that I am focusing on. More experienced Agile Coaches should be familiar with a few things - let’s begin!

Sprint Retrospective Tips 1: Keep it simple

Especially if you are a beginner Agile Coach or Scrum Master, or if the team itself is a bigger, this rule is crucial: Keep it simple.

At the beginning, teams are often sceptical. Do we really need this other meeting?! So you should make sure to make the retrospective simple by focusing on the most important questions only: Why did we not deliver on the results we planned for? How can we improve this?

If you answer these and have a few action items, the team learns: Okay, this is a valuable meeting that we should continue to have. Once the team says this, you already achieved something that many Scrum teams never really achieve (see Zombie Scrum).

Sprint Retrospective Tips 2: Have a good check-in

A good check-in can have a massive effect on how much team members contribute to the retrospective. The more team members participate in the discussion, the better. Especially introverted team members might need some warm up.

So try to find a check-in that helps the team to really warm up and get creative. One check-in that I really like, that let’s you have a look into other people’s heads:

• With whom in our organization would you like to switch roles tomorrow and why?

In case you don’t like this one: We have a list of many more Check-ins for every situation , just have a look.

Sprint Retrospective Tips 3: Reserve enough time for the action items

Action items are the most obvious output and benefit out of retrospectives. But oftentimes, they are of low quality.

The team focuses on discussion the question. And only a few minutes remain for putting down good action items. This is a typical mistake. Between 30-50% of the retrospective should be focused on developing good action items. The better the action item, the higher the chances that it actually has an impact.

If you want more tips on how to derive smart action items, check out our 7 tips on this topic.

Sprint Retrospective Tips 4: Have a voting mechanism

Usually, there are many things that are important and that you might talk about. How to deal with all of this? Well, you need a mechanism, some tool to vote (anonymously in the best case) on the feedback.

Traditionally, this is done with whiteboards using dot voting: Everyone gets 3 points and then sticks them to the feedback that he or she finds important.

One way to do it remotely online is to simply use a retrospective tool. Echometer for example, it was developed for this, among other things. Just open a retrospective, click around a bit - and maybe even try it out with your team:

Can AI improve your coaching? 🤖

We have Open AI’s ChatGPT on Agile Coaching interviewed - and were pleasantly surprised by the answers. 

If you ever need tips or ideas, AI can actually already be a useful source of inspiration today.

After everyone gave their opinion on the items, you should focus on the most important things only (maximum 3 area’s). Don’t make the mistake to put down too many action items. It might be tempting. But rather put down 3 good ones and implement them than having 8 action items implementing none of them.

Tips for the Sprint Retrospective 5: Take the “follow-up” of the measures very seriously

It is important to get this feeling of accomplishment regularly from retrospectives. And focusing on only a few action items helps with this. The other thing that is important here: Make sure there is some kind of follow up on action items.

You want to have some update on these things in the next retro. Only by having this, the team will see the value of the retro over a long period of time.

Even More Tips?

Do you want to have more sprint retrospective tips and maybe tips on agile in general? Then feel free to browse through our Blog . There’s a lot to discover there 🙂 .

Conclusion - Sprint Retrospective Tips

You hopefully got some inspiration for improving your retrospective. Another great hack to improve your teamwork by the way is to implement a regular team health check. And there are a few ways to do this in a pretty straightfoward, easy way. Find more on how to set up a team health check in 3 steps in the linked post.

By the way, if you are still looking for a suitable retro board (with 60+ agile retrospective formats), this post can help you: Comparing the 6 best retrospective boards

Play