The art of looking back: thoughtful questions for effective retrospectives

If you want to improve the effectiveness of your team, then you can’t avoid regularly reflecting on what your team has done and how you can do better in the future.

There are retrospective templates for precisely this purpose. These provide you with a catalog of questions that you can ask yourself as a team in order to support self-reflection in the best possible way.

A classic among retrospectives is, for example, the “good / bad” retrospective. In this, you ask yourself the two simple questions of what went “well” and what went “badly”. And even if these two questions seem very all-encompassing, they very quickly become boring and therefore only generate a few useful insights into the team’s opportunities for improvement.

And this is precisely why it is important to ask well thought-out retrospective questions in a retro. On the one hand, these bring variety to the retro ritual and, on the other, they reveal new perspectives on collaboration within the team.

The first retrospective focuses on the agility of your team. This allows you to check whether your team is running like a well-oiled machine or whether a few points of friction are causing the whole thing to shake:

We get things done really fast. No waiting, no delays.

We are able to estimate exactly what we can deliver in a given cycle and with the given resources.

Our sprint results do not require any post sprint rework to be delivered.

We limit our 'work in progress' to be focused at all times.

When has our way of working led to a suboptimal workflow? (e.g. unclear, unsuitable or not followed guidelines)

When has our way of working worked well?

What are recent examples for an increment that wasn't working / shippable at the end of the cycle?

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A team can only work really well if it pulls together and in the same direction. These retrospective questions address exactly that. Do you work together or against each other?

Health Check Questions (Scale)

As a team, we share a common understanding of what "good work" is.

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Strongly disagree Strongly agree

Open questions

Handling of contradictory priorities: ‘When I encounter contradictory priorities, I …’

Communication of blockers: ‘When I am stuck on a task, I announce this by …’

Navigation of conflicts: ‘When I notice a conflict start to build up in our team, I …’

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Since we’ve been talking about reflection all along, the necessary foundation must also be in place for this. The so-called “psychological safety.”

Only if this is available it makes sense to deal with further problems and potential in the team.
This is a health check retro - a retrospective where you answer the questions on a scale from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree”. These types of retrospectives usually take significantly less time. So it is optimal for a week when time is already short or in connection with the question “what else do we want to talk about?”:

Health Check Questions (Scale)

I regularly receive useful feedback on how good my performance is and how I can improve.

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Strongly disagree Strongly agree

If a team member makes a mistake, they are not judged for it.

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Strongly disagree Strongly agree

You're allowed to not know things in our team.

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Strongly disagree Strongly agree

In conflicts, we talk on a factual level, so that no one feels personally attacked or judged.

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Strongly disagree Strongly agree

Open questions

What else do we want to talk about?

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Do you have the feeling that your team has run out of steam recently? You can tackle this challenge with the appropriate questions from the battery retrospective:

How full is your personal battery as a percentage right now?

What has drained your battery recently?

What has recharged your battery recently?

What would help you to save energy over the next few weeks?

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Normally, a retrospective always looks at the past, but a look into the future can also reveal a lot about the status of the team. That’s why you can also look at the future perspective questions from time to time:

What is the most important milestone you would like to see us achieve as a team in the next week(s)?

Which hurdle should we focus on overcoming in the coming weeks?

What would you be particularly grateful for in the coming week(s)?

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Sometimes it happens that you have a lot of energy in the team and yet very little seems to happen. This phenomenon is often caused by bottlenecks in the team. To take a closer look at these circumstances, you can ask yourself the bottleneck retrospective questions:

What options are there for eliminating this one bottleneck?

When it comes to holding truly exceptional retrospectives, you need to bring more to the table than a great retro template. Here are a few to-do’s and don’t-do’s for your next retrospective:

To-Do’s:

• Always use different formats for retrospectives to achieve a high level of engagement.
• Adapt the selection of retro questions to the circumstances in the team. Low energy in the team → battery retrospective questions.
• Create an open and shame-free atmosphere. This promotes the honesty and feedback quality of the team.
• Pay attention to the time. Short retrospectives are demonstrably more successful. Pay attention to time management and collect feedback for the questions before the retrospective.
• Celebrate your team. Only by recognizing the positive aspects of working together can a high level of self-esteem develop within the team.

Don’t-Do’s:

• Don’t treat the retrospective as a compulsory exercise. Nobody likes to do things involuntarily.
• Prevent people from becoming too dominant in a retro. This quickly ensures that others don’t feel heard.
• The retrospective must not become meaningless coffee gossip. That’s why you should never leave the retrospective without concrete measures.
• A retrospective is not a forum for complaints. Make sure that it is not about apportioning blame, but about finding solutions together.

As you can see in this article, good retrospectives are about more than just “some new retro formats”.
A good retrospective adapts to the circumstances in the team and this also includes the retro format that suits the situation.

Feel free to check out our more than 50 retro formats and test them for free - Here you will find something for every situation: