You've probably been in these meetings and on these calls with your team... "Anyone have anything to bring up?" Crickets... but your project manager can say they ran the sprint retro and move on. This isn't the way things should work and your team will never evolve without embracing this opportunity and substantively participating with courage. I’m going to briefly orient you with what the goals of doing this are—it’s not just a sprint ceremony to check a box on so we can say we’re doing Agile.
Your sprint has concluded and the team has held its sprint review. What we care about now is how the team thinks about working on that increment. Give everyone a chance to step away from the day-to-day and anything chaotic—debrief and decompress… amongst themselves. Feedback that we’re gathering here is from the team and for the team. People on the team are accountable to each other—this is not an external management review of the team’s performance or efficiency.
So with those goals understood, let’s review who we need and how to conduct these. Only the actual team members should be included in a sprint retro. This does not include anyone else—no exceptions. Others might review the output of the retro, but they are not invited to participate. In line with the team being accountable to each other, people need to feel comfortable to bring up concerns without anyone in attendance who doesn’t have an equal stake in what is affecting the team.
How to go about this? Come prepared—I can’t tell you how many retros I’ve been on where nobody speaks up. Self-select a facilitator from the group—they’ll record what is brought up and hopefully encourage participation. When you’re contributing a problem, try and propose a solution alongside it. And, have the previous retro summaries available to you can gauge progress from the previous sprints.
Instead of recording black and white feedback—what was good and what was bad, consider 'do less' and 'do more.' We really want to hold up and celebrate what went great! We want to identify those things that really propelled the team forward and maybe formalize some of them—get to a point where we can repeat and sustain. On the other side, we also want to identify what to improve—and important here to not point out who, but the things that held the team back... What is detracting from the team moving forward? What didn’t work so we can stop doing that thing and try a different thing that might be better?
I'll get into some details of how you can run better sprint retros in a follow-on post soon!