Want your Product Team to get better? Start doing Retrospectives.
Seriously, give this a try, you’ll never want to go back.
A retrospective is a simple concept: Your team steps out of their day-to-day work and reflects on what’s going great and what’s not going so great within the team, with projects, or the company. This simple act of taking a step back from the reactionary state that most teams are locked into is a huge contributor to their continued improvement and well being.
As always, i’ve created a short video explainer if you’d like to skip the reading part:
The retrospective is probably something you’ve heard of before, but there’s a right way to do it and there’s a half-assed way of doing it. The half-assed way is when you don’t have a clearly defined process or schedule blocked for running the retro. Your team does them at seemingly random times when there’s a break in the normal schedule. Maybe that’s once a month, maybe less. The right way to do it is to have a very clearly defined process (which i’ll show you!) and a locked-in, unmovable timeslot every week or every two weeks.
Before I go into the exact exercise I use every week with my team, I want to show you the problems that start happening when you don’t do a retro.
1. They don’t improve
Due to the constant reactionary nature of their work, inefficiencies within the team are not highlighted or fixed. Even the inefficiencies that are highlighted by certain team members get swallowed and forgotten once the workload increases again. Team improvements are spoken about, complained about, but rarely, or very slowly implemented. A team in a constant reactionary state will simply improve more slowly than a team which allows itself to regularly reflect and experiment with new ways of running the team.
At a recent retro we ran at AJ&Smart, one of the key findings was that our office space was simply not conducive for the UI designers getting their work done as fast as was needed. A tension was building that I, as the head of product, would never have noticed without running the retro. One month later we’re moving into a new office with a “quiet zone” and Bose Headphones for all our UI designers.
2. There’s a lack of “Positive Milestones” and Progress
Whether you’re working in an agency, a startup or a large corporation, you’ll probably know this feeling: You’re working toward a new release or a whole new product — it goes out into the world and… and you continue working on it with very little time to take a breath and congratulate yourself and your teammates for hitting the milestones. Sure, i’ve seen companies who’ll have a party or a few beers once a major release goes out, but these can be few and far between.
The problems this causes in many cases is “Project Fatigue”. Project Fatigue is when the initial excitement for a project starts to wear off and your down to the nitty gritty details, starting to simply get a little bit sick of it.
The retrospective allows you to regularly celebrate small wins rather than waiting around for the “big moment”. The recognition of these small wins can give a team the motivation they need to keep the excitement level up for the duration of the project and the subsequent projects they move on to.
At AJ&Smart, we work on new products every week for companies using a modified version of GV’s Design Sprint process. After about 6 months of running these back to back we began to feel a little burned out a numb — however once we introduced the retro on Fridays, we were able to give “closure” to each project week and celebrate our successes before moving onto the next project. This small tweak drastically helped us to keep the momentum up without feeling like we we’re on autopilot.
3. Unspoken tensions build up
There’s really nothing worse than a passive aggressive product team. Pressure builds up over time with any team: small irritations, unresolved tensions, simple misunderstandings and personal issues. Left untreated, this pressure can create a toxic team dynamic which may show itself as subtle rudeness or lack of patience, but can often lead to explosive, pointless confrontations.
The result of all this is a team that doesn’t feel comfortable being really honest with each other, which, in turn affects the outcome of the products. The people who are willing to fight or have the biggest egos will push their agenda, while others in the team may simply give up and move into a passive state. They contribute less and the overall potential of the team is reduced.
The crazy thing is, I see elements of this in the majority of the teams I meet. Unresolved tensions and a high build up of pressure. In fact, often the reason my company is called in is simply to help “mediate” between the members of these teams because things have gotten so out of hand.
All of this can be avoided, for real, by doing a weekly retrospective.
The Exercise: Lightning Retro Jam!
Ok, so a while back I introduced an exercise called Lightning Decision Jam, Lightning Retro Jam is PRETTY MUCH THE SAME but with one added step, therefore the LDJ video below is still very relevant and can be used as a guide.
Just add Step 1+2 from this article and you’ve got Lightning Retro Jam(LRJ).
Supplies you’ll need (linked):
- Rectangular post-its, I like yellow
- Square post-its (2 different colours, I like Pink and Blue)
- Voting dots, 2 different colours
- Sharpies or something similar
- Time Timer or any timer that Clearly shows remaining time
- A nice playlist of focus music, this is one I created, feel free use it!
Total time needed:
The times i’ve suggested in the exercise are more of a guideline and may only be relevant to the first time you run through it. The exercise itself usually takes between 40–60 mins.
Choose a moderator
You absolutely need to select someone on the team to take the role of the moderator. They can join in on the process but must focus on making sure no discussion breaks out and has to keep time. We rotate this role at AJ&Smart.
Add these two steps to the above LDJ exercise:
1. Start with the positives! — 7 MINS
The first step is easy-peasy. Everybody in the team sits at a table and without discussion, they spend 7 minutes writing (on post-its) all the good things that happened during the week. These can really be anything, here are some examples: “Really loved the client”, “Tim was a huge help”, “It was sunny”, “Team drinks!”, “Yoga was great”, “Really liked doing the user tests”.
As long as it made you feel good during the week, it should go on a post-it.
Once the 7 minutes are up, each person will have a pile of positive post-its in front of them.
2. Present Positives— 4 MIN PER PERSON
The moderator now selects one person at a time to stand up at a wall/whiteboard to very quickly explain each positive. This part is really great and i’ve seen teams go from a bad mood to feeling great in seconds. I’ve even seen people in tears while presenting this bit! Good tears btw.
Nobody else in the team is allowed to speak here. The moderator should give no more than 4 minutes per person.
Once everyone has spoken and added their positives (we even include personal/health/mood) then everyone in the group has shared without having to discuss. This is great for keeping things moving.
Ok now the team’s feeling great, to continue, watch the video above or read the article below:
Wrap Up
The Weekly Retrospective has been an absolute Gamechanger at AJ&Smart, we would never go back to our endlessly reactive way of doing things.
Just try this once with your team and I promise you, you won’t want to go back.
Do let me know your thoughts and please do tell me if you took LRJ for a test run!! ❤️❤️❤️
Jonathan Courtney is the Founding Partner and Product Design Director of AJ&Smart Berlin. He gives cheeky, energetic product design workshops and talks around the world. Follow, or get in touch with him on twitter or instagram: @jicecream.
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