Empathy Retrospective

1. Setup

Appreciations: What did you like during the previous iteration?

This is the moment to thank all the effort your team has put into the last sprint and make sure they get the credit they deserve.

This way, you'll encourage them to continue doing a great job and ensure they are happy doing it.

Puzzles: What is puzzling you right now?

In this category, you give your team the chance to ask for clarification on the things they're not sure about. This could be about people's role, technical or functional processes. 

People are afraid of things they are not sure about, and this section helps us remove the uncertainty shadow out of the game and release that fear.

Risks: What didn't work so well?

These "risks" might be something really serious that puts the whole project in danger and, thus, they need urgent attention. But it could also be something more specific that it's making someone uncomfortable and probably preventing that person from doing the best possible job.

The goal of this section is to let your team express their feelings and not keep that "bomb" with them. Together, the team can find the best solution and make sure the project is truly successful.

Wishes: What are your improvement ideas?

In this category, you give your team the chance to share that secret idea they've been keeping for themselves. Some extra questions you can ask are: what suggestions do you have to make this project even greater? What do you think we may be doing wrong that can be addressed in a better way and improve our current processes? As leaders, we are experienced but we don't have all the answers. So, who better than the people in the field to identify improvement opportunities?

2. Fill the Board with Sticky Notes and Start the Discussion

The whole team should write their suggestions and concerns for each category on sticky notes. It doesn't have to be a detailed description explaining the whole idea. The initials (so that we know who the author is) and a simple phrase (so that we can refer to it later) will do.

Everytime that someone writes an idea, post the sticky note onto the chart in its corresponding section, as described above. This should take five to ten minutes at the most, depending on how many people you have in your team. 

Once everyone finishes writing their ideas, we should discuss each sticky note so that everyone gets a chance to better explain their ideas. As a team, we should then discuss the novelty, feasibility, and impact of the ideas, and collaborate to analyze how they can be applied to improve our next iteration.

3. Vote on the Best Ideas

After we cover all the sticky notes, comes the voting time.

Before proceeding with any action, we should focus on creating specific action items so that our next sprint goal can be accomplished. Therefore, each team member should vote on the three sticky notes that they think we must take action upon.

4. Define Next Action Items

Then, we should create practical and efficient "actions." This should be posted in the middle section of the chart, and assign a person responsible for each action item. Remember that the key is to vote on the cards with the actions that we think we should proceed with.

This is a great strategy to fully and comprehensively reflect on the past and move towards the future. It involves extensive teamwork and dynamism so our team can think about retrospectives as a session to brainstorm changes for progress.

Also, by writing thoughts down and working together, participants will be more comfortable providing ideas for how to improve the Sprint rather than feeling as if they are criticizing past ideas.

Finally, remember that people may forget about these action items after the Retro is over. So, my final tip to add action items as tasks to the Sprint Backlog, and include them in your Daily Stand-ups.