How Rosie Brent Transformed her Retrospectives with GoRetro

Use facilitation techniques

The first stage of a successful retrospective is to make it fun, interesting and engaging. The ability to have a surprise element adds interest and prevents the meeting from becoming monotonous. For example, picking a new template for each meeting and/or starting the meeting with a fun activity like GoRetro’s set of icebreakers and games.

Once the team is engaged and actively participates in the meeting, the facilitator uses a set of facilitation features to control the meeting, hide/unhide card authors, votes and comments, show only top voted cards, set timers and use many other facilitation empowerments.

Last but not least, one of the most powerful tools a facilitator can have is action items tracking and enforcement, and GoRetro provides just that. A retrospective without action items is bound to turn into a waste of time, and having action items without checking on them each meeting makes them meaningless.

Support the meeting with real objective data to keep the conversation “fact based”

The next stage of a productive retrospective meeting would be to add the data layer. Advanced Scrum Masters like Rosie use data to look into the Sprint and understand what really happened. As Rosie describes it,

“...instead of having a personal perception, they've got a much more empirical measure to use, which is obviously much more useful for them to make decisions about how they'd like to move forward.”

The team can then easily answer questions such as how many unplanned events did we have? Have we worked according to the priorities? Did we finish up all the spillover from the previous Sprint? How is our actual vs. planned trend over the last 3 Sprints? Are our estimates accurate? What does the task cycle time look like?

“Cycle time isn’t something the team thinks about, as a Scrum Master I do. Seeing it as part of the retro kind of changes their perspective on how the movement of the tickets actually happened.”

Supercharge the retrospective with AI to focus the team on what matters most

Now that the team has data to support their retrospective, they need to be efficient. Going through all of the data points takes time, and as Rosie puts it

“Data on its own means nothing. I mean, I can create statistics upside down and backwards, but without any context, they're meaningless.”

Rosie is right, without context and without staying laser focused on what matters, the team will not engage. One possible solution is to run through many preparations before each meeting. But our goal is to save time, not to add more of it, so we came up with the Joker, an AI assistant that analyzes the data for you and comes up with the most important issues. Rosie experienced the Joker with her team:

״As if somebody external to the team turned around and said oh, did you know? Because fresh eyes always see the same information completely differently. They don't have any sort of baggage, any politics, any kind of reason to say something. The AI is the same, it made us think about things we don’t usually take into account”