How to Run Retrospective Meetings

What is a retrospective meeting?

A retrospective meeting is typically held at the end of a project or a sprint (which is a short, time-boxed period where a team looks to complete a pre-defined objective or task) to look back at how the team worked together and how future sprints or projects can be improved.

While these are most often used by agile teams running on a Scrum framework, retrospective meetings are great options for various projects and tasks. For example, suppose you’re designing an app. In that case, you can run a meeting at the end of your project or at the end of certain milestones (e.g., the design phase, the prototyping phase, etc.) to see how you can improve operations on the next project or iteration.

These types of meetings have several names: agile retrospectives, sprint retrospectives, sprint review meetings, post-mortems, scrum retrospectives, etc.

In our opinion, every team can benefit from some form of retrospective. Giving your team a safe space to discuss the root cause of errors, delays, and issues helps keep everyone on the same page for future projects.

What is the goal of a retrospective meeting?

A retrospective meeting aims to cover how a project went, discussing obstacles and any issues that can be improved in the future.

These incredibly important meetings usually take anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes. They’re especially helpful for leaders to determine where certain team members might need more support and how to improve productivity and efficiency.

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Team leads should keep in mind that a retrospective is meant to empower team members to speak up about real hold-ups they faced. It’s not a place for leadership monologues. Ideally, the meeting facilitator should give every attendee speaking time so that everyone can share their experience (not just the most extroverted team members).

Researchers have discovered that well-executed debriefs can increase team and individual performance by 20 to 25%. For this type of lift, these meetings need to be designed for constructive, open, and honest feedback.

One of those researchers was Dr. Scott Tannenbaum, author of Teams That Work. He’s studied teamwork at NASA and led countless lectures on how to get it right. 

When asked about debriefs, Scott told us:

“In dynamic settings, teams must learn and adapt. Those that engage in periodic structured team debriefs are better equipped to do so, and as a result improve their effectiveness by an average of 20%. Relatively easy and inexpensive to deploy, all leaders should conduct debriefs with their teams.”

A successful retrospective provides you with specific action items for the next sprint or project so your team can become more efficient after each one. Pinpoint each of the items your team thinks went well alongside a list of improvements for the future. 

For example, perhaps the team unanimously felt that the new design process helped eliminate bottlenecks, but they also felt there were too many check-ins and would prefer to get on with deep work. The project manager can look into asynchronous group messaging updates during the next project to improve team members’ ability to focus.

The main goal of your sprint retrospective meeting is to see continuous improvement in each sprint—and the only way to do that is by locating weak areas. Then you can figure out how to fix them in the next sprint.

When you need a retrospective meeting

True to their name, retrospectives happen at the end of something (i.e. the end of the sprint or major project). They allow your team to gather data and feedback by looking back on the sprint or project.

We’ve covered how retrospectives are a major part of sprint planning for future projects, but that’s not the only time you’d want to use one.

Reasons to hold a retrospective include:

• After you’ve launched a new product or service. Your marketing team may want to hold a retrospective to discuss how the launch and promotion went.
• After launching a new feature. Have your product or development team hold a retrospective meeting to discuss how to streamline releases better.
• After a sprint. Hold a retrospective with your scrum team to get honest feedback on the previous sprint (typically every two to four weeks).
• After a project has wrapped up. Using retrospective techniques to pinpoint delays and room for improvement is key for efficiency in future projects.

You may find even more reasons to hold a retrospective meeting, depending on how your team works and the type of output it has.

How to run an efficient retrospective meeting (and where async rules)

Now that you’re a bit more familiar with retrospectives and when your team might want to use this meeting format, let’s dig a little deeper into how you can run a retrospective that meets your goals.

These six steps can help take your team’s project planning and management to the next level.

1. Decide on your format

First, decide on your format: sync or async? Asynchronous meetings can help teams stay focused on their important tasks, allowing them to respond to meeting items at a time that best suits them. 

Asynchronous meetings are not held in real time. Attendees contribute comprehensive input in their own time (but still within a timeframe, e.g., “on Thursday” or “sometime this week”). Holding meetings this way lets team members think about their responses before contributing and saves time with back and forth. 

Async meetings can be held through communication tools such as:

• A Google document or whiteboard containing agendas, Q&A, minutes, or outcomes
• Project management tools with team tagging and notification features, so others know when an item has moved onto their to-do list (without an email or Slack exchange)
• Emails (although we’re actively trying to reduce email overload)
• Yac voice messaging so teams can give feedback while maintaining the clarity and context of speech (and without mobilizing huge chunks of calendar time)

When dealing with sensitive topics, as can be the case in retrospectives, async voice messaging is ideal. With voice, you can communicate feelings and emotions that are difficult to detect in text-based messaging. Holding retrospectives asynchronously with tools like Yac enables teams to have critical conversations with less miscommunication.

Async is also a great idea if your distributed team works across different time zones. No one should be left out of these meetings. So, if working hours simply don’t line up, use asynchronous communication.

Ask yourself a series of questions to help determine whether you should hold your retrospective asynchronously:

What kind of project was it?

Complex and unfamiliar projects will likely benefit from a synchronous meeting that lets every team member discuss their thoughts. As there is a lot to work out with new and intricate projects, team members will generally have a lot to untangle.

Smaller projects or sprints that your team is used to running can utilize an asynchronous retrospective. Because your team is familiar with the process (and aren’t still learning about the methodologies), they can easily submit their feedback at a time that suits them.

How many internal stakeholders (staff) were involved?

The larger the team, the longer the retrospective meeting is likely to take. If you have a large team, asynchronous retrospective meetings are more respectful of everyone’s time, as each stakeholder can leave their thoughts in a voice message without attending a time (and energy) consuming meeting.

How efficiently did the team interact and collaborate?

Efficient teams can easily hold an async retrospective and get value out of it. That’s because they likely have an agenda and discussion points in place before the async meeting kicks off (more on this later). Everyone is aware of what will be covered and the deadline for feedback. 

However, teams that are struggling to work well together during a sprint or project may need a bit more of a hands-on, real-time conversation.

Pay attention to your team communication during this meeting so you can identify any areas that need to be addressed and improved for future projects. If communication is an issue, a facilitator might be needed for future sessions.

Use this time to look out for bottlenecks, miscommunications, and collaboration issues that may stall your future projects.

What were the results?

Was the project successful? Were there any major problems? If any member of your team has specific issues they want to address (say, a problem with a poorly performing team member), a synchronous one-to-one may be the best solution. If you predict heated discussions due to major project issues or interpersonal problems, sort those out outside of the group retro setting first.

Is an urgent discussion necessary?

Significant mistakes or timely problems may call for an urgent discussion. If so, do this synchronously with the team member(s) who need to be involved.

2. Create a collaborative agenda

The next step is to create an agenda and collaborative document that everyone involved has access to. This should be distributed before the meeting so team members can compile their thoughts about the topics. It’s a good idea to create a retrospective template for your agenda so you can easily recreate one for each meeting.

During an asynchronous retrospective, the bulk of the meeting and discussion will be done within this document and in your set retrospective or team channel. Include links to the Yac channel you'll use to conduct the meeting, as well as response and acknowledgment guidelines.

For example, the project leader may propose a five-day period over which team members will have an opportunity to provide thoughts and feedback on how the project went. In some cases, individuals may have nothing to contribute, and so a simple “thumbs up” emoji reaction lets colleagues know they have received the information.

Your retrospective agenda should cover areas like:

• Project overview
• What we learned
• What we did well
• Areas of improvement (including any blockers to efficiency and productivity)
• Discussion points

Have everyone involved add talking points so each area of improvement or strength is covered and everyone’s voices are heard.

3. Start with a pep talk

Address the team with a pep talk and make sure everyone understands the point of this retrospective. There won’t always be good news for everyone, and this helps the team know not to take things personally and to understand it’s just constructive feedback for the future.

You can do this asynchronously by recording a voice message and sending it into your retro discussion channel.

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You can also include some words of encouragement at the top of your collaborative note-taking document for everyone in your team to read before diving in. If you aren’t great at pep talks, consider starting with an icebreaker to help everyone feel comfortable and ease into the discussion.

We’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: Let your team talk. A team retro is for team members to say what they have to say—it’s not the time for leaders to do most of the talking. Kick off your meeting with a quick pep talk, then immediately get into it.

4. Discuss highlights

Starting with what went well helps create a positive tone for the meeting, so bring up some of the major highlights of the project.

For example, talk about how your team was under budget or how the project was completed well before the launch date, giving everyone plenty of time to test before it went live.

Let your team bring up everything they were happy with during the sprint or project, whether they found a workflow that helped streamline processes or saw more success with a launch than expected.

Vocalizing the areas that your team is doing well in can help solidify those practices and ensure they continue in future sprints. 

5. Cover areas of improvement

The next step is to cover areas of improvement and any disruptions, delays, mistakes, etc., that occurred during the project.

Have each team member provide at least one point that they think could be improved in the future, even if it’s minor. This exercise can help pinpoint problem areas or practices that your team and its members need to stop doing or work on improving.

Be sure to set expectations and, if possible, specifically train your team on how to give constructive criticism. This is especially important if the feedback has to do with how individual team members worked on the project. Mistakes are inevitable, so make sure no one is discouraged by team members being unnecessarily harsh.

6. Bring up action items and discussion points

Finally, it’s time to talk about action items. Brainstorm ways to fix the areas of improvement, so the meeting ends with solutions instead of problems. Then discuss any other important parts of the project or sprint your team wants to talk about, such as interesting client responses that may be relevant to future projects.

Empower your team members to share their own ideas that you can test out in the next sprint. Then, put together processes and implement a plan to bring these ideas to life. 

Perhaps a team leader was micromanaging their team throughout a project. Let them know that you would be more comfortable with less supervision in future sprints, and will approach them yourself if you hit a wall. Then, try this out next time and see if it works. Be sure to add items like this to your next retrospective agenda, so they’re not missed during the discussion.

Each sprint can always be more efficient than the last sprint, so putting together these action items or ideas of what you can start doing in future sprints is an essential step of any retrospective meeting.

Key takeaways

Whether you conduct your retrospective meetings synchronously or asynchronously—or using a combination of both—it’s essential to have the right tools in your arsenal. 

Learn more about why Yac is the perfect retrospective tool to use for your asynchronous meetings.