Introduction to retrospectives

Introduction to Retrospectives in TeamRetro

TeamRetro’s agile retrospective meetings provide your team the opportunity to reflect on their recent experiences and identify opportunities to improve. Retrospectives usually focus on a specific time period or event—e.g., the most recent development sprint, iteration, or a recently completed project. They are guided by the Agile Prime Directive:

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."

— Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Getting Started: Setting Up Your Retrospective

Creating your first retrospective is straightforward, and you have many options for customization:

Retrospective Meeting Process

  • Each retrospective in TeamRetro follows a series of customizable steps. You can reorder, rename, or skip steps based on your team's preferences.


Icebreaker

  • This optional step helps build connection and engagement before diving into the main retrospective.
  • You can pose a fun, thoughtful, or reflective question to encourage participation and get people into the right mindset. It supports team bonding, boosts psychological safety, and sets a collaborative tone for the session.

Welcome

  • This optional step sets the stage on the welcome screen and gets people started on the right foot. Participants can see a preview of the retrospective, any information added during setup, and even a relevant or fun image.
  • As part of this step, you can also run a Check-In question to boost engagement and participation.

Open Actions

  • Before diving into the retrospective, you can choose to review any action items that the team agreed to do in previous retrospectives. This increases accountability, allows you to celebrate wins, and address any blockers.
  • You can also review the team agreements, which help to set the tone of the meeting. Use PRESENT mode to talk through each item in turn. You can also use this step as an opportunity to discuss any parked items that might have been deferred from a previous retrospective.

Brainstorm

  • Your team shares their ideas within pre-defined topics such as "What went well?" or "What didn't go well?". Depending on your team dynamic, you can customize your own topics and reorder the process steps.

Group

  • In this step, all ideas are revealed, and the team may group similar or related ideas into themes by drag and drop. TeamRetro assists this process by utilizing AI to suggest groups that you can accept or reject. Grouping can be done just by the facilitator or be open to all.

Vote

  • The team can then vote independently or collaboratively on ideas they'd like to discuss further. Votes are tallied, and the facilitator can choose whether to reveal votes immediately or in the next step.

Discuss and Add Actions

  • Starting with the top-voted ideas first, members of your team can discuss, propose, and capture action items for future improvements. You can even use AI to suggest actions for you.
  • Team members can either review, comment, and add actions in their own time, or the facilitator can use PRESENT mode to guide the team conversation through each top-voted idea in turn.

Review

  • The team reviews the actions identified during the meeting and, optionally, assigns owners and due dates to ensure additional accountability. This is also an opportunity to review actions from previous retrospectives or health checks and update their status.

Close

  • The meeting comes to a close, and the results can be shared with your team, whether by email, PDF report, Slack, or downloaded into XLS or CSV formats.
  • Use this opportunity to also have a check-out question to capture participant feedback. Should you have any integrations set up, you will also be able to publish your action items to the relevant workflow tool (e.g., Slack, Jira, Confluence, etc.).


Tips for Ongoing Retrospectives

Additional Features to Explore

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