The retrospective process - BRAINSTORM
"Add your ideas under each topic"
In this meeting step your retrospective participants add their ideas and reflections under each topic. When they've finished, they can signal this by pressing the I'M FINISHED button in the meeting header. We'd recommend allowing 5-15 minutes for this step.
When your team is ready to move on, click the GROUP button to advance to the next step.
Keep the meeting moving
Keeping the meeting momentum going can be a challenge when your participants are not all in the same room and you may not be able to physically see when they've finished posting their ideas. TeamRetro provides a number of complementary tools to help you know when it's time to move on and keep energy levels high:
- Step timebox
Use the stopwatch in the top right corner of the screen to show a time countdown to all participants.
- I'm finished
When a participant has finished adding their ideas, they can click the I'm finished button at the top of the screen. Participants who have signaled they are finished will appear with a check next to their avatar in the Participants Pane, and the portion of team members who have finished is shown at the top of the screen.
- Typing indicator
When a participant is typing, an indicator will be displayed next to their avatar in the Participant Pane (this is a good indicator that some team members may require additional time).
Adjusting to your team's unique dynamic
You have a number of options in the BRAINSTORM step that can be used to adjust the experience to better match your team dynamic. These can be changed at any time during the retrospective and will take effect immediately. These are only visible to retrospective facilitators, and appear in the top right of the screen.
Customize Topics... - Customize the retrospective topics. Add your own questions to trigger conversation.
Choose when your participants see each other's ideas:
- Show ideas immediately - encourage your team members to draw inspiration from each other
- Show ideas in the next step - great to avoid group-think
Show or don't show who added ideas (this option is not available for fully anonymous retrospectives)
- Don't show who added - ideal for new or young teams; uncover reflections that your team members may not feel comfortable sharing openly.
- Show who added - ideal for well-formed teams with a strong sense of safety; also facilitates having team members 'talk through' their ideas in later steps.
Choose how ideas are colored:
- By topic - ideas will inherit their color from the topic in which they were first added
- By who added - ideas will inherit their color from the participant who added them; also facilitates having participants 'talk through' their ideas in later steps.
- Manually - want to use colors to represent something else? You can opt to choose the color of ideas manually.