Retrospective & Optimization

Derive key learnings and find ways to optimize the team, the collaboration, as well as the product.

• Organize team retrospectives to improve the way of working

• Review internal processes to remove obstacles and improve collaboration

• Inspect staffing of teams and roles of team members to optimize the team topology

• Discuss dependencies amongst teams to minimize in future projects

• Revisit tech debt that might have been created to prevent it from piling up

• Monitor all customer feedback channels, categorize customer inputs, and discuss with the Engineering and UX teams

• Interview those customers who offered representative insights or unclear new requirements

• Focus on continuous discovery again for the next iterations

Stop an initiative when you have achieved the objectives defined before - or when you believe other initiatives are more promising.

• The Product and Engineering leaders are in the lead and accountable.

• Agile coaches can help facilitate retrospectives, organize meetings, and follow up with actions - even though we found many of them to be too detached from the team's daily work.

• The entire product team (Product Managers, UX Research, UX Design, Engineering) is involved.

• Optionally, team members from Consulting, Customer Success, or other departments may join.

• Trust, trust, and trust to ensure psychological safety

• Team retrospectives to share learnings across the entire team

• Icebreaker games to warm up and open the retrospective session

• Metrics across the entire process to provide data beyond emotions, e.g., around velocity or lead time of features

• Transparency, openness, and documentation to ensure valuable outcomes of the meeting

• All the tools and techniques discussed in Idea Collection, Problem Discovery, and subsequent phases to help get back to the process loop

• Don’t rush. Not planning enough time for retrospectives creates the impression that it is unimportant and only done because we have to. Not digging into customer problems first but rushing into fulfilling a customer’s request will jeopardize all established efforts and mindset in the previous phases.

• Specifically in retrospective meetings:

  • Find the right team size. Too few participants and many relevant people will be missing. Too many participants, and it will become hard to give everybody a voice. Depending on on-site vs. remote events as well as tooling, the ideal number of participants varies.
  • Consider inviting management. Depending on the company culture and openness inside the team, it may help to not have executives in the room.
  • Address the good things as well as the bad things. Of course, find areas to improve but also include aspects that worked well to avoid a negative mindset.
  • Summarize and follow up so that everyone on the team knows what’s next and sees value in these retrospective meetings.

• Specifically in responding to customer feedback:

  • Categorize it. Return to product vision and strategy, identify and prioritize those that fall into strategic pillars.
  • Loop in both the customers and their point of contact in the company, e.g., Customer Success or Consultant. It will not only save time answering questions regarding progress but also make it possible to receive timely clarifications from customers.

Only mildly successful with their online gaming product, a tech company revisited their tooling and saw great potential in their previously internal tool for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.” They decided to pivot and launch this tool as their new product – Slack.