I speak to a lot of product teams, and help them to diagnose their problems. Sometimes the root cause looks like it’s people, sometimes it’s process. Sometimes it’s something outside the team altogether. Every team is different.
But in diagnosing these issues, I’ve found there’s one very consistent commonality for teams that are struggling: a lack of regular retros.
Retrospectives are basically a team getting together to reflect on how things are going. They discuss what’s working well, and what’s not. They collectively come up with ways to improve team performance. It’s that simple.
It’s amazing how often teams choose not to hold retros. Often people say they hold them, and when I ask when the last one was they can’t really remember.
The reasons I hear are fairly understandable.
1/ You’re totally slammed, and can’t prioritise improving team processes right now. You just need to get through this period. You already have too many meetings. We do mean to, but just have to skip to get other things done.
2/ The team is aware of what it needs to do, and will make the changes. Everyone knows what we need to do, so no need to waste time. Team morale is maybe shaky, and you don’t want to play the blame game.
3/ You don’t see the benefit from doing retros. Maybe nothing ever changes anyway. Or maybe the team is running pretty well right now. It’s healthier to do less meetings, and more actual work.
But ultimately they are just excuses.
The need for even the very best performing teams to adapt is constant: structural changes to the company, directional changes, new product focus, new team members etc. etc.
If you don’t dedicate time to improve processes, you’re signalling that team improvement is less important than whatever else you’re doing. This makes it hard to prioritise actions needed to improve team performance.
If the team is so stretched it can’t dedicate an hour to reflection, something is seriously wrong. The irony is that without conducting retros, you’ll always struggle to tell what’s going wrong. The alternative is having a hero figure internally or, worse, externally dictate the issues and how to fix it - this is not the dynamic of a healthy team.
Retros are like fitness training for an elite athlete. They bring value with their skills, but fitness lets them execute on those skills quickly and consistently. The team adds value through the work it ships, and improving processes lets it ship better and faster.
I personally boil the importance down to: if a team wants autonomy to make its own decisions, they also need to be able to autonomously fix their own issues. Retros are by far the most effective way to consistently do this.
Some tips on how to run better retros:
1/ Make it a safe space. Reinforce that these are blame free, and purely about finding problems in your team system. It’s about getting the problem out there, drawing a line under it, and fixing it. It’s important to reinforce this message each time, and build your culture around healthy, no-blame reflection.
2/ Put it in the diary. If you wait for that perfect slot to come up where everyone just happens to be free, you’ll be waiting forever. Book the time in, and ask the team to prioritise it. Having it in the diary adds friction for people to miss or cancel the session. It’s important, so treat it as such.
3/ Pick a few problems, create actions, and assign them an owner. Picking just a few problems will make sure you make consistent progress, rather than overwhelming everyone. Slow progress compounds quickly. Having a single, named owner for actions makes them far more likely to be completed, than if the team shares ownership. Every standup, ask for an update on the actions until they’re complete. This will set the tone that fixing the team problems is a priority.
4/ Run retros every two weeks while you find the right cadence. If things are really burning, do them every week. If things are humming perfectly, you can drop to monthly. But two weeks is a great cadence that will work in 95% of cases. Don’t be the team that never holds retros because you can’t agree on how frequent they should be. Also hold retros every major incident (and win!), and at the end of each quarter.
5/ Make sure to cover the positives too. Record what you do well, and should keep doing. Make actions about how to leverage your strengths even better. There will be times where you turn failures into strengths, and make sure to give those victories special focus. This will reinforce that retros are for improvement, not blame.
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I genuinely believe that whichever team can improve and learn fastest, will win the market. It fosters a culture of learning, and encourages high quality product work.
Your team health is a direct function of your product health. Make sure to give it the proper time that it deserves.