Reviving Sprint Retros

[Evan Fishman - Rally for Jira]

Ever finished a sprint retro feeling you wasted time? We've all been there. lol

As a founder and de facto project manager, I've seen firsthand how boring retros hurt team spirit.

But with a few creative ideas, we can revive these sessions.

Some of my favourites are:

➡ The Sailboat Exercise: Think of your team as a sailboat. What helps it move? What slows it down?

This exercise helps teams talk about how they work together.

➡ Start-Stop-Continue: Simple but valuable. What to start? What to stop? What to keep doing?

This helps find ways to get better fast.

➡ The 5 Whys: For example, when a major problem occurs, ask "why" five times to find the actual cause.

Often, the main issue is not the first thing you think of.

[Jeff Isenberg]

So true! I often get shrugs when asking, "what can we do better?" I like to respond to this with, "wow! I've never met a perfect team before!" This can get people talking. 

Sometimes folks are just impatient and want to get back to their day to day work, or they think there's nothing they can change. Sometimes I struggle to decide when to keep pushing the conversation and when to just adjourn and try again next time.

[Evan Fishman - Rally for Jira]

Haha totally understand you @Jeff Isenberg 

[Stephen_Lugton]

I try and use different formats each time, even if they cover the same kind of questions, for example our first retro after Christmas had 4 questions:

🎁 What presents did we get? (What went well?)

🤢 What did the Grinch do to steal Christmas? (What didn't go well?)

🎅 How was naughty and who was nice? (What delayed us or helped us?)

📔 What's on our list for next Christmas? (What should we change or aim to improve?)

For Halloween it was:

👻 Ghosts; what issues took you by surprise?

💀 Zombies; What felt slow – undead, even?

🧠 Brains; What did your team learn this sprint, or what do you need to learn? Now is the time to devour all those juicy, delicious brains!

🍬 Candy; Now, it’s time for those Halloween treats! What went well, and who deserves candy for all their hard work?

Then other times I use more focussed questions to get people thinking more:

• Did anything about this sprint go better than you expected it to? If so, what?
• What tools, techniques, and/or resources helped you during this sprint?
• What about this sprint was the biggest source of stress or difficulty for you personally?
• What’s still puzzling or unresolved about our process or an issue?
• Where are we running out of time?

or

• What’s something on your desk, a nearby wall, or out the window that cheers you up during the day?
• For the work you did over the last 2 weeks, why did you choose the approach you did?
• What resources do you wish you’d had (or had more of) during this sprint? How would they have made a difference?
• What can we do to replicate the successful parts of this sprint?
• What would you do if you were 100% responsible for the items you're working on?
• What’s something you admire about a colleague’s work this sprint?

[Luis Ortiz - Catapult Labs]

This is a great discussion, and the research cited here highlights a crucial challenge for Agile teams—how to balance autonomy with alignment.
As teams become more distributed and self-organizing, ensuring that productivity and collaboration don’t suffer requires structured yet lightweight mechanisms for continuous improvement.

Regular retrospectives are one of the most effective ways to sustain team productivity by reflecting on blockers and refining workflows. Similarly, structured estimation practices help align expectations and reduce unpredictability in sprint planning, while asynchronous stand-ups can keep distributed teams connected without adding unnecessary meeting overhead.

It’s interesting to consider how different teams approach these challenges. Some might rely more on embedded workflows within Jira (the closest thing to 'keeping it under the same roof'), while others prefer external tools to facilitate discussions. Either way, keeping Agile ceremonies & rituals focused and efficient is key to maintaining long-term productivity.

Would love to hear how other teams are tackling this!

[Stephen_Lugton]

When I was working with co-located teams only we used to occasionally do more interactive retrospectives outside of Jira, for example:

• Using a pile of lego bricks to build a representation of how the sprint had gone
• Giant Jenga where the objective was to make the tower fall over quickly if things had gone badly and build it as high as possible if things had gone well; often you had different team members trying to make it fall down while others were trying to build it up!