Improving Collaboration and Flow

In Lean-Scrum, the Retrospective is a crucial event for continuous improvement, designed to help your team adapt and thrive in today’s fast-paced, remote-first world. Moving beyond a simple feedback session, a Lean Retrospective is a structured, collaborative event that turns conversations into tangible, actionable steps for the next sprint.

Key Principles of a Lean Retrospective

• Remote-First by Design: Recognizing that modern teams are often distributed, the Lean Retrospective is optimized for remote engagement. By leveraging modern collaboration tools, teams can participate fully and asynchronously, ensuring all voices are heard regardless of location.
• From Chat to Action: While informal discussions are a healthy part of team dynamics, the ultimate goal of the retrospective is to create tangible outcomes. We recommend focusing on identifying up to three key, actionable items that the team can commit to implementing in the upcoming sprint. This focused approach ensures meaningful progress rather than a long list of unprioritized ideas.
• Closing the Loop on Improvement: A retrospective isn’t a standalone event. To truly embrace continuous improvement, we dedicate a portion of each session to reviewing the progress made on the actionable items from the previous retrospective. This creates accountability, celebrates success, and allows the team to learn from what worked and what didn’t.
• All-Hands Collaboration: A fundamental principle of Lean-Scrum is breaking down silos. The retrospective is an event for the entire team: developers, designers, product managers, and others to join forces. This cross-functional participation is essential for identifying bottlenecks, improving communication, and enhancing the overall flow of value delivery.

A Lean Retrospective is your team’s opportunity to pause, reflect, and get better, sprint after sprint. It’s about moving forward, together, with a clear focus on actionable improvement.

Duration and Frequency

• Duration: 1 hour
• Frequency: at the end of every sprint

Objectives

• Discuss what worked well during the previous sprint and identify areas for improvement.
• Review progress on previously identified improvement actions and determine if they were achieved or require further work.

Who Attends

• Product Owner/Manager
• Delivery Manager/Agile Coach (facilitator)
• Business Analysts
• All Developers
• All User-Centred Design (UCD) team members (User Researchers and UX/UI Designers)
• Q/A
• Other technical roles (if applicable)