Retrospective Meetings Demystified

A Comprehensive Guide to Run Effective Retrospective Meetings

If you are a seasoned engineer or leader, you've likely spent considerable time in a room or a virtual meeting with your team, dissecting a project's successes, failures, and areas for improvement.

Indeed, I'm talking about retrospective meetings.

These kinds of esoteric sessions often trigger mixed feelings: some find them valuable, while others see them as a waste of time.

I believe, as often happens, the truth lies in the middle, and this is what we are going to discover today in this newsletter issue.

Specifically, we will cover:

• 📚 What retrospectives are, their history, and how they are perceived

• ♻️ How to run retrospectives that make sense and are useful for your teams

• 🛠️ Tools that can help you in running your retrospectives

Let's begin!

📚 About Retrospective Meetings

In simple terms, a retrospective meeting is a collaborative session with the primary goal of reflecting on past events to identify what went well, what didn't, and how future iterations can be improved.

Retrospectives gained popularity with Scrum, where at the end of every Sprint, teams are expected to evaluate the work completed.

However, they can be extended to nearly any context involving a team, such as:

• 🏗️ Projects: reviewing the completion of a project or specific project phases to assess what worked, what didn't, and identifying improvements for future projects.