Retrospective Meetings 101

Run an engaging Retrospective meeting with your team to capture what you’ve learned.

Retrospectives help your team:

We set out to help people like you facilitate better agile retrospectives that let your team reach their potential.

Let’s take a look at how it works!

Parabol’s online Retrospective Meetings are like a digitally-coached mini retreat.

Our software guides your team to surface your teammates’ recent experiences, group them into themes, and develop an action plan, capture learnings, and make improvements. 

A meeting summary is generated automatically and all new tasks are captured on the team’s dashboard or processed during your team’s next Check-In Meeting. 

Parabol leads your team through 5 simple rounds to ensure that your agile retrospectives are a transformative and user-friendly experience, whether you’re in the same room or scattered around the globe:

Everything starts from the Meeting Lobby, and at the end of the process, we send out a Meeting Summary. Let’s get started…

When you’re ready to start a meeting, anyone can click Start Meeting and be taken to the Meeting Lobby.  This is where you have the opportunity to pick which retrospective template you want to try, and even customize a template just for your team.   

Parabol Retrospective Meetings are led by a meeting leader, called the Facilitator.

Any teammate who clicks “Start Retrospective Meeting” from your team’s meeting Lobby becomes the Facilitator for that session.

We aren’t robots. We bring emotions with us to meetings.

The Icebreaker helps us understand what state each teammate is in.

You might discover that a teammate is distracted by family matters, or that they’re overwhelmed by their workload: sharing that context builds rapport and helps the meeting run more smoothly.

This is particularly powerful for remote teams who lack opportunities for casual hallway interactions to socialize. 

As the Facilitator advances the meeting, each teammate is given an opportunity to answer a randomized Icebreaker for the meeting.

What it sounds like: If the Icebreaker is, “What has your attention today?” responses might be:

This is each teammate’s opportunity to share their personal high/low moments and observations from the previous period of work.

Over the course of the Retrospective Meeting the source of each Reflection card is never revealed, and, during this phase the text itself remains private to encourage full disclosure.

The Facilitator offers a time limit for writing down Reflections, and all teammates contribute their individual thoughts.

What it sounds like:

This phase is for individual contributions to the board.

The card text from the previous phase are revealed in this phase and the team works together to group them into related themes to surface trends.

Read each card carefully and drag them into piles to group them into themes.

Teammates should work simultaneously to make new groups, like a multiplayer video game.

You’ll notice that the software’s AI suggests titles for clustered cards, but you can edit these titles to better describe the trend.

What it sounds like:

Creative collaboration.

Feel free to discuss among your teammates to generate clarity, within the agreed time limit.

Each teammate has 5 total votes, and is able to vote up to 3 times on any single topic grouping.

The outcome of this voting phase will prioritize the following Discussion phase.

Spend your votes on the items that you want to spend time discussing as a group. The items you vote on should be the items that produce the most tension for you.

What it sounds like:

This phase is for individual contributions to the board. Discussion comes next.

The list of up-voted topics will be revealed in the left navigation, ordered by number of votes received.

Your team may choose to spend time discussing all the topics, or only those that generated the most “heat”, or only as many as can be completed in a specific time period.

You may also click-and-drag on topics to reorder and discuss them in any sequence you wish.

The Facilitator advances through each topic in turn.

The discussion is open, but the Facilitator should encourage the group to ask itself why and get closer to the root cause of the reflection cards.

The Facilitator can always ask, “what could we do instead, next time?” to prompt the team to suggest individual tasks.

The closing screen of the Retro Meeting process is a simple Summary of who attended, what was discussed, and the next steps for each teammate.

After all agenda items have been processed, the Facilitator will advance to “End Meeting”, which automatically generates the Summary view. 

This Summary is also automatically emailed to all teammates, including any who were unable to attend.

These emails are a simple, informative artifact of a team’s progress, which can be saved or forwarded to any interested stakeholders.