Hot Air Balloon Retrospective

The Hot Air Balloon retrospective includes four prompts: two to look back, and two look forward. That’s right – this is a retrospectives and futurespectives!

A hot air balloon is a gorgeous, fantastical mode of travel. And it’s an equally fun way to run a sprint retrospective or lessons learned meeting!

Imagine your team huddled together in a basket beneath a colorful globe filled with hot air. You need to get where you’re going, but on your way, you must avoid any menacing storm clouds and stick to the clear, sunny skies. 

If you need to go higher, turn up the flame. Or load up on sandbags, to come down closer to earth. 

Here are the prompts for this template you can try it out yourself. Sunny days ahead! 

This is when you’ll reflect on what your team’s done over the last sprint, year, or any other period of time. What practices and processes did you use, and how did they work out? 

What practices or processes helped your team reach new heights? What brought you closer to your goals, or helped you get there more easily? 

Example: Integrating all our apps with Zapier saved us so much hassle and time. 

What slowed you down, held you back, or demoralized your team members? Why was that practice or process used? 

Example: Our weekly reporting was very time-consuming. The value the reports offered wasn’t worth all the time and effort it took to compile them. 

Now it’s time to look forward. What’s on the horizon that your team will need to navigate, steer clear of, or plan for? 

What difficult or tricky things lie ahead for our team? Is there anything that could trip you up, or throw you off course?

Example: Our next client doesn’t seem super clear on their goals for this project. That could make it tricky to deliver work they’re really happy with. 

What’s your team feeling excited about, and prepared for? How can your team steer clear of the storm clouds, and safely reach sunny skies? 

Example: We’ve got a couple team members who are amazing at strategy. Let’s connect them with that client, and help them get crystal-clear on their goals. 

Try the Hot Air Balloon retrospective when you need to look both forwards and backwards.

This sprint retrospective is unique because it lets teams look to both the past and the future. You can assess what’s worked for your team, and also brainstorm ways to apply your learnings moving forward. They’re amazing retros at pivotal moments, like the end of the year or when you wrap up a big project. 

The template offers a playful, visual way to structure a retrospective. It’s perfect for when your team wants to embrace some lighthearted optimism as you look forward together. 

This retrospective can be especially fun around the winter holidays, or first thing in the New Year, when we naturally reflect on past achievements and future plans. It lets you take a different perspective on your work with a birds-eye view.

First of all, jump into Parabol. If you’re a Scrum Master or the team meeting facilitator hit the vibrant Add New Meeting button.

Select Retro Meeting with the arrows, then use the dropdown to select the Hot Air Balloon retrospective template. This is where you’ll find Parabol’s library of 40+ retrospective ideas. 

Feel free to copy and customize your template to add a “Kudos” column if you want to celebrate the work of your team. 

Every Parabol retrospective begins with an optional icebreaker. This box is checked by default. You don’t have to do one, but we recommend it. 

If you’re doing an icebreaker, you’ll have a random question to answer. You can refresh it if you want another option, and of course you can create your own if you want.

After the icebreaker you’ll move on to the reflect stage. This is where your team will brainstorm in silence using the prompts above. All reflections are kept anonymous at this stage to prevent groupthink.

All Parabol sprint retrospectives can be run synchronously or asynchronously. Functionalities such as the timer, voting and multiplayer grouping help you make your retrospective exercise a success and make facilitation easier.

Team members can all leave comments together, or do it at a time that works for them. Also, reflections are anonymous, and no one can see them until you’re done working on them.

After the reflect phase, you’ll vote on issues to discuss, talk about the most voted on items, and set action items for how to resolve them in your next sprint. 

Parabol will send a summary of the retro when you’re done so nobody needs to take notes.