Retros we lovE

Here's some of the Retros we love to run - we can't claim they are our original ideas, most are resources we've found online. We've just collated them into easy to use templates.

Feel free to make a copy and use with your teams. Google opens these templates in preview - so click the cog icon and "Open editor" (as per the example).

All the below retros can be used for a variety of situations. They can be adapted to cater for most situations, but we've put some suggestions below each activity to help when looking for something specific.

Stop, Start, Continue

Good for: all teams and situations

Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For

Good for: all teams and situations, project wash ups

Mad, Sad, Glad

Good for: honesty, frustrated teams

Keep, Add, Less, More

Good for: teams looking to try new processes

1-10 Retro template

Superheroes and More 1-10!

Good for: themed retro, gauging where teams are

Drop, Add, Keep, Improve

Good for: established teams looking to try new processes

The "Original" Four

Good for: celebrating successes

Three Little Pigs

Good for: analysing processes and practices

Living Our Values Retro

Living Our Values

Good for: holding your team to account for living company/team values

Values Retro Instructions

Values

Good for: establishing what the team values most

Self-Serve Retro

Self-Serving

Good for: teams looking to facilitate their own retros better

The Plateau Effect

Good for: teams who struggle to see how they can do more/better

Hot Air Balloon Retro

Hot Air Balloon

Good for: capturing the highs and lows

Lego 1-10 Retro template

Co-located lego themed 1-10

Good for: having some fun with a team and gauging where teams are

MVP/Hidden Agendas Retro

Minimum Viable Product/Hidden Agendas

Good for: demonstrating why transparency is key

Actions Centered

Good for: getting teams to align to/focus on common actions

Roles & Reponsibilities Retro

Roles & Responsibilities

Good for: new teams or teams where roles are misunderstood

The Waste Snake Retro

Waste Snake

Good for: establishing where efficiencies can be made

Confidence 1-10

Good for: establishing a benchmark for team confidence

To Estimate? or !To Estimate?

Estimating

Good for: teams new to estimation or who struggle with it

Johari Window

Good for: building trust

Moving Motivators Retro

Moving Motivators

Good for: understanding what motivates individuals and how change affects them

Paper Fold Exercise

Paper Folding Exercise

Good for: highlighting how differently we can interpret things

Word Up!

Good for: getting the general mood of a team

Art of Agile

Good for: driving home importance of collaboration/feedback loops/skills & tools/needing clarity

FLAP!

Good for: exploring issues in certain focus areas

Gamestorming

Good for: identifying improvement areas through gamification

Updates

Good for: when teams are struggling to commit to regular updates

A Christmas Carol - Christmas Retro #1

A Christmas Carol

Good for: a cheesy Christmas-themed retrospective

Letters to Santa - Christmas Retro #2

Letters to Santa

Good for: another cheesy Christmas-themed retrospective

Here's some links to some great resources we've come across too:

Scrum Values

Treasure Island

Agile Battleships?! An exercise from BoxUK to introduce iterative development

Retro Smells Ben Liders exercise to explore your own Retros - Ben has loads to try on his site

"Don’t run project retros, play Dungeons and Dragons"

Retro cards from Laurence Wood at William Hill

Video here.

Need some inspiration? Try Random Retros

Fun Retro have a site with stacks of "Activities and ideas for making retros more engaging"

Tasty Cupcakes - lots of inventive Retro ideas

Retomat has a lots of resources, focuses on their 5 phases of Retros

Agile Strides have grouped together 40 ideas to "Spice up your Retros"

IdeaBoardz is a team collaborat-ion, retro tool.

A great tool from Metro Retro - currently free to use

Another fab tool, this time from Reetro - currently free to use

Scatter Spoke - free online anonymous retro tool

Retro Dashboard is a free-to-use tool

If you use Slack, Polly is a good Retro tool you can integrate with

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