Retro recipe

Road Trip

Posted on the 28th of November 2022 by

We are driving towards a fun retrospective. This one ensures a good amount of fun and collaboration during your retrospective.

Ingredients

  • A (free) Mural account
  • The mural template
  • Internet-connected device for all participants
  • Videocall software
  • Your awesome team
  • A good mood
  • Trust

Retrospective (1h30)

Choose your car & color (10m)

This section is used to introduce the retro to the team. You go over the predetermined topics and explain them a bit.

After you've explained the rules of the template, the rules remain available in the top left corner of the ‘The Road’ section.

First, you break up your team in smaller subgroups.

You explain the warmup. Here, each team can choose a vehicle that they'll use to drive on the road. You can let your team go crazy here.

You set the time box. The groups each get a set amount of time to discuss some topics.

Only 2 things are a must:

  • The predetermined topics, which you write down on the roadmap in the center of a roundabout, must be talked about.
  • Each subgroup uses sticky notes to write down their thoughts per topic (double-click to add a sticky note).

The rules have been explained. Now it’s go-time.

The Road (40m)

The first part focuses on the predetermined topics. As mentioned before, the roadmap has room for 4 predetermined topics, but you can always customize the map to your needs. The subgroups can choose where they start on the map, and from that point onwards drive towards each topic until all topics have been covered by the group.

In the second part, the subgroups can add and discuss topics they themselves bring up.
The blue road sign represents things that have gone well this sprint. The red stop signs represent things that didn’t go so well.
The roadmap was designed with room for 4 subgroups, but again customization is optional.

Back Together (30m)

You bring all groups together again and talk about the predetermined topics first.
Afterwards, if the timebox allows it, you can let the team bring up their own topics and discuss those.
You can always skip the ‘Previous Action Points’ section to free up an extra 5 minutes.

The idea is to create action points during this part of the retro.

Previous Action Points (5m)

In this section, you bring up action points that your team committed to for the previous sprint and inspect them.

Rate the Retro (5m)

Last, but not least, we rate the retro. Hopefully, this retro was a success for your team, which you can then see by the way they rated it.

People can click the line, according to how well they thought the retro went. The closer to the Formula 1 car, the more people thought the retro was a success.

Follow-up

For most intents and purposes, your eventual board will contain a lot of info all over the place. Often, your team will already have a main location to place retrospective notes. Pay particular attention to the action points. Highlight them or put them in a separate section. Do not forget to follow up where necessary in your next retrospective and/or daily!