Retro recipe
Dream Car
Retrospect with your team by comparing the Sprint car to your dream car. Discuss what steps can be taken to move closer to achieving the dream car.
Ingredients
- Laptop with internet connection
- Big screen / Shared screen
Mise en place
Connect the laptop to the big screen and make sure all the hardware and software works (e.g. video, microphone, screen sharing, etc.).
Cooking
Step 1: Warm-up (15 minutes)
Creating a safe environment where people dare to step outside of their comfort zone is crucial. To achieve this, we organize a short warm-up session where everyone is asked to invent a competition in which they believe themselves to be the undefeatable champion within their team.
We have had participants claiming to be the undefeatable champion in a snack bar eating competition, quoting famous movie lines, drinking coffee, hitting flies with a fly swatter, and so on.
Soon enough, people started having a laugh and were already promising to take each other up on some of those challenges one day. 😅
Step 2: Sprint car (3 minutes)
Ask your team to reflect on the past sprint individually. Ask them what car they would compare the sprint with. Try not to give too many examples, so they can come up with their own. However, if you do notice people are struggling then you can provide some examples to really let them know anything goes: The Flintstones mobile, The Tesla Cyber Truck, a Fiat Multipla, a Lada, the flying car from Harry Potter. A boat instead of a car? - Sure!
Step 3: Why this car? (~5 minutes per person)
Now we get to the good bit. Ask everyone to explain their choice one by one. Provide the team with a visual reference by quickly googling the car. Why did you pick this car? Here we got answers such as:
Just like the car, this sprint wasn't pretty, but it still got value to our customer. It got us from point A to B which is still the main function of the car/sprint and had room for extra value.
Of course, the responses can be completely different for your team. But no doubt you will get great insights into how the team experienced the sprint. Also, challenge the others in the team to ask follow-up questions: e.g. "What happened that you consider as 'ugly'?"
Repeat this step until everyone was given the chance to motivate their choice of car.
Step 4: Dream car (3 minutes)
Ask everyone to write down the name of their dream car. No further explanations are given at this point.
Step 5: What can we do to work towards that dream car? (~5 minutes per person)
When everyone has chosen a dream car, once again let everyone explain their choice and try to visualize the dream cars. Bonus points if you can put the sprint car and the dream car side by side. Now ask the individual what we can do as a team to get that sprint car one step closer to their dream car.
By now, you should have gathered a lot of possible action points. These are actions that the team will need to start/stop/continue doing to get closer to their "dream sprint". Out of all these actions that we discussed within the team, we only selected three to focus on for now.
Final impressions
We really enjoyed the positive vibe this format brought to the team. Imagining the dream car immediately put the team in a solution-oriented mindset instead of a problem-oriented mindset. It challenged the team to think about what we can do differently and not just vent about what frustrated us during this sprint.