Halloween

We are trick-or-treating you to some fun, spooky retro vibes. The idea is to get the team in the Halloween vibe as well as having a valuable retrospective.

On the picture above, you see a few members of the Core Ecosystem team that led this retro recipe.

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)

Abandoned city (15m)

This section contains the warm-up to the retro. Here we create a story as a team. The facilitator starts off by setting the scene: “We arrive in an abandoned city. There is no one to be seen. What will we do?”.
Next up, you let each team member add a sentence that fits the theme, further completing the story until everyone went once or twice.
In the end, you should have a fun and spooky story!

The goal here is to break the ice and get the team in a talking mood.

Spooky spoo (1h)

This is the part where we add topics and dive right in.

There are many ways to structure this retro. In this example, we opened up the discussion with the whole team present. If you want to divide the team into smaller groups, you definitely can! The only thing you need to do is adjust the timeboxes.

This retro is ideal when working remotely, but is just as much an option when in the office. Just print out the image below on a big piece of paper and get started!

You should give your team the following timeboxes:

• 5-10 minutes: adding topics - each person can add topics to whichever category, but they are not obligated to.
• 5 minutes: voting - each person votes on topics they would like to discuss. Decide on beforehand how many votes each person gets, e.g. 3 votes each.
• 45-50 minutes: discussing topics.
• 5 minutes: voting to potentially extend the discussion on a topic.

Below, you can find the board that will be used.

There are 4 themes:

• Ghost/reaper – What surprised us?
• Zombie – What went slowly/is (good as) dead?
• Brain – What did we learn/need to learn?
• Candy/astronaut – What went well? Who deserves praise?

When discussing topics, make sure to let your team create action points that you can commit on.

Previous Action Points (10m)

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 happy unicorn, the more they feel 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!