November 20

Product Retrospectives

Every product lifecycle has events you’d love to repeat and others you’d like to avoid at all costs. Unfortunately, if you don’t take a little bit of time to reflect on your work on that product, those events can easily meld all together. That’s where product retrospectives come in handy. They give your team an opportunity to consider what’s happened before and decide how to shape what you do going forward.

Product Retrospectives. Have you been working on a product for a while and feel like all of your sprint retrospectives aren’t providing a good view of the larger picture? The Product Samurai explains how you can pull together all the people that worked on your product including those that helped with launch, shipments, supply, legal, marketing, operations to run a product retrospective that helps you zoom out and learn from trends across the life of your product.

(via @ProductSamurai)

Three popular ways to run a productive retrospective. Retrospectives are ceremonies where team members collectively analyze how things went in order to improve the process for upcoming work. People have come up with a variety of formats and exercises for looking back at their product work, but all face a similar challenge: keeping retrospectives engaging and productive over time. Unfortunately, no single approach is a silver bullet. Brandi Gratis explored three popular ways to run a retrospective to give you some ideas for keeping things interesting.

(via @backlogtool)

6 Tips for Better Product Retrospective Meetings.  Product retrospective meetings can help your team find strengths and weaknesses in your current processes. A retrospective can help you identify, analyze, and solve problems, with actionable plans to prevent the same hiccups from happening again. Andre Theus provides some tips to help you make sure you run your product retrospective so that everyone leaves the room feeling heard, understood, and optimistic.

(via @productplan)

Retrospectives beyond the team level.  Many teams use retrospectives to help them deal with difficult situations and improve their way of working. But teams don’t work in isolation, they interact with other teams and with their stakeholders to deliver value. Ben Linders explores how retrospectives beyond the team level can be used to improve collaboration.

(via @benlinders)

Ideas for Remote Retrospectives that Engage.  With the sudden shift to remote working, teams who had a regular cadence of collaboration activities suddenly found themselves having to shift to holding them remotely. For many teams, one of the most important team events is the retrospective – a regular opportunity for teams to examine their collaborative ways of working and look for opportunities to collectively improve their teamwork and their processes. Shane Hastie explores how you can recreate the highly collaborative nature of a well-run product retrospective in a virtual setting.

(via @infoq)

Kent J McDonald

About the author

Kent J McDonald writes about and practices software product management. He has product development experience in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, nonprofit, and automotive. Kent practices his craft with a variety of product teams and provides just in time resources for product people at KBP.media and Product Collective. When not writing or product managing, Kent is his family’s #ubersherpa, listens to jazz and podcasts (but not necessarily podcasts about jazz), and collects national parks.


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