Item 43: Have Frequent Retrospectives

I'm not one for buzzwords in tech, like "Agile", "Sprint Planning", "Backlog Grooming", "Scrum Master", etc. I also hate meetings. I hate them. I hate them more than literally anything. They are the single biggest productivity killer to my day. However, there is one meeting I encourage every team to have, regardless of their process, and regardless of the way they work: and that is the retrospective. If you've never done a retrospective before, it's basically where you get together and reflect on how your team works together. That's it. It's not about "what went well and what could be improved", it's not about "action items", it's not about three-column graphs or venting or anything else that people have you believed.

The retrospective is the one opportunity where you give your team not only the permission, but encouragement, to reflect on how the way in which you build products can be improved. Have them frequently. I like at least once every two weeks, but certainly more than once a quarter.

Make sure you don't make excuses for the way things are at retros.

And you need to do something with the information teams give you at retros.