Massively multiplayer retrospectives

I wanted to share some notes on how I run remote retrospectives. These are not incident retrospectives, which I tend to run differently. But these are for project retrospectives, or for regular check-ins with a group of people to ask ourselves what we can do better.

Why use this format?

This retro style is more effective than other formats I’ve used. It has these advantages:

• You get almost universal participation.
• It’s extremely time efficient.
• It covers a very wide set of topics quickly.
• It allows for discussion of the most important topics.
• It often results in actionable insights.

How does it work?

Create a Google Doc ahead of time. You can also use Notion, Slite, or any other editing platform that allows for simultaneous editing of the same file.

Add two sections:

What went well, who do you want to appreciate?

What didn’t go well, or what was interesting that you observed?

I have at times done other categories, but I think these two are the most important. You can have a separate Action Items section, for example.

Meeting format

At the retrospective, you start off by giving some context for retrospectives if you haven’t done them before. And then you say we’ll spend the first 10 minutes filling in the retro doc. And you share your screen and give an example. The example might look like this:

What went well, who do you want to appreciate?

• Jade: Shannon did an excellent job of running the incident response. Everything felt really well organized, and well communicated.

What didn’t go well, or what was interesting that you observed?

• Jade: Some of our dashboards aren’t working correctly, so during the incident, I spent a lot of time on a tangent that ended up being a dead end

Then you also show everyone that you can reply to other people with indented messages, or express agreement, using these patterns:

What went well, who do you want to appreciate?

• Jade: Shannon did an excellent job of running the incident response. Everything felt really well organized, and well communicated. +Jen +Max
  • Xavier: +1. Also really liked how she checked in periodically on all of the lines of inquiry.

What didn’t go well, or what was interesting that you observed?

• Jade: Some of our dashboards aren’t working correctly, so during the incident, I spent a lot of time on a tangent that ended up being a dead end
  • Jen: I think some of our dashboards broke when we broke out the user service. We should probably update them for the new service.
• Jen: My work for the week ended up being a lot easier than I expected, and I wasn’t sure where I could best help out after that
• Maria: Our standups aren’t feeling very useful to me. I’m finding it’s breaking up my focus for the morning. +Jen +Xavier
  • Jen: Is the goal to make sure we communicate? Or to share information? Or what? I think our team needs more context sharing, and wonder if doing more show and tell would be helpful.

Because everyone is editing at once, after ten minutes, you’ll have a full set of thoughts on the week. And you’ll be surprised, there might be entire conversations that have happend already.

Dot voting to go deep

You then spend the rest of the meeting talking about the topics everyone cares about the most. You first select the topics by using dot voting:

• Give everyone 3 or 5 votes.
• Tell them to put their initials (or an emoji they choose) next to the topics they’d like to discuss.
• Give people a minute to vote.
• Then go through the topics in order of those that got the most votes.

It might look like this:

What went well, who do you want to appreciate?

• Jade: Shannon did an excellent job of running the incident response. Everything felt really well organized, and well communicated. +Jen +Max MF
  • Xavier: +1. Also really liked how she checked in periodically on all of the lines of inquiry.

What didn’t go well, or what was interesting that you observed?

• Jade: Some of our dashboards aren’t working correctly, so during the incident, I spent a lot of time on a tangent that ended up being a dead end JT MF XF JR JR JR
  • Jen: I think some of our dashboards broke when we broke out the user service. We should probably update them for the new service.
• Jen: My work for the week ended up being a lot easier than I expected, and I wasn’t sure where I could best help out after that
• Maria: Our standups aren’t feeling very useful to me. I’m finding it’s breaking up my focus for the morning. +Jen +Xavier JT JT JT JT MF MF MF JR JR
  • Jen: Is the goal to make sure we communicate? Or to share information? Or what? I think our team needs more context sharing, and wonder if doing more show and tell would be helpful.

So in this case, you start with the topic of the standups, and then go to the dashboards topics. You have a retro sorted by the topics people most want to talk about.

How to facilitate the topic

The way I like to facilitate the topic is to say, “looks like our first topic is about the standups. Maria, can you kick off the topic for us?”

After she does, then ask other people to respond or give their thoughts. If people are quiet, ask them why they voted to talk about it.

After people have voiced some thoughts on it, action items might naturally emerge. If they don’t, then ask, “is there something we could do in the next week or two that would make this better?” Talk through the options, and come up with an action item, and make sure someone is assigned that action item. As manager, you might be the person taking the action item! Be sure to complete it quickly, and report back to the team when you do.

That’s basically it. It’s fairly simple. But be sure to treat the action items seriously. I usually paste action items into Slack or an email afterwards, and will often review the action items quickly at the beginning of the next retro.

Why this works

• You get high participation. Everyone feels like they are expected to contribute. People who are shy can easily participate.

• It is time efficient. Why? Because everyone is basically talking (and listening) at the same time.

• It covers a lot of topics quickly. Why? You get a lot of breadth, because people will spend time thinking and listing the topics from their week.

• It covers the most important topics deeply. The dot voting allows you to select and prioritize the topics in priority order. Then you spend whatever time you’ve allocated on the most important topics.

• You get a lot of action items. The format also encourages you coming up with a few action items each retro. This feeds a virtuous cycle, where people feel like the retro results in improvements, which makes the meeting more useful, which leads to more improvements.

Tips

One nice quality of these retrospectives is that you’re starting in a quiet, contemplative activity. I’ve found you can actually start the meeting whenever a few people have joined. As others join, they know the drill, and will just get started.

You can do an equivalent form of retrospective in person, using sticky notes, and calling things out as you put them up on the wall. It works, but it’s not quite the same. This is truly one of the few online forms of a meeting I find hard to replicate in person!

As a side note, I think this form of simultaneous editing of docs to be an interesting pattern. It seems underexploited — I bet there are a lot of similar things you could do in other meetings.

Thank you

I learned about Dot Voting from Jim Shore. This took some inspiration from that. I think this format might have been something we came up with at Gremlin. I don’t remember who invented it – it might have been Alexa Stefanko, Jason Poole, or Shaun Yelle. Or me!

Image by Tom from Pixabay