Unlocking Retrospectives

Retrospectives empower teams to learn and improve. But many teams fail to reach their true learning potential. Ryan was part of a team that held retrospectives for a year and a half to fix one line of code. Through the story of this team, he will show you how they turned their retrospectives from a meeting with meaningless action items to one that accomplished a meaningful improvement. Ryan will explore the resistance that was met and how it was overcome. He will show how to shift to a hypothesis-driven retrospective that to guides specific improvements and learning goals. His team made significant changes to their retrospectives and were rewarded with a radical improvement. Breaking through their retrospective impediments and finally embracing a learning mindset empower Ryan's team to fix the legacy line of code that had held the team back for over year. This new found power gave his team confidence in their tests, reduced support issues, and gave the team a win to celebrate. Ryan will give you the same ideas he used to unlock his team's retrospectives: Improving only one thing at a time, using hypotheses to guide improvements, and using different retrospective techniques to get different outcomes.