Your Retros Are Only As Good As Your Facilitation

Your Retros Are Only As Good As Your Facilitation

I co-facilitated a full-team engineering retro that almost crashed and burned. A classic error of assuming we were aligned on the process beforehand. We weren't.

Your job as a facilitator is to create a process, not just host a meeting.

5 painful lessons I was reminded of:

1. Group stickies in real-time. Don't make 20 engineers watch you read 50+ notes one by one. It's excruciating.
2. Understand before solving. The sticky note saying "deployment friction" meant completely different things to two different people. Let people explain.
3. Actively engage the silent ones. Several senior devs didn't say a word, their insights are often the most valuable. You have to create the space for them.
4. Use brain-writing over brain-storming. The loudests voices don't always have the best ideas.
5. End with commitments, not just action items. We walked out with a list of tasks, but not clear owners. An action item without an owner is just a wish.

My team deserved better.

This article was originally published on https://craftengineer.com/. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.
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