Introduction
The idea for the Becoming Agile series is to explore the idea that deciding to use agile methodologies is something that takes time, focus, practice and discipline. There will be good days when the benefits of agile ways of working are obvious, and there are also times when people and team members get frustrated, when the construct of Sprints or keeping the backlog or specific tasks defined and updating things will feel onerous, and thoughts that maybe doing something else would be better.
This chapter continues the series exploring the four essential Agile ceremonies:
Daily Standups
Sprint Planning
Sprint Retrospectives
Sprint Reviews/Showcases
Committing to having discipline around each one of these meetings will help your team to stay aligned and connected. It keeps communication open, decisions transparent and work collaborative - agile supports to develop the culture I want for the teams I manage.
As part of your team becoming agile, it’s important to not only be thinking about how we plan and deliver work - but how we learn and improve as a team. There is an agile meeting specific to that: it is called the Sprint Retrospective.
Each chapter is structured around the goals for the ceremony, best practices, potential pitfalls, and tips to help your team get the most value from Sprint Retrospectives.
Why Retrospectives Matter
Agile isn’t just about delivering the work you have to deliver now - it is about learning from the work we deliver and evolving how we work. This mindset will benefit not just what you are delivering now, but that everything you will deliver iteratively over time. Retrospectives allow space for the whole team to reflect on what is working and what needs to change.
While Sprint Planning sets the direction and priority tasks for the Sprint, and the Daily Standup checks on the progress, the Retrospective is where we zoom out, look back, and decide together how we can improve.
It’s a built-in feedback loop, just like product increments evolve through iterative development, your ways of working will also evolve through regular reflection and improvement.
Losing the Words “Always” and “Never”
Working in Sprints and having Sprint Retrospectives should help serve as a powerful antidote to what can be referred to as: ‘black-and-white thinking’, ‘all-or-nothing thinking’ or ‘absolutist thinking’. This kind of thinking can show up in statements like “we always miss deadlines” or “I’ve never got anything out of standups”. These statements can feel emotionally true, especially under pressure, but they often oversimplify complex work and obscure opportunities for improvement.
Away from agile, this type of thinking is a common cognitive distortion that can happen in both personal and professional contexts. In a personal context, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) acknowledges pattern is well-documented as a barrier to clear thinking and healthy problem-solving (Beck, 2011). CBT helps individuals learn to challenge these kinds of thoughts, using evidence from what is happening, and supports people to replace extreme statements with more balanced and constructive reflections.
In an Agile context, Sprint Retrospectives offer a team-level approach for this mindset shift. Rather than reacting with “this never works” or “this will always be too hard or fail,” the Retrospective invites the team to slow down and ask:
What specifically didn’t work in this Sprint?
What has worked for us in the past?
What is within our control to change in the next Sprint?
By asking these kinds of questions, teams begin to replace assumptions with data, reactivity with real-world reflections, and absolutes with nuanced insights. This helps build not just better delivery habits - but better habits of thinking, collaboration, and trust for your team.
Over time, teams who use Sprint Retrospectives well can improve how they communicate, are more willing to try new things and more resilient in the face of challenges. They learn to talk about issues without defensiveness, challenge assumptions constructively, and avoid the traps of exaggerated, unhelpful thinking. These things help build a team culture that everyone in the team contributes to and can be proud about.
Retrospectives aim to support the Agile value of “responding to change over following a plan” by helping teams adapt based on their lived experience - not a project management theory or unattainable ideal.
Purpose and Goals
The Sprint Retrospective is held at the end of every Sprint, after the Sprint Showcase or Review and before the next Sprint Planning session. Its purpose is to help the team reflect, learn, and improve.
Key goals of a Retrospective include:
Reflecting on what went well and what didn’t.
Identifying improvement opportunities - these can both be small and significant.
Creating actions the team can take into the next Sprint.
Strengthening team culture by fostering trust, open communication, and shared ownership of the process.
The Scrum Guide says, “the purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness” (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). The meeting isn’t about allocating blame to people, or assigning fault to a process - it is about learning and identifying and trying better ways of working together.
Format
Retrospectives can take many forms, but at their core they are structured conversations that help the team reflect and improve.
A simple and effective format often follows these key steps:
1. Be clear on the purpose – at the start of each Retrospective, state an intention to create a space of respect and psychological safety. Remind everyone the goal is on continuous improvement. The team wants to increase output quality, so blame has no place. Transparency and change comes from a place of trust and respect and everyone in the team has a role to play to achieve this.
2. Gather Useful Information and Data – review what happened in the Sprint using a structured approach that helps your team to think about how things went. This can include tasks, events, emotions, metrics, or milestones.
3. Generate Ideas and Insights – discuss patterns, challenges, and opportunities.
4. Decide What to You Will Do – identify specific, actionable improvements to take into the next Sprint.
5. Close the Retrospective – thank the team, reflect on the value of the session, and commit to follow-through on actions.
Common prompt questions for slides and whiteboards include:
What went well this Sprint?
What didn’t go so well?
What could we try differently in the next Sprint?
You can also experiment with creative formats to keep the sessions engaging—like Start/Stop/Continue, Sailboat, 4Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For), “the good, bad and ugly” or custom themes based on your team’s recent work.
Collaborative Retrospectives
Just like Sprint Planning, the Retrospective is a team activity. It’s not a status meeting. It’s not run at the team, it’s run by the team.
Here’s how to make it collaborative at every stage:
Before the Retrospective
Track insights during the Sprint – use digital whiteboards, discussion boards or threads, and encourage the team to take quick notes to help capture thoughts while they’re fresh.
Review the Sprint Goal – look back at what the team aimed to achieve. Did the Sprint Goal help or hinder focus?
Collect Helpful Data and Evidence – tasks completed, bugs raised, Sprint trends, effort spent unblocking tasks, email feedback - anything that helps contextualise the team’s experience.
During the Sprint Retrospective Meeting
Facilitate open discussion – consider time-boxing sections, anonymous post-its, or digital tools like Microsoft Whiteboards, Menti, Miro or Figma.
Create a blameless environment – assume good intent and focus on outcomes and systems, not individuals.
Include everyone – encourage contributions from quieter voices. Allow time to gather thoughts, don’t always just leap into brainstorming. Give everyone a chance to contribute and share. Rotate who facilitates to build shared ownership.
After the Retrospective
Choose 1–3 actions to commit to – you aren’t trying to instantly fix everything. Pick what’s realistic and high impact.
Add actions to the Sprint backlog – this ensures they’re visible and prioritised.
Check back in – in the next Retrospective, ask “how did we go at following through on our last actions?” This will build accountability and momentum.
Example Sprint Retrospective Discussion
Facilitator: Welcome to our Sprint Retrospective. Today’s goal is to reflect on how we worked during the last Sprint so we can improve as a team. Let’s start by sharing what went well.
Developer: I think we communicated better around risks in this Sprint. I also liked that we took a designer and a developer to the client meetings, this helped us get on the same page faster, and helped reduce handover delays.
Tester: I had some test environments that went down again, which blocked me for two days, but shout out to the team for getting them back up way quicker this time.
Designer: I liked how we involved Senior Leaders and users earlier in the process to get feedback on the prototype, it helped us get it right faster, noting that I think some of them were freaked out and thought what we presented should have been more done, because they weren’t used to seeing things at this stage, but think we managed that well.
Facilitator: These are great observations. I will group our feedback and look for patterns while you’re in breakout rooms looking at what didn’t work so well and then we can come back and report that back, just so everyone has a couple of minutes to brainstorm first and then smash out as many of these things as they can on the whiteboards. Then we can come back and vote on what the one or two changes we can make next Sprint.
(Later in the session)
Facilitator: Okay, based on our discussion, here are the two actions we’ll take into next Sprint, hopefully I’ve captured these okay, let’s take a look:
1. Schedule a standing weekly sync between test and development leads and user testers during the next Sprint to see if that improves their understanding of what we need from them as testers and take that back to both teams.
2. Allocate a team member at standups who can update tags on tickets impacted by environment issues, so we can get a better sense of the impact quicker and improve clarity around escalation and resolutions.
Sprint Retrospectives Create a Culture of Improvement
Sprint Retrospectives help you make progress towards Becoming Agile. They work best when the team sees them as an important part of how the team grows and improves, not when people see them as a place to stay quiet, get through the meeting and tick a box.
But this takes time and practice and confidence that you mean what you say when you tell them it isn’t about blame or fault, and it is a safe place to raise things. Your team will get better at giving feedback, asking for help, surfacing challenges, and suggesting changes if Sprint Retrospectives are a place where what worked well can be celebrated, what needs work can be called out, and what you will do about it is followed through on during the next Sprint. Some Retrospectives will feel like love-ins and some will feel like hard work, others will feel transformative. Sometimes they can feel awkward or quiet - and that’s okay too - it can mean people are thinking, so don’t feel a need to fill the space with talking.
Over time, a good Sprint Retrospective culture will shift your team from trying agile to truly Becoming Agile - because you’re not just delivering work, you’re improving the system that delivers it, and helping your team communicate and be more connected.
Tips for Better Sprint Retrospectives
Make It Safe - people won’t speak openly if they feel judged. Start with a check-in question or icebreaker. Remind the team that this is about learning and improving.
Keep It Focused - this session is not a general team chat or the Festivus “airing of grievances”. It is a structured forum. It has a purpose that is about talking, listening, and setting specific actions and committing to those actions.
Vary the Format - don’t do the same “What went well / what didn’t” every time. Changing it up keeps it fresh and helps people think differently. It shows that you are willing to try new things, like what you are expecting your team to do. If it works for you, try metaphors (weather report, movie review, airplane flight), or other things that you think suit your style, your team and will spark new ideas.
Make Actions Visible
Document improvements as backlog items, this makes them visible to the whole team. Review them in the next Sprint Retrospective and celebrate progress, effort and the wins when they pay off.
Reflect on the Process
Use part of your Retrospective to reflect on how the Retrospective itself went.
Ask the team: “Did this format work for us? Should we change anything about how we run these?”
Common Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them
Lack of Engagement
Why it happens: time of day, team might be tired. Team could be bored, or doesn’t see the value.
How to fix it: Change the format, try gamifying it, and consider rotating facilitators.
Ask the team: “What would make this Retrospective more useful for you?”
Constantly re-visiting the same things
Why it happens: Feedback isn’t acted on or changes aren’t tracked.
How to fix it: Limit action items. Add them to the backlog. Follow up. Celebrate when actions lead to improvement. Sometimes if it keeps coming up it is because it matters.
Ask the team: If this keeps being raised, is it something we need to agree to act on in the next Sprint?
Focusing on Blame
Why it happens: Unclear facilitation or unresolved conflict.
How to fix it: Use a blameless tone, and focus on systems and actions, not people. Encourage talking about what happened and why, not just who did it.
Ask the team: If we could rewind and design this Sprint again, what would we change to set ourselves up for success?
Skipping Retrospectives Under Pressure
Why it happens: the end of a Sprint can be busy, and the team has lots of work on and wants to get started, or wants to move on.
How to fix it: Prioritise it like you would a production issue. Even 30 minutes of reflection is better than none. Skipping the Retrospective is missing an opportunity to listen and a chance to get better.
Ask the team: Suggest one thing you would change about our Sprint Retrospectives to make them more meaningful?
Conclusion
Becoming Agile is about acknowleding that we are always learning. Sprint Retrospectives are one of the most important parts of learning agile ways of working.
Commit to Sprint Retrospectives as being an important part of the process to you, and this will help the team value them. Like all things agile, you are aiming to increase value iteratively in every Sprint.
When you start with Retrospectives, prepare your introduction, and aim to keep it simple. Stick to the focus questions. Be seen to be listening. Take notes and commit to trying different things.
Be clear that you value reflecting and every Sprint is another chance to improve. Over time, your team will build confidence, self-awareness, and shared ownership of making things better is something everyone has a role in, it isn’t just on you because you were the one who “made” the team do agile.
All of the Agile ceremonies provide a space and a structure for communication. Sprint Retrospectives are an opportunity to figure things out, they are a powerful tool for teams, as they demonstrate how you are people who are prepared to listen to feedback and not take it personally, and that you value the chance to improve how things are working if it will make delivering value easier for the people in your team.
References
Atlassian. (n.d.). Retrospective. Atlassian Team Playbook. https://www.atlassian./team-playbook/plays/retrospective
Adkins, L. (2010). Coaching agile teams: A companion for ScrumMasters, Agile coaches, and project managers in transition [PDF]. Addison-Wesley. https://masterinagile.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Coaching-Agile-Teams.pdf
Beck, J. S. (2011). *Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond* (2nd ed.). [PDF] Guilford Press. https://img3.reoveme.com/m/be38edbbfc79330a.pdf
Cohn, M. (2019, September 30). Effective retrospectives. Mountain Goat Software. https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/effective-retrospectives
Cohn, M. (2020, July 13). Overcoming four common problems with retrospectives. Mountain Goat Software. https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/overcoming-four-common-problems-with-retrospectives
Derby, E., & Larsen, D. (2006). Agile retrospectives: Making good teams great [PDF]. Pragmatic Bookshelf. https://agile.2ia.net/Agile%20Retrospectives.pdf
Scrum.org. (n.d.). What is a Sprint Retrospective? https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-sprint-retrospective
Sutherland, J., & Sutherland, J. J. (2014). More praise for Scrum: The art of doing twice the work in half the time [PDF]. Agile Lean House.https://www.agileleanhouse.com/lib/lib/News/More_Praise_for_Scrum_The_Art_of_Doing_T.pdf
Super useful summary of a meeting format that can be used in many diff circumstances