Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 28]

Nicola Rushton — Designing Team Culture

Every couple of months Nicola works with a new set of clients — new people, with new ways of working together. They created PostFacto — a tool for running remote retros. It is now used by around 2000 teams worldwide.

A show of hands shows most people are doing retros… but most have been in one that felt like a waste of time.

Nicola remembers her first retro, after a tough full-day scoping workshop. The clients were arguing amongst themselves, there was one person who clearly wanted to derail the project, a key person kept dropping out to take phone calls. After this day-long workshop from hell, someone said “wow…retro?”

They wrote up the usual went well, went wrong and do differently. The group was able to use this technique to figure out how to improve as a group, without blame or worry. It was a little weird to talk about your feelings at work… but it’s also nice to work with a team that can be open with each other.

The teams that communicate openly are the great teams.

Retrospective types

There are lots of variations on the retro. postfacto.io is an opinionated version, with “happy”, “wondering” and “sad” columns. The labels may vary but that’s their purpose.

Some retrospective may end up into games that teams need to play one per month and other even work like therapy — teams have the possibility to complain about their previous sprint issues.

The key in the end is to do this regularly, but ensure there are actions. Things actually need to change as a result of a retro.

It’s based on research digging into both good and bad retros — lots of 1:1 interviews, observation and dog fooding the product. This showed a common set of pitfalls:

The painful, awful retro. Often solved by having them more often (counter-intuitive, but works). Think of retros as scheduled maintenance for your team. Also set expectations, note the prime directive. Beware voting or skipping items — they had a ‘cheese’ item that looked like an easy-to-skip thing. But when they asked ‘who wrote this one?’, it ultimately showed their habitual retro snack of cheese was making a lactose intolerant team member feel a bit ignored.
People not really sharing the truth. It’s a serious problem when people don’t feel safe to share. things that can help: just invite the direct team; actively work to establish a feeling of safety (be vulnerable, or be the one willing to point out an elephant in the room).
The room is dominated by one or two voices. This needs a strong facilitator, who ensures everyone is heard. Watch for someone who has been talked over or interrupted, particularly if they have since shut down.
Same old problems over and over again. It helps to focus on the action items. Don’t repeatedly discuss a problem without trying solutions. If there are lots of options, do a time-boxed trial. Make sure the items are actually actionable, make sure they are owned by someone specific.

Last tips:

Do retros at least monthly and don’t skip them.
Make it a safe space.
Have a facilitator
Focus on action items (next steps)
Be kind

Design retrospectives?

We normally run ‘retrospective sessions’ in development teams where designers belong to, but we don’t tend to run design retrospectives between the design teams.

How about introducing some of those games ideas we happily use on development process to improve our social interactions between designers?

Let’s brainstorm together how design retrospective should like. A couple of ideas to start with:

Do retros at least monthly and don’t skip them.
Use a game to enhance people to tell honest opinions about some design processes used during the
Have a facilitator.
Focus on actions items (next steps for example: new workshops to learn, new initiatives, pair up with somebody to deal with issues, etc)
Be kind on feedback and areas to improve.

What do you think about that?
Do you have a design retrospective? Can you imagine this instance as a happy one within your team?

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Natalia Rey — UX Designer at RedGate, mom of 2 little creatures & illustrator on her spare timeGabi Braga — UX Designer at Envato Elements, freelancer at Toptal & beer enthusiast in her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Retrospectives was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Retrospectives

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles