Retrospectives
Each team looks back on its week and its quarter: what worked, what to change, and whether its charter still holds.
Planned. What this page describes is not built yet.
Why a retro
Self-improvement makes one task run better. It never asks whether the team should still exist, or still do what its charter says. A retrospective is that second question, asked on a cadence, by the team itself.
The weekly retro
Every team will run a short weekly retro, usually led by its team lead. Members do not meet: each writes structured answers from the week's runs, and the lead brings them together.
| Question | What it asks |
|---|---|
| Went well | What worked this week? |
| Went less well | What did not? |
| Learned | What do we know now that we did not? |
| Unclear | What is still open? |
| Actions | What changes before next week? |
What the team learned goes into its memory, where the retro's run is allowed to write. A question the lead cannot answer comes to you. Actions become work: a scheduled run, a task change, an issue.
The weekly retro should take minutes, not become a project of its own.
The quarterly retro
Once a quarter, the team will ask the larger questions:
- Is the charter still true?
- Is its metric the right one, with the right target?
- Should the team grow, shrink, split, or close?
- What should the rest of the company know?
The answers go into a brief for you. A charter rewrite, or closing a team, waits for your approval: a retro proposes it, and nothing changes until you say so.
After a retro
The lead posts what the rest of the company needs to know. Separate teams that stop telling each other what they learned stop being one company.
Until then
No retro runs today. A team lead or you can still run a review as an ordinary task on a schedule, with its questions in the task's skill.