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Common Retrospective Questions

The document discusses common questions to ask during a retrospective after a design sprint. A retrospective allows the team to provide feedback and identify opportunities for improvement. Key questions to ask include what went well, what can be improved, which tools saved time, and when satisfaction and contributions were highest. The team should also identify challenges, such as phases that did not go as planned or external factors that affected productivity. By discussing successes and areas for growth, the team can improve their process and outcomes for the next sprint.

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103 views

Common Retrospective Questions

The document discusses common questions to ask during a retrospective after a design sprint. A retrospective allows the team to provide feedback and identify opportunities for improvement. Key questions to ask include what went well, what can be improved, which tools saved time, and when satisfaction and contributions were highest. The team should also identify challenges, such as phases that did not go as planned or external factors that affected productivity. By discussing successes and areas for growth, the team can improve their process and outcomes for the next sprint.

Uploaded by

孙雨熙
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Common retrospective questions 

Every design sprint is an opportunity for your team to learn something new. This is
especially useful for entry-level UX designers joining a design sprint for the first time. 

During a design sprint, the focus is on: 

Understanding the design challenge 


Ideating solutions 
Deciding which solutions to build 
Prototyping a few solutions 
Testing those prototypes

Immediately following the design sprint, your team should hold a retrospective. A
retrospective is a collaborative critique of the design sprint. The goal of a retrospective is
to make sure everyone who took part in the sprint has the chance to give feedback and
think about opportunities for improvement. 

The key questions to ask during a retrospective are: 

What went well? 


What can be improved? 

Answering these questions will help you work better as a team and as an individual.
Make sure everyone feels empowered to share their experiences, and that personal
identifiers, like race or gender, don’t prevent members from being honest. Before the
retrospective begins, tell the group that any feedback provided will be used to reflect on
the experience and improve the process for the next sprint. 

Start the retrospective by discussing the parts of the design sprint that were successful
and areas where the team did well. Maybe a new process was created that could be
applied to future sprints. Or maybe the addition of a new digital tool enhanced the team’s
productivity. Analyze your team’s wins, and think about how they could be applied to
future sprints.

Questions you might ask during this part of the retrospective include:


Which tools saved you the most time and effort?
When did you feel the most satisfaction?
What helped you make your best contribution to the team during this sprint?

This is also a good time to acknowledge a team member’s strong performance.


Celebrating successes builds relationships and increases cohesion and harmony within
the team!

After highlighting everything that went well, it’s time to shift gears and think about areas
for improvement. Your team will want to know what went wrong, so that you all can do
better next time. 

Encourage everyone to participate in sharing areas for improvement. You might even
take turns going around a circle and adding challenges to a shared list. If anyone is
nervous about speaking up, invite each person to write their thoughts anonymously on
individual sticky notes. Then, all of the improvements can be reviewed together. This
eliminates concerns about causing offense and reduces the chance of groupthink.
Groupthink can occur in a group discussion when one person shares an opinion and
everyone immediately agrees with the opinion, instead of sharing their own feelings
about a topic. Groupthink prevents each person from having an equal say, and it might
mean certain areas for improvement are overlooked.

Consider each phase of the design sprint to structure the feedback: understand, ideate,
decide, prototype, and test. At what point were there missteps? What caused those
challenges? Share your perspective if a phase or two didn’t go according to plan. 

Questions you might ask during this part of the retrospective include:

What went wrong that caught you off guard?


Which problems came up the most often?
When do you think we experienced the biggest challenge as a team?

Then, examine the sprint’s outcome or final product, and ask questions like:

Did the team overestimate or underestimate the work required to complete the design?
Did an external factor derail your productivity?
And most importantly, does the final design actually solve the user problem?

Identify ways that the team could have ended up with a better solution. 
Keep in mind, retrospectives are about empowering, not shaming. This is not the time to
call out an individual for poor performance. If you have issues with a team member’s
work, it’s best to address it with that person privately, not during a team-wide
retrospective.

By the end of the retrospective meeting, your team will have a better understanding of
what went well and what could be improved. Naturally, you’ll want to take lessons
learned into your next design sprint. 

Before your next sprint, review the conclusions you reached at the end of the last
retrospective. Your conclusions should inform how you conduct the next sprint. Perhaps
you need to include a more diverse team, allow more time for ideating, or test with
additional users before moving forward with a design.

Questions you might ask include:

What did you discover during the sprint that you’re still wondering about?

How could the current process be holding the team back from creating better solutions?

Takeaways

Remember: Speak up and share your suggestions for how the next design sprint could
be better. Don’t be afraid to suggest anything you think will improve the project or next
sprint. The only bad suggestion is the one not shared!

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