Image of the film “The Core”

Retrospective exercise: Problems in the core

When a team grows is important to not forget the values of the team and the company. This could be worse if the team is also starting to forget to talk about problems in retrospectives and is focused into discuss solutions.

There are a lot of techniques to work on this kind of problems, but in this article I’m going to explain a retrospective exercise that Pablo Bouzada and I designed, totally inspired by this talk from Maria Berenguer — (Spanish) Mis retrospectivas se han roto and our experience in other retrospectives.

Introduction to the retrospective

First, the facilitator has to prepare the room for the exercise, will prepare a paper or notebook for each teammate and a pen for each of them. Will also take some markers to share with the team and write The Prime Directive (translations) in the board.

Image introducing the exercise to the team

Exercise 1: Company values

By turns, each teammate explain a value that she or he knows about the company, related to how we work in the projects during the sprints. Some examples can be:

• Deliver good functional quality.