Ask HN: How do you make a sprint/project retro awesome?

I've been told you should play around with new ways to retro. Meh. We have a spreadsheet with columns: went well, wishy washy, needs improvement, action items, and give thanks. People can fill it out as things come up in the sprint or in the fisrt few minutes of retro.

It guides discussion, but requires active participation and a shared knowledge that this is a "safe place" to call out issues. We try to make action items around things that are frustrations for improvement. The give thanks is a good time to reflect on help you've gotten. Personally, I'll reach out to individuals called out in that column (who are on other teams) and their manager to say how they helped me or the team.

Really, we learn by making mistakes. Spotting them and discussing them and coming up with actionable, trackable remediations is what makes retros valuable to us. Bigger mistakes and being honest about lapses in meeting expectations lead to better retros.

We iterate or try new things in retro often, but recently my team has been sticking with a RealtimeBoard (or sticky notes, if in person,) where each person fills out a success/praise, a frustration, and an idea or improvement.

This method of presenting things that worked and things that didn’t cuts out a lot of wasted meeting time by jumping straight to pain points.

I try to make sure people leave with an improvement to work on - however small. Then start by assessing that - otherwise it just becomes a moan-fest and nothing gets better

By not having one? This must be a trick question.