Team retrospectives are usually an hour, monthly, with a facilitator and a wall of coloured notes. I have been in good ones. I have also watched fifty of them produce three action items, two of which nobody did.
The version I kept is ten minutes, weekly, alone with a text file.
The three questions
Every Friday, before I stop:
- What went slower than it should have?
- What did I do twice?
- What do I already know I will forget?
Ten minutes, written answers, no formatting. The value is not in the answers, it is in the questions being asked while the week is still in memory.
Why it works when the big version does not
A monthly retro asks people to remember four weeks, which nobody does. What actually surfaces is whatever happened last Tuesday and whatever somebody is annoyed about. A week is short enough that the honest answer is still available.
Doing it alone also removes the part that makes group retros expensive: the negotiation. I am not proposing a process change to five people, I am noticing something and changing my own behaviour on Monday.
What comes out of it
Mine produce three kinds of result, and I treat them differently.
- A friction to remove. The command I typed wrong twice becomes a shortcut. The step I forgot becomes a line on a checklist. Fixed the same day, always.
- A pattern worth watching. Not actionable yet. It goes on a short list, and if it appears three weeks running it becomes a real task.
- Something to raise with a person. These are the valuable ones. Written down while still specific, raised on Monday with an example instead of a feeling.
The rule that keeps it alive
If the retro produces homework, it dies. So the only allowed output is something I do immediately, something I write on a list, or something I say to somebody. Nothing that needs a document, a meeting, or a project.
A habit that survives a bad week is worth more than a better habit that does not.
Keep the file
Read six months of these in one sitting and you find out what your actual problems are, which are almost never the ones you would have guessed. Mine turned out to be waiting: on reviews, on decisions, on environments. Not skill, not tools, not focus. That single realisation reshaped how I plan a week, and it came out of a text file I nearly stopped keeping.
Written by
Ari Bennett
Software engineer and writer
I build web software for a living and write about the parts that are hard to search for: the trade-offs, the dead ends, and the small habits that make a codebase pleasant to come back to a year later. A decade in, I still keep a paper notebook next to the keyboard.
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