Product Design Retrospective - A Management Tool to Improve any Product Team or Startup

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey guys this is Jonathan from AJ and smart I'm standing here on the main Waterfront in Berlin in front of the main bridge this the overbound booker we're just outside our office and I'm going to talk to you today about [Music] retrospective a retrospective is a way for your team to take some time off their day-to-day to take a seat and to really reflect on what's going well and what's not going well within the team it often acts like some sort of therapy session for your team that helps to reduce tensions and to overall just improve product teams the strange thing is that the majority of teams that I've worked with do not do any retrospectives or they do sort of half-ass versions where they don't have a specific time blocked out for it maybe they'll do it like once a month or maybe once every two months but they don't really have an actual kind of system or a habit around retrospectives within the companies and you often see these similar problems cropping up number one is that the team doesn't actually improve a lot or it doesn't improve very quickly and the reason for that is because the team is in a constant reactionary state they're not able to stop and think okay this is a problem within the team we should this is an inefficiency we should fix this because they're so focused on the day-to-day work what a retrospective allows you to do is to say let's stop let's see what's broken and let's actually fix it so before we move on and a lot of times you'll have individual employees within the company who actually know how to fix a problem but they don't have any time to really talk about it and actually put this into action so very often there is a lot of talk around the coffee room about the things that are shitty the things that need to change and nothing happens a retrospective kind of forces you to identify these problems and forces you then to solve them number two there's a lack of positive milestones and a lack of tangible progress so when a team is working on a project or when there's a a team working with an agency or however it is your product team is working they're often just going to be kind of stuck in the daytoday of what they're doing doing focusing very much on the tasks that they have the problem is often that when a product is released or when an update is released or when the client project is done you don't really take the time out to celebrate that these things were done and actually to kind of almost like uh congratulate the people who worked on the team and when you're working without retrospectives and when you're sort of in this constant reactionary State you almost never really celebrate the finishings of a project so things tend to feel like they're going on and on and on forever without stopping and this causes project fatigue so it causes a team to start feeling like the the excitement that they had at the start of a project it starts to naturally go down over time and eventually you can you often find teams to lose perspective of why they were even doing it the retrospective allows you to stop and especially if you do a weekly retrospective and almost like finish up the week and kind of um have like some sort of like a a milestone at the end of every week so you get this satisfaction of the ending of a project even if it is continuing on okay finally number three unspoken tensions start to build up in the team when you don't have the chance to really sit down and have this almost therapy like retrospective there are tensions just start to build up and pressure starts to build up around a product team what starts to happen is that certain people start to get so annoyed with each other and so annoyed with things that are going on in the project team that these unresolved tensions start to show and start to ruin the products and you can see this in a lot of ways sometimes it's subtle but sometimes it gets pretty extreme where you have the people who are the bigger egos on the team very aggressively pushing their ideas through whereas the people who maybe are not like such big egos starting to step away and the product actually suffers as a result of that the retrospective sort of allows for an anonymous take on the health of the team and allows you to sort of attack those problems without the ego in mind so how do you actually run the retrospective at your company well luckily I'm going to show you exactly how to do it there's two ways so if you're reading this in the medium article and if you're watching this video video in the medium article you don't need to do anything just continue reading you're going to see exactly how to do it if you're watching this on YouTube and thanks a lot for watching our YouTube channel all you need to do is go down into the like the description and click on the medium article which will show you exactly how to do it and this medium article is also going to link to this video here so just open that in a different tab go wild it's going to be crazy and um also do like this video do share this video and in return I will kiss you who's ever watching this you even if you're some scary guy I'm coming for you to kiss you we thought we'd actually take you outside for one of these videos because most of them are kind of me sitting there in a dark room looking very [Music] lonely