Join Certified Scrum Trainer® John McFadyen for a 12-part video series exploring the scrum event known as the sprint retrospective. Throughout the series, he’ll share tips and tricks for creating impactful, engaging, and effective sprint retrospectives for your teams.
Facilitating the conversation is the following tip for running your sprint retrospective like a pro! When you're the facilitator, you're not a passive bystander or a speaker—your job is to help the team actively. A trait of a good facilitator is being able to step outside of the conversation and be a guide.
It's important that your sprint retrospective has an agenda, as this is the facilitator’s tool for keeping the meeting on track and avoiding the team going down the rabbit hole with unrelated topics.
A good technique as a facilitator when you start to see this happening is asking the team, "Is this conversation helping us move forward?"
You don't have to be technical or a subject matter expert on the team's topic. Your expertise is in ensuring that the agenda items are achieved.
If you sense the conversation is getting derailed, ask the team again, "Have we gone off topic? Does this conversation have to happen now?" Very rarely do teams say that the conversation has to happen immediately.
Another key role of the facilitator is to make sure that everyone has an equal voice. Everyone who wants to speak should have the space to be listened to with respect. You also need to accept that some people don't want to talk, so don't force the issue.
At the end of the sprint retrospective, you want to make sure that people are making good decisions and have actions they own to improve how the team works together.
Key Takeaways:
- As a facilitator, you need to listen more than speak
- Come prepared with an agenda, and use that to stay on track
- Make sure that everyone on the team has an equal voice
Need to watch any of the other videos in the series? Find the links below!
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