Sailboat Retrospective

When using the Scrum framework, the Retrospective is the final event in a Sprint. The Retrospective allows the team to identify how to work together better and improve the quality of the product. Whereas the Sprint Review is an opportunity to inspect the increment, the Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the team to inspect themselves. During this event, the team discusses how the Sprint went regarding individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and their Definition of Done.

As an outcome from the Retrospective, the team identifies ideas for improvement and implements them as soon as possible. Many teams decide to place improvement ideas into the next Sprint Backlog to make their completion more likely and add transparency.

Like all other events in the Scrum framework, the Sprint Retrospective is timeboxed. It runs to a maximum of three hours for a one-month Sprint; the event is usually shorter for shorter Sprints.

The sprint retrospective is a recurring meeting held at the end of a sprint used to discuss what went well during the previous sprint cycle and what can be improved for the next sprint. The Agile sprint retrospective is an essential part of the Scrum framework for developing, delivering, and managing complex projects.

There are so many Sprint retrospective meeting formats to choose from. Each team can decide how to run their Sprint Retrospective, and changing approaches from time to time can help keep things fresh. Today let’s look at the Sailboat Sprint Retrospective.

The Sailboat retrospective format is a simple and creative retro idea. A sailboat is drawn with its sails, its anchor, some rocks, some clouds, and a few islands. It is a nice, visual way to break things down.

Sailboat Retrospective is a fun and easy way to boost the communication of what went well and what slowed the team during the current sprint. Based on the topics addressed during the retrospective, the team agrees on the improvement activities needed for future sprints.

• The tropical island represents the set sprint goal they have aimed to achieve in their daily work during the sprint.
• The Wind represents everything helping them to achieve the sprint goal, pushing the team’s sails boat to go even faster.
• The Sun represents all the things making them feel good and happy during work. As a retrospective is a time for team celebration this is a highly appreciated topic to bring up and an opportunity to bring forward kudos to your team friends.
• The Anchor on the Sailing boat represents everything that is slowing us down and holding us back on the journey towards the sprint goal.
• The Reef represents potential risks ahead that we see will jeopardize future sprint work.

What you can expect to get out of this technique
From my experience, this technique is quite appreciated by teams because of its simplicity. This exercise helps teams to define a vision of where they want to go; it helps them to identify risks during their path and allows them to identify what slows them down and what helps them to achieve their objectives.

When you would use this technique
I believe this method is quite simple and does not require any special occasion. Although, it might be interesting for situations when a retrospective is conducted with more than one team at the same time.

Using the SailBoat exercise can be extremely interesting because we simply put the name of both teams on the SailBoat and we remind everyone that we are on the same SailBoat navigating in the same direction.

This technique reveals all good things and less positive things performed by a team. The SailBoat exercise is suitable for any team; it does not require any specific level of maturity.

How to use the Sailboat Retrospective

First, we draw a SailBoat, rocks, clouds, and a couple of islands like it is shown on the picture on a flip chart. Having the picture on the wall, write what the team vision is or what are goals as a team. After that, start a brainstorming session with the team allowing them to dump their ideas within different areas.

1. Set the stage — start the Retrospective by introducing the team of the sailboat metaphor.
2. Reflect and write individually — Give each team member 7 min to individually write down stickies on the board in the different areas of the sailboat canvas.
3. Present and discuss in pairs — Have breakout sessions with 2 (or 3) persons in each breakout room where they present their stickies to each other.
4. Summarize — Each pair summarize the discussion during breakout so all team members can hear what has been discussed. Opportunity to ask questions if any.
5. Group stickies — In case of more than one sticky with the same topics the team agrees upon grouping them together.
6. Voting — Time for team voting on the topic(s) that needs focus going forward. It could be topics helping the team go forward so they need to continue with these to keep momentum, or topics related to what is slowing them down or potential risks coming up.
7. Find Actions — Based on the highest voted topic(s) the teams agree on improvement action going forward in the next sprint.

If you do this exercise with more than one team at a time a good wrap-up is to let all teams put up their posters on the wall side by side. Afterward, you can easily have a scrum of the scrum to pick up what needs to be fixed between the teams, or you can bring the managers there to take on the issues that they can help solving from all teams.

If you want to do a bigger change you can also ask the team (it doesn’t need to be a scrum team, it can be a management team as well, or any other where they work together as a team) to add what behaviors they should leave behind to be able to do the change. This is very effective to be able to pin point what type of behaviors, not just actions, will help to create a change. Add it to the poster by the island the ship is leaving.

Hope you and your team(s) can use it and that it gives the teams more and better capabilities to be great teams 🙂