How to improve your retrospective using Range

Improve your regular retrospectives using Range

Range can improve your team’s ability to reflect on past work in retrospectives. If your team has regular retrospective meetings and also writes daily check-ins on Range, consider using one of the following activities for your next retrospective:

Option 1: Run your retro meeting with Range (30 min)

What: Run a structured retrospective that helps the team gather and reflect on each member’s highlights and noble failures from the week.

Why: Reflecting on highlights from the week gives the team an opportunity to celebrate and take regular stock of progress. Reflecting on noble failures (things that didn’t go as planned) helps teams practice treating failures as opportunities for learning and develops a growth mindset.

How to use Range:

1. Set the stage — Explain the purpose of the activity to the team. Distribute sticky note pads, pens, and make sure everyone has their phone or computer.

2. Review what happened — Using Range, each teammate individually writes up a bunch of sticky notes capturing highlights and noble failures. The summary view of the check-ins page is a useful reference — make sure to filter to just check-ins from your team. You can set a timer for this section so there’s a natural stopping point.

3. Share highlights and noble failures — Coming together as a group, each teammate takes turns sharing a highlight or noble failure with the others.

4. Consider starting by sharing noble failures so that you end the meeting on a positive note with a lot of highlights.

5. For highlights, multiple teammates will often write down the same thing. To save time, you can have everyone else with the same highlight get up to “pile onto” the original once it’s shared.

What to say: For highlights, prompt people to consider highlights from the work that others did in addition to their own. If people are having a hard time being open with noble failures, you can model behavior by being vulnerable with your own noble failures.

Option 2: Use Range to start your existing retro meeting (5 min)

Why: If you already have a retrospective format that’s working well and you don’t want to change much to incorporate Range, you can still use Range at the start as a way to jog the team’s memory about the period of time that the retro covers.

How to use Range: At the start of the retrospective, set aside 5 minutes for everyone to open Range and silently read back over what was shared. The summary view of the check-ins page can be useful here when filtered to just check-ins from your team. After everyone has reflected and refreshed their memory on past work, run the retrospective as you normally do.

What to say: It’s easy to forget the things that happened recently, especially when work is moving quickly. Prompt people with “What happened this week/sprint/month that you might have already forgotten about?”