What do Stairway to Heaven, air balloons, and the 3 Little Pigs have in common? They’re all fun formats for sprint retrospectives! For the last few months, my team tried different retrospective formats, ranging from the highly creative, to the exceedingly dull.

This exercise helped our team determine: 1) what information the team finds valuable in retrospectives, 2) what topics need to be discussed as a team (day to day vs. big picture), and 3) and how often certain topics need to be discussed.

After exhausting all of the retro formats we could find, we had a Retro of retros, in which we selected the format that fit our team operating system the best. While this process helped establish an operating system for a fairly new team, it can also be used to re-invigorate team dynamics or increase engagement for an existing team.

In this talk, I will cover the various formats we tried, explain the pros and cons of each, and what your team can gain from following a similar approach.