Trello for Retrospectives

David Ghent recently published a great post on using Trello for research synthesis and I thought I’d follow up with another Trello application on Agile projects — retrospective.

I just finished a remote project with 8 team members who needed a good alternative to a whiteboard for retro. It’s pretty hard to beat a whiteboard for simplicity and ease of use…

…but with people coming in from 3 cities and 2 time zones, we had to find another way to make everything visible to everyone all the time. So we went to Trello, and it actually worked out pretty great:

Here’s how to do it:

One-time setup:

1. Set up a Trello board called Retro (or String Cheese, or whatever). Put it within your team’s Trello organization if you have one.
2. Set up your lists: Action Items, Done, [DATE] :), [DATE] :/, [DATE] :(
3. Share the board with everyone on your team and give them edit permissions before retro (it’ll eat into your time if you do it during)
4. Get your snacks and drinks ready, and have everyone bring a laptop or tablet or phone — anything that can run Trello.

At retro, here’s the process:

1. Everyone adds their cards to the appropriate list just like it was a whiteboard
2. Folks vote for items using one of two methods. They can use the Voting Power-up (enable it using Menu > Power Ups > Voting, and then people vote by selecting a card and clicking the Vote button on the right-hand side). I’m not a huge fan of Voting because you have to click into each card and you can only vote once. What’s better than voting? stickers! Everyone gets a few votes and puts stickers on the cards they’d like to discuss. Trust me, it’s way more fun.
3. The facilitator drags the top-voted items to the top of the list
4. The group discusses them one by one
5. The facilitator triages them. Give a color label to a card that has been discussed by clicking on it and clicking the Label button, or hovering over the card and pressing a number key between 1 and 6. Move cards that are actionable to Action Items.
6. The facilitator adds action items.
7. The group celebrates! Another week over!

Once the retro has finished, the facilitator archives the lists and creates new ones for next week. The dates keep all the archived lists in order and it’s easy to retrieve old lists.

The next week, before starting items the group goes over action items from the week before. Items move from the Action Items column to the Done column. Everyone cheers.

What’s great about it:

1. Retro items are saved for future reference
2. Action items stay up, can be assigned to people and given due dates (Trello will even send reminders by email). Retro items can be dragged straight into the Action Items column.

What’s not so great:

1. It’s still not in-person. For collocated teams, I still recommend the whiteboard.
2. Action items aren’t physically radiated in the team’s space, so they can be harder to remember. Using due dates and assigning items to people within Trello helped keep up reminders and accountability.
3. People have a tendency to drift off when their computers are in front of them. Treat this by having everyone get up once in a while during discussion, and keep laptops closed when not in use.

Pro Tips

• Trello Gold gives you access to a lot more stickers and you can make custom ones — it’s more fun.
• If you’re the one to invite your whole team to Trello, you get free Trello Gold, you mastermind.
• Make it fun! Change the background, make crazy stickers, make jokes, use weird emoticons… One of the biggest things lacking from remote teams is joking around — Trello’s a pretty playful tool and we had a really good time messing with it.

Trello for Retrospectives was originally published in Built to Adapt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.