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Transforming Useless Retrospectives into Powerful Ones With Action Items
How to ensure you end your retrospectives with something valuable.
Originally published in GoRetro
I hated Sprint Retrospectives. I didn’t understand why we had to sit down every second week to discuss the same things. The Scrum Master would religiously ask us the same boring questions, and I wanted to be anywhere but in that room.
Almost all of our Sprints ended the same way. We had Sprint carry-overs and someone complaining about bugs. Yet, we knew our next Sprint would be no different, with pressure to deliver more, failure to deliver on expectations, and bugs caused due to rushing everything.
What did we do wrong?
Let me share my learnings from bad Sprint Retrospectives. Hopefully, you don’t do like I did :)
By the end of this post, you will learn how to do it in a valuable way and consistently improve your team’s work.

Bad Sprint Retrospectives
Before we talk about bad experiences, we need to understand why doing Sprint Retrospectives matters in the first place. I could point you to the Scrum Guide, but I guess you’re tired of it. So let me give you my fifty cents.