Today I had another simple and fun retro, this time I themed it using the classic Donkey Kong/Mario.
Here are the steps in which I facilitated it:
- I invited everyone to open the whiteboard. While everybody was doing so, a nice discussion started about the game itself (old donkey kong) and what everybody’s first gaming experience was (gameboy, amiga, sega, nes, etc). So I gave it a couple of minutes to set the mood.
- people started playing on the board by moving mario and the flames/barrels 😂 (tip, make sure to lock the level-background, via right click)
- I invited everyone to take about 10 minutes to come up with items for all of the questions and stick them on the board
- To signal the timebox was almost over, I started this tune in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cttPiwzcKnc
- together we walked the board, whenever we identified improvements I already summarized them on stickies and moved those to the last section.
- during the “What obstacles did we overcome?” section, I added an additional question “what did we learn from this”, this helped us identify some additional improvements we could make
- I closed the session by asking anyone to recommend a game which we could play as a team together next week, and ended up scheduling a lunch session to play Among Us together
I stole the idea from here 😇: https://medium.com/@dougidle/the-donkey-kong-sprint-retrospective-983b4ae3bb42