Retrospective

What is a Retrospective?

A retrospective is a team meeting where people pause and look back at their recent work together. What worked? What didn't? And what should change next time? Most teams just call it a "retro." The practice started in agile software development, but it's spread to all kinds of industries because, honestly, every team benefits from taking time to reflect. The insights from these meetings often lead to updates in process documentation and improved workflows.

What makes a retrospective different from your typical status meeting is the focus. You're not talking about deliverables or giving updates. Instead, the conversation centers on how the team actually works together, the processes you follow, and where things get stuck. The point is walking away with a few concrete changes to try in your next sprint or project cycle.

If you're working in Scrum, the sprint retrospective happens at the end of every sprint, right before planning kicks off again. The team looks at everything: how people collaborated, what tools helped or got in the way, whether the Definition of Done still makes sense. You talk through the wins, dig into the problems, and pick the most important improvements to tackle right away. Doing this regularly means teams keep getting better over time instead of repeating the same frustrating patterns.

Key Characteristics of a Retrospective

• Structured Reflection: A facilitator guides the group through what worked, what flopped, and what to change. This keeps the conversation focused and makes sure quieter team members get heard too.
• Psychological Safety: People need to feel safe being honest. That means no blame, no defensiveness. When folks can share concerns without worrying about backlash, you get much better insights.
• Action-Oriented: The output isn't just a list of complaints. You leave with specific things to actually do differently next cycle, often improving knowledge management practices along the way.
• Regular Cadence: These meetings happen on a schedule, usually every 1-4 weeks. The consistency matters because small improvements stack up over time.
• Whole Team Participation: Everyone joins, regardless of role. The engineer sees things the designer misses, and vice versa. Different perspectives make for better solutions.

Retrospective Examples

Example 1: Agile Software Team

Picture a development team wrapping up a two-week sprint. Their Scrum Master runs the retro using "Start-Stop-Continue" as the framework. The conversation reveals that pairing on tricky features was a win (they'll continue that), but standups have been dragging on way too long (that needs to stop). Someone suggests they start logging architectural decisions directly in the repo so future devs don't have to guess why things were built a certain way. By the end, they've got three clear actions: use a timer to cap standups at 10 minutes, keep pair programming on complex work, and spin up an architecture decision log. Two people volunteer to create the template before the next sprint starts.

Example 2: Customer Support Team

A support team runs monthly retrospectives to keep improving how they help customers. They use the "Four L's" format: Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For. This month, they realize the new knowledge base articles cut down on repeat questions (that's a win), but the formatting is all over the place, making articles hard to skim (that's a gap). They also notice customers seem to prefer video tutorials over written guides for technical stuff. The action items? Standardize the article templates and record video walkthroughs for the five most common support issues using Glitter AI's screen recording. At the next retro, the manager checks in on whether these changes actually moved the needle.

Retrospective vs After Action Review

Both involve looking back and learning, but they're not the same thing. Here's how they differ:

How Glitter AI Helps with Retrospectives

Here's the thing about retrospectives: teams often leave with great ideas for process improvements, but then nothing actually changes. The gap between "we should do this differently" and "here's the documented new way" is where good intentions go to die.

Glitter AI helps bridge that gap. When your retro surfaces a process that needs updating, you can capture the improved workflow through screen recording right away. Glitter turns that recording into documentation with annotated screenshots and step-by-step instructions, so the change is documented before anyone forgets what was decided.

Instead of improvements living in someone's head or in scattered notes nobody can find, they become actual documentation that new hires can reference, that teammates can pull up when they have questions, and that the whole team can point to. Glitter also tracks versions over time, so you can see how your processes have evolved. It's a nice reminder that all those retrospective conversations are actually making a difference.