How to Write Great Retro Cards

One of the most precious aspects of your presence in a retrospective is your input. Contributing to a retrospective is an opportunity to help your team and company improve by openly sharing the experiences you have at work.

During the Reflect phase all team members are expected to contribute ideas to the retrospective board using the feedback cards. How you approach writing these cards makes a huge impact on the quality of your retrospective and the improvements they enable. Here are few tips to help you write great cards. ‍

Focus on one idea per card

Focusing on one idea per card makes everything easier during the rest of your retro, like:

• grouping cards about the same topic during the Group phase,
• voting on topics during the Vote phase,
• having a focused problem-solving conversation about one topic at a time during the Discuss phase, and
• creating impactful Action Items during the discuss phase.

Use your words

One word cards are easy to write but they don’t provide much value. You don’t have to write a paragraph either. A short sentence can convey a lot of information. Keep it short, specific, and focused.

Express your opinion

Your opinion matters and a retrospective is the perfect place to express it.

If something isn’t going well, say so and express about how bad it is and how much it is impacting your work in your card. And do the same for the positives.

Examples

Bad: “The combination of poorly defined stories, excessive meetings, flaky test infrastructure, and unexpected dependencies on the authentication team created a perfect storm that not only tanked our velocity this sprint but also severely impacted team morale and left us with several incomplete features that will now cascade into next sprint’s workload.”

A card like this is trying to cover too many things all in one card. Here are some better options.

Good: “Test flakiness needs investigation”

Great: “Several user stories were so poorly defined that we had to completely re-scope them mid-sprint, causing significant delays.”

Great: “The test flakiness in our UI test suite wasted hours of my time on false failures.”

Great: “The lack of clear dependencies between us and the authentication team completely derailed our critical path tasks.” ‍
‍

Bad: “Meetings”

One word cards don’t say a lot … literally. Here’s a couple of better options.

Good: “Some meetings could have been emails.”

Great: “The sprint planning meetings have become a waste of time with no concrete outcomes or actionable items.” ‍
‍

Bad: “Better feature flags?”

This one isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t tell us what’s wrong or what impact improving them would have. Here’s a couple of better options.

Good: “We need a better feature flagging system during outages.”

Great: “Without a better feature flagging system we will continue to have long outages when we ship broken features because we can’t effectively toggle features off in both the front end and back end.”

‍