Retrospective

Reflect on past work and identify opportunities for improvement by following the instructions for the Retrospective Play. This example retro uses fictional data for a product squad reviewing a recent website checkout release.

#📋 Overview

Date	Jul 3, 2026
Team	Northstar Checkout Squad
Participants	@unknown, Priya Shah, Tom Bennett, Amelia Clarke, Marcus Hill, Sofia Patel

#💭 Retrospective

▶️ Start doing	🛑 Stop doing	🙌 Keep doing
Run a 30-minute design and engineering sparring session before stories move into sprint planning. Add a release-readiness checklist covering analytics events, accessibility checks, and rollback steps. Share customer support themes every Monday so the squad can prioritise high-impact checkout fixes.	Accepting late scope changes after Wednesday unless the team agrees to trade something out. Scheduling review meetings without a clear goal, owner, and pre-read. Waiting until the final QA pass to test payment-provider edge cases.	Posting concise daily stand-up updates with blockers, risk level, and next steps. Pairing backend and QA on payment failure scenarios before code freeze. Using the launch dashboard to track conversion, error rate, and abandoned basket trends.
Example evidence: 4 of 7 stories needed design clarification after development had already started.	Example evidence: the gift-card balance story was reworked twice because acceptance criteria changed late.	Example evidence: the 24-hour launch dashboard helped detect a failed Apple Pay webhook within 18 minutes.
Owner: Priya Shah will create the sparring rota by Jul 10, 2026.	Owner: Jack Graves will add a scope-change rule to sprint planning notes by Jul 8, 2026.	Owner: Tom Bennett will keep the dashboard summary in the team channel after each release.

Pro tip: For a remote team, collect notes asynchronously first, then use the live retro to group themes, vote on priorities, and agree owners.

#✅ Action items

The squad agreed the following follow-up actions to apply the retrospective learnings before the next release.

Priya Shah to schedule weekly story-sparring sessions for the next four Fridays, starting Jul 10, 2026.
Jack Graves to publish a lightweight scope-change checklist and example decision log at https://example.com/northstar-squad/scope-change-checklist by Jul 8, 2026.
Tom Bennett and Amelia Clarke to add payment-provider edge-case tests to the release checklist at https://example.com/northstar-squad/release-checklist by Jul 15, 2026.