4 Questions for an American Football Retrospective
Are you a sports fanatic and that’s why you searched for the “American Football Retrospective”? Fantastic, sports fan! You’ve come to the right place. Here you get a first overview of the American Football Retrospective.
American Football Retrospective
4 questions for the Football-Retro 🏈
Good teamwork is just as important in American football as it is in agile work. The right players have to be on the field. And yet sometimes you just have a bad game day. If your team has some football fans, then this agile sprint retrospective provides a perfect template for you:
Example plays (questions) for your American Football Retrospective
- Touchdown: Where did we play particularly well together?
- Example: We have achieved significantly better communication and coordination between offense and defense in this project. – This is how it should continue.
- Field Goal: What opportunities do we have?
- Example: You have the feeling that not everyone in your team dares to call audibles, there is a lack of so-called psychological safety. So you could start by carrying out an agile team Health Check in 3 steps in your team (more information on: “ psychological safety %E2%80%9C or “ Team health check in 3 steps %E2%80%9E).
- Penalty: When did we break the rules?
- Example: It is important to regularly check our key performance indicators (KPIs) such as the conversion rate on third down – - unfortunately, this has been neglected recently! We should get better at keeping an eye on our statistics (More info on: “ agile metrics %E2%80%9E).
- Game-Winning Drive: Where did we hit the bull’s eye?
- Example: You were very happy with the new playbook software to help with prioritization & transparency of plays. It should definitely continue to be used.
You can also find the American football retrospective in our Echometer tool and conduct it online with your team (no registration required):
American Football Retrospective
American Football Retrospective: How the retro works
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Random Icebreaker (2-5 minutes)
Echometer provides you with a generator for random check-in questions.
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Review of open actions (2-5 minutes)
Before starting with new topics, you should talk about what has become of the measures from past retrospectives to check their effectiveness. Echometer automatically lists all open action items from past retros.
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Discuss retro topics
Use the following open questions to collect your most important findings. First, everyone does it themselves, covered. Echometer allows you to reveal each column of the retro board individually in order to then present and group the feedback.
- Touchdown pass: Where did we play particularly well together?
- Field goal: What opportunities do we have?
- Penalty: When did we break the rules?
- Game-winning drive: where did we hit the bull's eye?
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Catch-all question (Recommended)
So that other topics also have a place:
- What else would you like to talk about in the retro?
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Prioritization / Voting (5 minutes)
On the retro board in Echometer, you can easily prioritize the feedback with voting. The voting is of course anonymous.
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Define actions (10-20 minutes)
You can create a linked action via the plus symbol on a feedback. Not sure which measure would be the right one? Then open a whiteboard on the topic via the plus symbol instead to brainstorm root causes and possible measures.
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Checkout / Closing (5 minutes)
Echometer enables you to collect anonymous feedback from the team on how helpful the retro was. This creates the ROTI score ("Return On Time Invested"), which you can track over time.
American Football Retrospective
As you can see, the soccer retrospective includes many important perspectives on teamwork and is therefore also an interesting undertaking for non-football fans from time to time. If you as an Agile Coach or Scrum Master have a team with an affinity for sports or are even a soccer fan, the soccer retrospective will certainly go down even better.
American Football Retrospective
From the pitch to the office
My own sporting past, although not in American football, has shown me how closely the principles of team sports are linked to those of agile working methods. In both worlds, mutual trust is the cornerstone of success. Like a well-coordinated football team that executes complex plays in a matter of seconds, an agile team must also work together in a flexible and coordinated manner to achieve its goals.
The importance of a good balance between concentration and relaxation should not be underestimated, both on the pitch and in the office. A team that doesn’t lose its sense of fun even in stressful situations is often more productive and resilient.
Introducing sporting elements, such as this American football retrospective, into the day-to-day work of agile teams can bring a breath of fresh air and new perspectives. It is a first step towards strengthening team spirit and improving collaboration.
Who knows, maybe you’ll even enjoy starting your meetings with a motivating “Ready, Set, Hut!” – as long as it doesn’t get out of hand! 😄
Conclusion – The American Football Retrospective
If you want to bring a little more sportsmanship to your team or put a smile on the faces of football fans on your team, the American football retro is definitely a recommendation. If you like it, you’ll probably also like these retros: 54 Fresh Retrospective Ideas for Healthy Agile Teams in 2024
