An interactive retrospective works best online with a clear process: team members give anonymous feedback, prioritize the most important topics, and document concrete action items. With Echometer, it works like this:
- Easy preparation of retrospectives through templates for retro formats, surveys, and whiteboards
- Intuitive and step-by-step facilitation of retrospectives. Possible both online and on-site. On-site, simply use the QR code so participants can join via their smartphone with the Mobile Companion App.
- Automatic follow-up through export functions and integrated tracking of developments and action items, including a retro archive.
This is what conducting a retrospective looks like in Echometer:
- The retrospective board allows the agile team to start with a fun welcome screen, where it can wait for the rest of the team while playing an interactive game.
- Once all retrospective participants have arrived, continue with an icebreaker question. Echometer has several templates for icebreaker questions, including both open questions and visual whiteboard templates with workshops and small games.
- After the icebreaker, you move to the action tracking screen: here the team reviews the open action items from past retrospectives and decides whether the actions should be kept, closed, or discarded. This step is unique to Echometer and significantly improves the quality of agile teams’ continuous improvement process.
- Then it’s on to the Team Health Check: All team members answer various questions, for example a question about team satisfaction or questions about psychological safety. This type of question increases both engagement in the retrospective, even among introverted team members, and the creation of agile KPIs to track team mood over time.
- Then you continue with the retrospective board, where everyone can leave anonymous feedback on open questions — unless this has already happened beforehand via a survey. There are hundreds of retrospective templates for different retrospectives on the Echometer retro board.
- Feedback is written on the retro board hidden at first, so the participants do not influence one another. The moderator can then reveal the feedback column by column.
- Once the feedback on the retro board has been revealed, presented to the team, and any questions about the feedback have been clarified, you can move on to prioritizing, i.e. voting.
- Voting in Echometer is anonymous. During the voting, you can see how many votes have already been cast and how many are still open.
- For on-site retrospectives, you can also vote via smartphone.
- Once voting is complete, action items can be derived. To do this, you can either create an action item directly for a piece of feedback, or open the feedback on a new whiteboard to analyze the problem in more depth and brainstorm ideas for action items.
- Brainstorming action items on a dedicated whiteboard within the retro is a particular differentiator for Echometer compared with other retrospective tools such as Parabol. In Echometer, you can create a separate whiteboard for each topic within the retro, thus steering the focus of the discussion optimally.
- Finally, Echometer makes it possible to conclude the retrospective by asking the entire team anonymously to rate the ROTI score on a scale of 0 to 10 (i.e. the “Return on Time Invested”): This helps the team, and especially the retrospective moderator, to continuously improve the quality of the retrospectives within the team itself.
Given this unique retrospective process, which is both structured and flexible, combined with the range of features, Echometer is often referred to as the best tool for agile retrospectives.
Specialized retrospective tools like Echometer offer integrated moderation features so that teams do not just work on a digital whiteboard. These include a guided process, a timer, anonymity settings, a focused agenda step for all participants, as well as features for grouping and prioritizing feedback.
These features make it easier for Scrum Masters and moderators to structure the discussion, involve all team members, and record concrete action items at the end.
You can find a step-by-step guide for conducting the interactive session in the article How do I run a retro?.