4 questions for a soccer retrospective

Are you a sports enthusiast and that’s why you searched for the “Football Retrospective”? Great sports fan, then you’ve come to the right place - Here’s a first overview of the Football Retrospective:

Good teamwork is just as important in soccer as it is in agile. You have to have the right people on the field. And yet, sometimes you just have a bad day. If your team has some soccer fans, this agile sprint retrospective will give you a jumping off point:

Example moves (questions) for your soccer retrospective

• Double pass: Where did we play particularly well together?
  • Example: In this project, we have significantly better communication and coordination between the individual players in the team. - Let’s keep it that way.
• Free kick: What opportunities do we have?
  • Example: You have the feeling that not everyone in your team dares to speak up, there is a lack of so-called psychological safety. So you could start by doing an agile team health check in 3 steps in your team. (More info on: “ psychological safety %E2%80%9C or “ Team health check in 3 steps %E2%80%9E)
• Foul play: When did we break the rules?
  • Example: It’s good to look at agile metrics like your team’s velocity from time to time – that hasn’t happened much lately unfortunately! We should get better at keeping track of our metrics. (Read more: “ agile metrics %E2%80%9E)
• Goal: Where did we hit the bull’s eye?
  • Example: You were very happy with the new tool to help with prioritization & transparency of the product backlog. It should definitely be used further.

By the way, you can also find the soccer retrospective in our Echometer tool and do it online with your team (no registration required):

How to

Football Retro: How the retro works

1. Random Icebreaker (2-5 minutes)

   Echometer provides you with a generator for random check-in questions.

2. 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.

3. 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.

   • Double pass: Where did we play particularly well together?
   • Free kick: What chances did we have?
   • Foul play: When did we break the rules?
   • Goal: Where did we hit the bull's eye?

4. Catch-all question (Recommended)

   So that other topics also have a place:

   • What else would you like to talk about in the retro?

5. Prioritization / Voting (5 minutes)

   On the retro board in Echometer, you can easily prioritize the feedback with voting. The voting is of course anonymous.

6. 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.

7. 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.

Football Retro

Double pass: Where did we play particularly well together?

Free kick: What chances did we have?

Foul play: When did we break the rules?

Goal: Where did we hit the bull's eye?

Open this retro now

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.

Personally, I have played a lot of sports myself in the past. It wasn’t soccer, but I still know that working in agile teams and playing in a team has a lot of parallels. The trust among each other is incredibly important and also the coordination of moves at lightning speed leads to better movement as a team and finally bringing home the victory for yourself. 

Taking a more relaxed approach and having fun with your team is something that pays off in both areas. I don’t want to go into detail about this topic here, but maybe this is a great incentive for you to incorporate something more from other areas, such as sports, into your everyday life in agile teams. The soccer retro is a great start for this and I hope that the team spirit can be further strengthened. 

Maybe you could also try a joint battle cry: “Zicke zacke zicke zacke hoi hoi hoi” - But please don’t overdo it 🤣

Conclusion - The Football Retrospective

If you want to bring a little more sportsmanship to your team or put a smile on the face of football fans in your team, the football retro is definitely a recommendation. If you like it, you’ll probably like these retros too: 22 Refreshing Agile Retrospective Templates in 2023