Use Your Retrospectives to Reflect and Improve

Meet regularly as a trio to reflect on your discovery process. If you already do Scrum retrospectives, it’s easy to add a couple of reflective questions to this meeting to also reflect on your discovery process.

I encourage my teams to ask, “What did we learn during this sprint that surprised us?” This could be anything from a feature release didn’t have the expected impact, we learned a new insight in a customer interview, or we ran into a feasibility hurdle that required us to redesign a solution. Make a list.

Then, for each item on the list, ask, “How could we have learned that sooner?” The answers to these questions will help you improve your discovery process. If a release didn’t have the intended impact, was there a faulty assumption that you neglected to uncover? Did it not get prioritized as one of your “leap of faith” assumptions for testing? If you learned a new insight during a customer interview, was it because you misunderstood a customer need, or did you uncover a new part of the customer experience for the first time? If you ran into a feasibility hurdle, is it because the requirements were misunderstood (maybe you need to revisit your story maps)? Or perhaps feasibility assumptions are a bit of a blind spot for your team.

As you conduct this retrospective, be nice to yourselves. Remember, no matter how good you get at discovery, you’ll still run into surprises. Surprises help us improve. Take the time to learn from them.