6 Awesome & Fun Visual Remote Retrospectives

Due to COVID-19, my Scrum Team suddenly had to switch to all remote, all the time. This is a bit challenging when it comes to making retrospectives fun. So, in this blog, I’m sharing 6 Awesome AND Fun Visual Remote Retrospective activities.

I used to think that in-person retros were the best way to conduct retros. However, like everyone else, I had to find ways to adapt and translate activities that would normally be done face-to-face to online.

When the change to online happened, I scrambled to find a virtual tool that would accommodate my creativity. I don’t like retrospectives to be boring; I’m known for always using a different format at the end of every Sprint. After a quick Google search, I quickly discovered Miro and it suited my needs. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not perfect, but it does what I need it to do.  

To adapt to the pandemic, I modified some of my favorite retros using Miro. Here are six that worked well:

The Sailboat

I simply dropped an image of the Sailboat (from Luis Conclave) into Miro, described the different elements of the picture, and set my team loose using virtual post-it notes. Each team member picked a color and put their name on a sticky. Then they put one idea using their color sticky and put it next to the related concept. It was easy and intuitive. After everyone provided their input, I looked for themes and grouped related stickies. This helped to focus the discussion on the items that had the most comments.

The Three Little Pigs

The classic tale of the Three Little Pigs, their story came to life online with a drawing of the straw, wood, and brick houses. No explanation is needed. This time the team discovered that there are emojis available to stick on the screen, so they used these to indicate their feelings about certain items on the virtual board.

The Weather

For this retro, I found photos on Pixabay of a blue sky, a lightly cloudy sky, a dark and cloudy sky, and a rainy night with lightning. Again, the concept is simple, but it mixes things up. I like that I can visually look back and see that our team’s morale was improved as the team grew together.

Seasons

This one is very similar to the weather retro, but instead, it uses the four seasons.

Trick or Treat

For Halloween, I toyed with doing the Zombie retro, but decided to keep it simple by using a simple format of “Trick” or “Treat”. Fortunately, there were a lot more treats than tricks.

Football

[American] Football season was just starting up again, so I thought it would be fun to use a sports analogy for our retro. Much to my surprise, the drawing of a field that I found was not actually a football field, apparently, it was a soccer field (known as football everywhere else in the world). Oops! Anyway, the concept was still easy for everyone to understand, and everyone got to laugh at me for being so silly.

I’m curious to know what other Scrum Masters have done to adapt their retrospectives to the “new normal”. If you have any concepts or ideas that worked well, please share! I’m always looking for new ideas to add to my ever-growing retrospective list.