# Hybrid Retrospectives (Async+Sync)
date: Feb 19, 2024

We experimented with hybrid retrospectives recently - part asynchronous, part synchronous.

We decided on this approach for the reasons below:
1. Our engineering team is split across 5 time-zones (so we have few overlapping hours)
2. There is a bias towards having long meetings (because of the high coordination costs)
3. Our team members don't all work 5-day schedules (so we have 3 days when everyone is at work.

Although the team was willing to give retrospectives a try, they were hesitant because they don't inherantly see value in this ceremony. Additionally, being a remote first company, synchornous meetings (especially with the whole team) are discouraged.

## Why care about retrospectives?

From my perspective, a retrospective is the primary tool for any team to incorporate continuous improvement into their processes. For this reason, I felt strongly about ensure that the team was having regular retrospectives at the team level.

While event-specific post-mortems (e.g. end of project, end of initiatives, etc.) are useful for improving the delivery processes for those events. Team retrospectives serve the additional benefit of catching and addressing challenges pertaining to a team's culture as well as all its processes (e.g. delivery, customer research, design, support triaging, etc.).

## “Start where they are at”

However, I needed to find a way to create team ownership. I needed this to become a team norm and _Not a Delivery Manager (DM) process -- aka we are only doing it because our DM told us to do it_.

To do this, I remembered the coaching aphorism: **“start where they are at”**.

This seemingly trivial statement allowed me to shift how I was approaching *re-introducing* retrospectives to the team. Specifically, to get buy-in, I needed to understand their challenges with sync meetings.

### Solution path

I had discussions with the team and specific team members, gaining deeper insights from their perspectives.

| Prompt | Team's Perspective | Action |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| How do you deal with sync meeting| 5 time-zones, not everyone will be engaged; avoid the team; limit the time duration if it must happen| Created a 30 min sync meeting|
| What would work best for them/you? | async; assync access to share feedback before the meeting; mechanism to give feedback async; clear agenda and expected outcomes | Created a shareable board that allows the team to async prepopulate; started with a simple retro format; explained the purpose of the retro in an Github issue that was also linked in email |
| What make you uncomfortable? | This was tried before with limited suscess; not everyone will participate | Reiterate the importance of starting (then iterating); Positioned this as a "Safe to try; Safe to fail" activity to improve their team processes; Had 1-on-1 meetings with key team stakeholders and influencers|
|_Assessed the gaps in their knowledge?_ | Unsure of what would change; Unsure of who owns the retrospective process | Created micor-learning content (~3 mins, presentation + video) to explain what are retrospectives |

## Results?

From the feedback that I received, the hybrid approach was well-received by the team (i.e. using a shareable collaborative board to surface topics before the retrospective, coupled with a synchrounous 30-minute meeting to identify actions).

Areas where I could have improved the approach include:
* Start the discussion with the team much earlier in their iteration.
* Use a more streamlined approach to "test the room's temperature". I asked people to give a one sentence comment on how they were feeling. Unfortunately, some people chatted for much longer than I expected.
* Provide learning content much sooner into the process. Although I eventually created micro-learning content, this could have been done at least a week sooner. This would have given the team adequte time to ask clarifying questions about retrospectives.