In Agile, a retrospective is a regular meeting held at the end of a time-boxed development cycle (typically biweekly or monthly). During these meetings the team reflects collaboratively to identify opportunities for improvement that can be actioned during the next development cycle.

Various teams make great use of these meetings by providing a safe space to share challenges, and observations openly. The focus is on learning and continuous improvement, with the team being able to identify and agree on actionable improvements. These are then carried forward into future development cycles, helping teams to iteratively refine their ways of working.

Unfortunately, some teams treat retrospectives with deep suspicion and an unshakeable belief that they are a terrible use of time. Curiously, these are usually the teams who would benefit from them most. More common still are teams that struggle to get the most out of retrospectives. There is, of course, a lot that can be said about helping teams make retrospectives work better. Each team is different, requiring tailored measures to address unique challenges. However, there are a plethora of eminently fixable problems:

• Invite those directly involved in the development cycle being discussed. If there is not enough time for everyone to contribute you have invited too many people!

• Foster a safe and inclusive environment that invites everyone to contribute.

• Different formats can be experimented with to keep things fresh. I give examples of these in my blog post on Agile-powered Empowerment.

• An empowered facilitator can be appointed to ensure the meeting stays on topic and within the allotted time.

• Focus on identifying actionable improvements, each with designated owners to be followed up with regularly until completed.

Traditionally, retrospectives function akin to a regular team self-audit, during which personal development feedback is often generated. We can more purposefully leverage retrospectives as sources of valuable feedback, to further ensure personal development is prioritised alongside productivity. Meaningful insights can be surfaced with one slight adjustment, by just adding a question as a prompt for the team. The best questions are ones thoughtfully designed with careful consideration paid to both the team, and the insights you are seeking to be volunteered. Here are a few examples:

• What strengths did you see in others?

• What support did you receive?

• What skills did you learn/develop?

• If this Sprint were a CV bullet, what would it say?

Prompting feedback in retrospectives is a small, almost trivial change that unlocks a disproportionately large benefit. It invites teams to shift improvement from being purely focused on process and consider a more human centred approach. It empowers teams to explore new dimensions of continuous improvement by reflecting on their own growth, and better aligning personal development with team success and organisational goals.

Reflecting on experiences while they are still fresh is invaluable, particularly in fast-moving technical or product-driven environments. The closer feedback is to the work, the clearer, more specific, and more useful it becomes. Our peers who witness the everyday moments are uniquely placed to give us insight into how our skills, behaviours, and contributions are perceived in real time. When these observations are shared in a group, something subtle but powerful occurs: a common understanding emerges, and improvement becomes a collective rather than an individual effort.

By shifting growth into the rhythm of weeks instead of months, improvement becomes incremental and habitual, not a yearly reckoning that comes too late to change anything and leaves people feeling judged rather than empowered. It rescues personal development from the bureaucratic oubliette of the annual performance review: an event so distant from the work itself that it often resembles archaeology.

Capturing the feedback is just as vital as generating it. Written down in the moment by individuals, or gathered by a facilitator and passed to the relevant parties, it becomes a faithful record of contributions and achievements rather than a reconstruction. It avoids useful insight from evaporating in the long gaps between performance review meetings, and spares individuals the stress of having to recall distant memories of their contributions and impact retroactively, often under tight deadlines of performance reviews.

It is worth being clear about what this is NOT. Retrospectives should not be hijacked into being HR confessionals, forensic performance autopsies, nor covert negotiations about pay or promotion. Feedback in retrospectives should be a gentle voluntary nudge. The effective sweet spot is brevity and simplicity: quick recognition, delivered constructively.

Importantly, feedback in retrospectives helps individuals better align their personal development with the needs of the team and organisation. Group discussions encourage reality to assert itself very quickly. Growth becomes more practical and relevant to the team’s ability to deliver better outcomes, rather than just looking impressive on disparate abstract development plans.

Over time, teams that consistently prompt more frequent feedback build stronger feedback cultures. The result isn’t a perfect team or a flawless process, but something far more valuable: steady improvement driven by clear information, fewer illusions, and a shared understanding that removes the guesswork from growth.

Conclusion

By recognising and enhancing retrospectives value to generate feedback we can better foster learning and growth, both for individuals and the team. It reinforces the idea that people are central to delivery and that their growth is inseparable from team success, better aligning personal development with team outcomes and reinforcing the principle that improvement applies as much to people as it does to processes.