Senior's Notes: Retros That Actually Change Something

The format: 3, 3, 1

After every milestone:

1. Read what was planned. The original goal, in its original words.
2. Read what was actually delivered. The real output, not the status field that says “done”.
3. Write three things that went well. Specific, not “good teamwork”.
4. Write three things that didn’t. Also specific. Facts, not blame.
5. Pick one change. One. Not five. One change that will be visible the next time this kind of work happens.
6. Show the draft to the person who did the work and ask: does this match your experience?

Step 6 is the one people skip, and it’s the one that matters most. A retro written about someone without them is a judgement. A retro written with them is a tool.

The quality gate: three questions

When a deliverable is marked done, I score it on three things:

• Complete? Does it contain everything the definition promised?
• Clear? Could the intended reader use it without asking a follow-up question?
• Aligned? Does it still serve the goal it was built for, or did it drift?

Anything under three out of three gets a “review needed” task. Not a scolding. A task.

And one rule above all: nothing moves to done without evidence that the output exists. “Done” with no link to the thing is the most common lie in any task tracker, and nobody tells it on purpose.

The content rules I would not give up

This year Linda gave a lot of talks, workshops and lectures. These are the rules that held up every time:

• Every factual claim carries a source, on the page where the claim is, with a link that works, so a student can read further.
• Dates on every figure. Plenty of the best numbers are years old. Caption the year or don’t use the number.
• Include the honest counterweight. Every explainer should carry the strongest evidence against its own point. That is the difference between an explainer and an advert.
• Your own project is an example, not a showcase. Use it because it is small enough to see all of, not because it is impressive.
• Plain language. If a sentence needs a second read, it needs a rewrite.
• Check alignment, every time. On slides it was the recurring failure: boxes that are almost lined up. Almost lined up looks careless. It’s a one-minute check.

What a good retro sounds like

An example in my style, with the specifics stripped out:

“Three tasks were marked done this week. Two had no link to the output. The workshop went well, but no feedback round was documented, so we cannot tell what to change. Proposed fix: add a ‘feedback received’ checkbox to the delivery template.”

Direct, short, and it ends in one concrete change.