Space Invaders Retro

Being a scrum master, my main job is to help my teams become more and more effective, and one way to do it is through scrum retrospectives.

I have to be creative all the time to get feedback that really matters and, with my teams, find the best way to improve our processes and tools.

Today I bring to you, “Space Invaders". It’s a simple and effective retro that will help teams to identify issues or dependencies that can be eliminated from our team.
It can be use as a retrospective or a futurespective.

I use Miro in all my Retros. Miro give’s me all the freedom that I need to be creative and is super easy to use!

Space Invaders Retro

Context:
Earth is being attacked by some aliens who want to destroy our best practices! Luckily, our planet has a force field surrounding it ready to protect us from this attacks.

Making an analogy, earth is who or what is helping our team, the rockets are all the issues that make your team slow down and the force field is the how we can protect/fix those issues.

Rules:
Using liberating structures “1, 2, 4, all":

1. Ask for all team to write on paper all issues, possible solutions and who or what can help fix them. 5/7 minutes.
2. Make groups of two team members and ask them to do the same exercise, but now with the notes from another team member. 7/9 minutes.
3. Same exercise as before but with a group of four but this time, each team will write the answers on post-its. 9/12 minutes.
4. Each team read’s its own post-its and explains each one of them.
5. Ask the team to vote on what issue they think is more important to fix next sprint, discuss and nominate who is responsible to implement or fix the chosen issue.

Template:

Thank you for reading!!