retrospective format Archives - Page 2 of 75 - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Joshua McDonald: Scrum Master Success Means People Feel Heard, Respected, And Safe To Speak Up

“I hope you can feel heard and respected at the end of the day.” – Joshua McDonald

Joshua defines Scrum Master success through the team’s comfort with self-organization, respectful pushback, and asking for help when they do not know what they do not know. For him, a successful team is not drama-free because nothing hard happens.

It is low-drama because people can raise problems without fear, communicate openly, and keep moving forward even on bumpy roads. Joshua keeps himself honest by reviewing retrospective notes, one-on-one notes, and the commitments he made to follow up. He keeps a running to-do list from Slack messages, meetings, and team conversations so feedback does not disappear after someone shares it.

Periodically, he brings past retrospectives back to the team and asks what they accomplished, what changed, and whether anything fell through. That ledger matters because Scrum Masters work through people. If people feel heard and respected, they are more likely to keep working with you, regardless of your title.

Self-reflection Question: What system do you use to make sure team feedback turns into visible follow-up?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Personalized AI-Themed Retrospectives

Joshua’s favorite retrospective format is never using the same format twice. He noticed teams getting bored and agitated when the same sailboat or standard board appeared every sprint. His answer was to personalize retrospectives around team members’ interests: a BMW theme for a developer who liked cars, a beach theme after someone’s vacation, or a TV-show theme tied to a person’s hobby.

He uses tools like Mural, Zoom whiteboards, Microsoft Teams, and AI-generated visual themes to make each retro feel like it was designed for someone in the team. The point is not decoration. The point is listening. When people recognize their interests in the retro, they feel seen as people before they reflect on the work.

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About Joshua McDonald

Joshua is endlessly curious about better ways of working. He helps teams grow by blending experimentation, creativity, and AI with practical coaching. When a meeting feels routine, he’s already testing a new approach to make it more valuable. Energetic and inventive, he turns everyday collaboration into opportunities for team growth.

You can link with Joshua McDonald on LinkedIn.

Wasim Osman: The Scrum Master as a Router, Redefining Success Through Efficient Communication

“A big part of the Scrum Master role is to work as a router—handling a lot of conversations with a lot of different devices, even though the internet is coming in through one cable.” – Wasim Osman

For Wasim, success as a Scrum Master looks like a router in a house: many conversations, many stakeholders, all flowing through one point that has to prioritize, schedule, and stay on time. If the router slows down, everything downstream stalls—and the Scrum Master becomes the blocker.

Early in his career he was overwhelmed juggling three or four engineering teams, so he built himself a personal Kanban board and ran his own quick standup every morning and again at the end of the day, just to see what moved, what stalled, and why. Getting organized with himself is when the work started to feel satisfying, because he stopped being the bottleneck. But he’s honest about the hardest part: people rarely tell you to your face when you’re slowing them down.

The feedback is already there—you’re just not hearing it. So you have to ask for it, react well when you get it (or people stop offering), and sometimes name the awkward truth first: “Our meetings used to be better—what happened?” That opening gives everyone permission to be honest.

Self-reflection Question: If you’re the “router” for your teams, where are you quietly becoming the bottleneck—and who would tell you if you were?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: What Went Well / What Went Wrong / Outliers + Open Discussion

Wasim’s go-to retrospective is deliberately bare-bones: what went well, what went wrong, and—the part that makes it his own—what were the outliers, followed by open discussion.

He added the “outliers” question years ago after noticing that team members kept raising points that weren’t clearly good or bad, but were still significant enough to discuss. Outliers give people “a bucket for sharing information that has no polarity”—an early signal about the future, a quiet concern, something that doesn’t fit the other two columns but matters.

He sometimes pairs it with lightweight metrics: sprint completion rate, or tickets that sat too long in review or QA, surfacing patterns the team wouldn’t otherwise notice.

Self-reflection Question: What “outlier” signal has your team been sitting on—neither a win nor a problem yet—that deserves an open conversation before it becomes one?

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About Wasim Osman

Wasim Osman is a seasoned Agile Coach and a Product Owner at Orkestra SCS. He launched his agile career at a Silicon Valley startup based in New York, then spent years coaching teams across Canada, helping organizations transform how they deliver value. Wasim brings a rare blend of agile discipline and product thinking. He’s passionate about building technology that drives real business impact.

You can link with Wasim Osman on LinkedIn.

Havva Sevay: Success Is Feedback, Not Metrics—And the Power of Standing in Someone Else’s Shoes

“My success is not metrics or numbers—that was my controller past. I measure myself through feedback, and through team satisfaction.” – Havva Sevay

As a former project controller, Havva could have defined success in numbers. Instead, she measures it through feedback and team satisfaction. As long as people keep talking to her—telling her how she can be a better Scrum Master—she considers that success, and she treats even hard feedback as learning. But the most striking part of her definition is the discipline of standing in someone else’s shoes.

When a developer suggested she’d give better advice if she understood programming, she took the Scrum Developer training—the hardest training she’s ever done—just to feel the team’s daily reality. Vasco connects it to coaching a team that builds tools for other teams: the role isn’t to produce the system, it’s to make the other teams’ lives easier.

Havva’s takeaway for every Scrum Master: put your shoes in a different position. Understanding the work from the other person’s perspective is what drives team success.

Self-reflection Question: How do you measure your own success as a Scrum Master—and when did you last experience your team’s work from their perspective?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Mario Kart (Gamified) Retrospective

Havva’s favorite retrospective format is gamification—she believes in the magic of playing, because it lets everyone relax, open up, and step out of the daily stress. Her go-to is a Mario Kart–inspired retrospective. Team members choose their character (Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser), then map the sprint onto the game: the star and speed mushroom for successes and who helped them, the bad mushroom for impediments, another icon for the solution. They praise each other by handing out stars, and close with a “Mario checklist” of action points for next time.

Havva also adapts to the team—asking their favorite Nintendo game, board game, or even pen-and-paper RPGs like The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge). The point: make the retrospective something people genuinely enjoy, and the honest reflection follows.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Havva Sevay

Havva is a people-focused organizational development expert with a Master’s in Business Administration and certification as a Scrum Master. She empowers teams and leaders through agile methodologies, modern leadership, and a strong feedback culture, fostering psychological safety and collaboration. Passionate about HR initiatives, Havva shapes people strategies, enhances employee experience, and drives inclusive, high-performing workplaces built on trust and engagement.

You can link with Havva Sevay on LinkedIn.

Danil Chernyshev: Success Is Synergy—When the Team and the Product Both Win

“Success is when team members say thank you, and praise others for delivering a successful product.” – Danil Chernyshev

For Danil, success as a Scrum Master is never one thing—it’s a combination. It’s the moment team members thank each other and credit the whole group for a product that actually landed with customers.

As he reminds us, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and developers are all there for the same reason: to deliver a product and solve real problems for the end user. A healthy team that has fun together but ships nothing has only spent time and money. A team that delivers but burns everyone out, until no one wants to see each other again, isn’t a success either.

Real success is the synergy of both: a productive team, happy customers and stakeholders, and people who still have the energy to keep going. Danil also turns the lens inward—success means understanding where you are in your own journey.

And it grows from action: when teams get stuck overthinking, he guides them back to what’s inside their control, helps them find the smallest valuable step, and gets them experimenting. Start where you are, do what you can, then learn from it.

Self-reflection Question: Are you optimizing for a happy team, a delivered product, or the synergy of both—and how would you know the difference?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Lean Coffee (paired with 1-2-4-All and 5 Whys)

Danil doesn’t lock himself into a single retrospective format—he chooses based on the sprint, guided by “common sense in Scrum.” His default is to keep a running list of topics gathered throughout the sprint, then open the retrospective with a Lean Coffee session to democratically decide what to discuss.

From there, a light topic gets a quick Lean Coffee conversation, while a deeper one moves into 1-2-4-All from Liberating Structures or a 5 Whys. The non-negotiable for Danil: every retrospective must end with actionable action items. A retro that produces only conversation and no change, he says, was a waste of time—maybe fun, but still a missed opportunity to reflect, learn, and adapt.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Danil Chernyshev

Danil is a results-driven Scrum Master and Delivery Manager passionate about optimizing SDLC processes and unlocking development teams’ potential. With a keen interest in AI, he empowers organizations to innovate and excel, bridging agile practices with cutting-edge technology for impactful results.

You can link with Danil Chernyshev on LinkedIn.

Alf Dobbert-Baums: Success Is When the Team Gets Closer to the User

“Getting closer to the user — it’s always very good to get the feedback from the user.” – Alf Dobbert-Baums

For Alf, success as a Scrum Master is measurable in proximity: how close did you get the team to the actual user? He tells a small story that makes the point bigger than it sounds. In a sprint review, a user mentioned an annoying detail — clicking an item in a long list opened a popup, and when you closed the popup, the focus jumped back to the top of the list. Four hours later, the team had fixed it. A small JavaScript change saved a whole customer-center team from scrolling back to find their place dozens of times a day.

The shift Alf coaches is treating the review as a working meeting, not a demo. Users don’t clap and leave — they discover. They surface the thing the PO doesn’t see, because the PO has perspective and the user has the actual workflow (often with three other apps open at the same time). Alf credits a usability test he once ran for opening his eyes: “Why are you clicking there? Nope, she wouldn’t click on there.” When the developer sees a real person use the software, the product changes. The guessing stops.

In this segment, we refer to Shift: From Product to People by Michael Dougherty and Pete Oliver-Kruger and their Usability Theater technique — getting users to use the product while the team watches, the way you’d watch a play.

Self-reflection Question: When did your team last watch a real user use the product — and if it’s been a while, what’s stopping you from inviting one to your next review?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Classic Four — Prime Directive + Good / Learned / Change / Puzzles

Alf’s favorite retro is one of the very first. Open with the Prime Directive, then walk the team through four questions: what was good, what did we learn, what should we change, and what still puzzles us. Alf likes it because it celebrates successes, shares knowledge, and — through the “puzzles” question — gives space for the unresolved things people carry in their heads. But he wants to stress one thing most teams skip: revisit the agreed improvements in the next retro. Did you do them? Are they still relevant? Did the world change? Even improvements that didn’t work give you information — about who to involve next time, what was missing, what was too much. Without revisiting, every retro starts from scratch.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Alf Dobbert-Baums

Alf lives in Berlin. He studied Theater/Religion at the Freie University Berlin. He is a Systemic Organizational Consultant, a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. He has also been a freelancer for Usability and Requirements Engineering for car manufacturers. At “Verti” he led the agile transformation.

You can link with Alf Dobbert-Baums on LinkedIn.