Team Retro prep

Overview

Retrospectives are only as good as your team’s memory of what actually happened, and memory is unreliable. This preset gives you data-backed prep so your retros focus on real patterns instead of recency bias.

What this is for

This preset solves the retrospective preparation problem. You’re supposed to reflect on the past month, but without looking back at every single update, you’re just discussing whatever people remember from last week. Important issues that happened three weeks ago get forgotten, and you end up having the same surface-level conversations every time.

The Team retro prep preset does the analysis work for you. Every month, it reviews all your team’s goals, summarizes progress in 5 major themes, and identifies the top trends in blockers and challenges. You walk into your retro with concrete data about what actually happened, so you can have substantive discussions about what to change instead of just airing grievances.

Who should use this

Scrum masters and agile coaches facilitating monthly or quarterly retrospectives who want data to back up the conversation. You’ll have specific examples of themes and blockers instead of relying on whatever people remember.

Team leads who want to make retros more actionable by focusing on patterns instead of one-off incidents. You’ll see which problems keep coming up so you can actually fix them.

Engineering managers running retros across multiple teams who need to compare what’s working and what’s not. You’ll spot organizational issues that show up in multiple teams’ blocker trends.

The prompt

List all the goals that the [ team name ] team is working on. Summarize the team's progress for the last 30 days in 5 themes, with a single paragraph summary for each. Summarize the top 5 trends in blockers and reported challenges.

How to use

Click here to create a new Echo using this preset. You'll be able to customize the prompt and schedule before it starts generating answers.