Welcome!
Hi there! Do you conduct retrospectives on your sprints or projects? Are you tired of the same old round-robin meeting to cover lessons learned? Try hosting your next retro in Lucidspark! Add your ideas through sticky notes, react to your teammates’ comments, and prioritize your action items with a Visual Activity. If you’re just getting started with the Lucid Suite, retrospectives are my number one recommendation for you to get quick value. Here’s how to get started. 
Overview
Conducting a retro is easy. You just need to do these five things:
- Add a template from our templates library
- Use sticky notes to add your ideas
- Emoji react to ideas from your team
- Present your ideas
- Prioritize action items using a Visual Activity
Let’s get into it!
Framework
1. Add a template from our templates library
You’ll find that we have many of the industry standard retrospective activities that you’re used to. For your first retro, I would recommend the Quick Retrospective template. It’s simple and effective - it’s also the one we use for our meetings here at Lucid!
2. Use sticky notes to add your ideas
This will be the biggest change from your standard, round-robin meetings. Everyone should use a sticky note to add their reflections. We recommend using the timer feature, and starting off with about seven minutes. During this time, your team will be adding sticky notes onto your template, but no one will be talking quite yet.
3. Emoji react to ideas from your team
Select a sticky note, and emoji react to that idea using the context toolbar. We recommended a lot of emoji reactions on your retros! It makes your meeting more fun and also helps to analyze sentiment and gut reactions on ways to improve.
4. Present your ideas
After your timer is done, and everyone has added their ideas, now it’s time to discuss! Since we can all see our stickies or use a screen reader to understand what everyone has written, there’s no need to read through every single note. What you want to focus on, instead, are any trends that you can identify between your stickies and the your team’s stickies, as well as any additional context that notes can’t provide. One-by-one, each person will present their lessons learned. This step usually takes our team between 15 - 25 minutes.
Pro tip: Embed any necessary files or media that help illustrate your points.
5. Prioritize action items using a Visual Activity
Visual Activities are like positional voting games. They are an excellent tool to keep your meeting interactive and generate action-based insights using your sticky notes. Create a Visual Activity using the toolbar on the left of your screen. Once everyone has submitted their votes, be sure to use the “View Results” option and ask lots of questions to reach consensus!
Pro tip: I personally recommend using the Impact and Effort Matrix Visual Activity!
Conclusion
That’s all there is to it! We typically complete this retro exercise in 45 minutes every other Friday. All of the information is saved to your Lucid documents for you to reference any time.
Pro tip: Save these documents to your group’s Lucid Team.
As you get more advanced, be sure to check out some of our other templates and integrations. Happy retro-ing!
