Facebook Reactions Retrospective

Use

A simple and refreshing variation of the very popular "Glad", "Sad", "Mad" retrospective.

Length of time

60 - 120 minutes

Short Description

A variation of the "Glad", "Sad", "Mad" retrospective inspired by the reactions feature used on Facebook. Instead of the original three "Glad", "Sad", "Mad" columns the team can use the following six: "Liked", "Loved", "Made me laugh", "Surprised me", "Made me sad", "Made me angry".

Materials

• Sticky notes
• Pens
• Whiteboard (optional)

Process

• The facilitator sets up six columns on a whiteboard or directly on the wall using "header" sticky notes. Distributed teams can use one of the many online tools e.g. https://funretro.github.io
  • Liked
  • Loved
  • Made me laugh
  • Surprised me
  • Made me sad
  • Made me angry

• Everyone individually writes down observations regarding the previous sprint/release/project. Each observation should be written on a separate card and fit into one of the six columns. This part can be time-boxed not to get overwhelmed with too many observations.

• After everyone is done or the time-box is over the team can group similar observations and use a voting/prioritizing technique if there are too many sticky notes to comprehend.

• The last step is discussion and action items generation. If the team used voting/prioritization use that order. If not, start with the column the team is most passionate about and continue column by column.

Source

Author: Piotr Wegert

Side note: I spent some time looking for similar exercises and found the following one by Jasper Verdooren, written in 2012 (at that time there was only the "Like" button, reactions were introduced in 2016). Be sure to check it out as well.