Sprint Review Is Group Therapy For Development Teams

We finished Sprint 13 at HubSpot last week. In some ways it was a rough sprint and as the Product Owner of the Red Sox team I had been feeling pretty stressed out about it. We hit one major bug that derailed us for a few days, and for some reason I couldn't identify we had a hard time hitting our stride after that.

I agree with Yoav's last post in that one of my favorite things about Scrum is the end of sprint review. Each team has the opportunity to sit together and talk about the good and bad things that happened during the sprint. During my first sprint review, as everyone was discussing their feelings, something that doesn't happen all that often in business, I realized that sprint review is a little bit like group therapy.

Each sprint review starts off a little awkward as someone has to start talking. When they do though, I find that everything they say resonates with me. As I headed into our team review this sprint, I wasn't sure why we hadn't been able to hit our stride, or why the major bug had derailed us. After talking about it with the team we had a couple of solid takeaways to help us prevent similar things from happening in the future.

Sprint Review gives us the opportunity to sit down regularly for the specific purpose of talking about how things went. As a result, things never seem to get too far out of control. Had we just kept plugging away with our work and not had our sprint review, I think it would be harder for us to work out the kinks. By talking it out, we were able to come up with solutions to help us get our stride back so we can head into Sprint 14 feeling great.

Reading what I have written, this seems so obvious, but I have never been a part of these kind of conversations outside of Scrum. I think this approach would work and be very beneficial for all types of team because it helps to identify kinks before they fester and become full blow wounds. 

 Have you ever tried regular group therapy with your team?