Is your team dreading retrospectives, or skipping them altogether? Mike Cohn joins Brian Milner to unpack what’s really going wrong (and how to fix it) so retros don’t just take up time… they actually make your team better.

Overview

In this candid conversation, Brian Milner welcomes back Mountain Goat Software co-founder Mike Cohn to talk about one of the most misunderstood parts of Scrum: the sprint retrospective.

Too many teams treat retros as boring, repetitive, or even pointless—and end up skipping them entirely. But retros are where the magic of continuous improvement actually happens… when they’re done right. Brian and Mike dig into the common reasons teams dread retros, how to spot the signs a retro isn’t working, and the practical ways to bring them back to life.

They also share their own lessons learned (including how Mike once argued retros shouldn’t be part of Scrum!) and walk through the real reason retros matter: giving teams space to inspect, adapt, and improve together.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Mike Cohn

Your Fast Tract to a Fresher Retrospective Webinar

#141: Cooking Up a Killer Retrospective with Brian Milner

Overcoming Four Common Problems with Retrospectives by Mike Cohn

Retrospectives Broken? Fix Them for Good by Mike Cohn

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Mike Cohn, CEO of Mountain Goat Software, is a passionate advocate for agile methodologies. Co-founder of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, he thrives on helping companies succeed with Agile and witnessing its transformative impact on individuals' careers. Mike resides in Northern Idaho with his family, two Havanese dogs, and an impressive hot sauce collection.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00 )

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here with you always, Brian Milner. But before we dive in today, I wanted to let you know that we're gonna have a free webinar that I'm gonna be running here for you. It's gonna be on September 24th at 9 a.m. Pacific. So do your adjustments wherever you are. It's called Your Fast Track to a Fresher Retrospective. It's just gonna be a little short 20 to 25 minute presentation. And then there's gonna be some open question and answer that we're gonna have after that. it's perfect if your team's retros are feeling a little stale, or if you're looking for practical ways to shake things up. We're gonna put a link to it our show notes, but wanted to make sure right up top that you guys knew about that. It's completely free, September 24th, 9 a.m. Pacific. We're gonna have that webinar on retrospectives. And joining me here today, also is the one and only Mike Cohn. Welcome in, Mike.

Mike (00:55 )

Hey, Brian's good to be back.

Brian Milner (00:57 )

Glad you're here. We wanted to have a conversation because I think we can probably all agree that not all retrospectives, we might even say are worth having. When you look back on them and you look back on the content of it, maybe we'd say it wasn't worth having. If your team isn't getting value from the meeting and skipping it might feel rational. But skipping the point of retrospective, continuous improvement, isn't something high performing teams really can afford. It's a main part of what we do. So we're going to talk a little bit more. We're going explore that about why some teams end up dropping retros. Because I hear that all the time. People ask that in classes. Is it OK to? Should we? Should we do it less often? So we're going to talk about why some teams might drop retros. What that really says about the team health itself. and how you can bring retros back in a way that reconnects to their purpose so that it's not just a ritual. And with that then, I'm going to pull Mike back in. So again, Mike, thanks for being here. I really appreciate you giving us your time for the episode today.

Mike (02:05 )

Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm glad to be here. Before you jump in, I do want to point out that we've been on for about 15 minutes before we got ready to record. Just kind of haven't talked to each other for a bit. And I just want to point out for everybody listening that Brian did a mini retro on his podcast before we got started, talked about how we can change some editing on that, maybe get episodes out more quickly and also to get them out in video. So I guess I'm saying that to. make us commit to the video part of it, but to also point out that Brian did a retro on his podcast, right before we got started. So Brian is walking the walk.

Brian Milner (02:40 )

Yeah, mean, it's always good to inspect and adapt, right? I mean, if you don't do that, then you're not questioning why things are happening the way they are and things get stale and eventually fall off. So yeah, I'm a big proponent in that, stopping down to inspect and adapt for sure.

Mike (02:56 )

Brian, one of the things that does come up with retros is teams feel like skipping them when they're not getting anything out of it. Do you think it's okay to skip a retrospective?

Brian Milner (03:08 )

Well, I'm probably not going to shock anyone here in my answer, but I'm not going to be someone who would support that. I'm not a proponent of that. I think that's a mistake. I try to be very careful about saying, hey, this is always this way. I do think that that's the Agile Manifesto talks about periodically, routinely. kind of having this kind of inspecting and adapting moments where we retrospect on how things went. And Scrum has this meeting built into it to happen every single sprint. The thing that kind of jumps out at me when I first thought about this is we kind of take this attitude sometimes that, this thing isn't working great. And so maybe we should skip it. Or least that's, I guess, the mentality behind skipping the retrospective.

Mike (03:55 )

When you say skip it, I think about the guy skipping leg day, right?

Brian Milner (03:59 )

Right, right. Well, that's exactly where I was going to go. It's like, where else in life do we say, that's not working, so I just won't do it. You know, like, I'm having a hard time getting my passport renewed, so I guess I just won't get my passport. You know, like we don't do that with other things. There are things that are hard. There are things that take more effort. And it doesn't mean that if it's harder or it's not working right now that we just don't do it. We got to figure out why and... you know, fix it and, you know, get better at it.

Mike (04:27 )

Yeah, there's a I'm a big fan of the Lego Batman movie. And in there, there's a song where this says Batman never skips leg day. Right. And, you know, skip something if it's truly useless, but don't skip something because it's hard. Right. I would agree that. Brian, I'm curious what you think about this situation. What suppose you have a team doing one week, one week sprints and one week is.

Brian Milner (04:31 )

Ha ha. Right.

Mike (04:51 )

Awesome. It's the right length for the team. It's a right length for the business. Everybody agrees. It rocks. One week sprints rock. But the team hates retrospectives. Like literally, they'd rather go to the dentist and have a root canal instead of having a retro. And at some point, somebody on the team goes, huh, if we switched to four week sprints, we wouldn't have to do these darn retros as often. That's a tough one. What do you think about that?

Brian Milner (05:18 )

Well, there's some truth in that. You know, they're not wrong, as they say. You know, if you do longer sprints, then you have meetings less often and included in that is a retrospective. So yeah, that's not wrong. You would do it less often. But on the other hand, your retro is gonna be a lot longer. If you're retrospecting over the past month versus over the past week,

Mike (05:28 )

Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (05:42 )

A weekly retrospective is going to be very short. A monthly retrospective is going to be very long and no one likes longer meetings. So that's the trade-off is, yeah, we can do it less often, but do you really want to h