The Superhero Sprint Retrospective Activities

Team building doesn't have to be a stressful activity, and so these Super fun retrospective activities are extremely fun, especially for geeks who just love Superheroes and Superpowers :) .

Both of the sprint retrospective activities below grant fun ways to gain insight into the values that your team excel in and learn where they may be lacking. While these retrospective formats do have similarities to a SWOT, they go beyond, are a good direction to get your team collaborating, and add a much needed geeky spice into retrospective meetings.  In addition, they could work as a fun activity separate or together to get your team engaging as much (or as little) as needed.

The Superhero Retrospective Activity

How does the Superhero retro work?

Step 1: Know Your Strengths!

Ask the teams to create a superhero that has all of their strengths which must include all of their collective skills. For example, if the team is Accounting, they can include "excels at profit management". The idea here is for your team to figure out what aspects they are the strongest in. By making the strengths a collective, it allows the teams to work together.

Step 2: Face Your Weakness

Now, this next step calls for some honesty. They must put in the superhero's weaknesses. This may include things such as "lack of equipment" or "delays". It may be a bit awkward, but being honest about where your teams need some help is crucial to making our hero effective.

Step 3: Create Your Villain

A hero must always have a villain. The villain in this case doesn't have to be a person. It needs to be a conflict that the team collectively agrees hampers their effectiveness. It can be mismanagement, dated policies, or even old technology. This exercise will give the team some much-needed perspective on what to work against.

Step 4: With All Our Powers Combined

Now, have your team create a sidekick and gadgets! These are the things that give your team the ability to patch up their weaknesses and defeat them. Sidekicks can be ideas for new team members with the strengths they need while gadgets can be new technologies that help them in their goals!

The Superhero retrospective is a cool idea for dev team members, especially geeky ones, to get involved, have fun, and find areas they are strong in, others they are weak in, and what they need to overcome together. 

‍When should the Superhero be used?

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Well, the Superhero retro activity is aimed to add a lot of fun into the meeting, making it a fun retrospective, get people excited about participating, and for the geeks within your team a cool outlet to bring another world into the dev environment. Even those who aren't major geeks would enjoy painting the superhero and villain within the sprint and try to make the world a safer place :) 

The Superpower Retrospective Activity

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‍How does the Superpower retro work?

The superpower sprint retrospective is a great exercise to get team members to understand their individual strengths and celebrate them.
For this retro activity, the facilitator asks each member to create their own super-emblem. Then, each person writes down everyone’s individual superpower on a sticky note and sticks it to the corresponding person’s super-emblem. Then, each member can see a visual representation of his or her strengths, aka Superpowers, and understand how much they matter in the team.

When should the Superpower be used?

The Superpower retro activity is useful when certain team members do not feel like they are an asset to the team or feel like they are not good enough. Additionally, this activity is great for boosting the members’ confidence and getting them to trust one another. There is this great bond that instantly happens when someone compliments you on a strength you have. This also allows team members to feel like others acknowledge what they are good at and celebrate it.