Continuous learning and improvement is an integral part of agile journey for any team. Having retrospective sessions after every sprint or release is a very good way to focus team's attention on identifying

What went well?

What can be improved?

What did we learn?

What are the challenges?

Even though it's a very powerful way for a team to identify areas of improvement, it can quickly become a mundane and pointless exercise if it is not focused towards a goal.

End goal can be anything depending on current and future state of the team. But it is important to track that goal using appropriate metrics.

In this talk I am going to share my experience of working with an agile team that was struggling to maintain a sustainable pace.

Team used to do monthly retrospective meetings to identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement, but that used to quickly turn into a blame game.

How introducing a simple metric of tracking cycle time changed the game for this team and helped drive other improvements like building awareness of sustainable flow, reduce wait time in the flow and improve backlog grooming process.

I'll also demonstrate use of GROW coaching model for team retrospective and how it helped in identifying problems within the team.