Entries by Alan Wright

How to run a retrospective

This post provides an introduction to team retrospectives and a guide on how to run them. Intro to retrospectives What is a retrospective? A regular meeting for the team to reflect on past performance and identify ways to improve. Why bother? Good teams continuously improve their product. Great teams also continuously improve how they work […]

How to run a premortem

Premortems help us identify and reduce risks before they happen. They are a great exercise to run before launching a product or feature. What is a premortem Product teams often use postmortems to understand what caused a problem and how to reduce the risk of it becoming a problem again. Premortems are the opposite. You […]

Writing good OKRs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal setting system that was popularised by Google.  To summarise, the objective defines what you want to achieve and the key result defines how you will measure progress towards achieving the objective.  In this blog post, I share my thoughts on how to write good OKRs.  I focus […]

Makers time and collaboration time: two metrics that help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity

Makers time and collaboration time are two metrics that I have started using to help teams to measure the amount of quality time they have available to do their best work, and to make improvements over time.  In this blog post I explain what they are and when/how to use them.

Better meetings for remote teams

“Too many meetings” is something I’ve said or heard over and over again in every organisation I’ve worked.  Since lockdown began, this problem seems to have gotten worse for two main reasons: There are more meetings: ‘Watercooler’ conversations and informal chats around the team space have been replaced with scheduled video meetings. Meetings are more […]

Running effective show & tells

Show & tell is a chance for teams to show their work to stakeholders and to get feedback. It’s a crucial form of governance for agile teams that keeps everyone up to date by allowing them to see the team’s progress first hand. Before you read this, you might want to check out my other […]