The Thermometer Retro

Ben Madley, 31 Aug 2019

The Thermometer Retro asks your team to decide what is going well and what isn’t going well and then focus on improving what isn’t going well.

When to use it: It’s great for teams that want to solve everything (even things that aren’t a problem), teams that have retros but struggle to find action points or something doesn’t feel right but you can’t tell what.

When not to use it: If negativity, team morale or team relationships is an issue, this probably isn’t the retro for you.

There’s a temptation to view this retro as a health check, but it’s more important to focus on finding opportunities for improvement.

How It Works

Like many retros you are going to need post-it notes.

  1. Find a visible part of the room — a door works well — and stick hot to the top and cold to the bottom to make your thermometer.
  2. Take turns suggesting areas to rate and deciding how happy you are with them as a team and put them on your thermometer.
  3. When you’ve run out of areas to discuss or you’ve reached the last 10 minutes or so of the retro, decide on the 1-3 most important areas to improve.
  4. For each area you pick, pick an action point to improve it.
Our first run.

Our first run.

Try to avoid getting individual votes and taking the average. Encourage the team to come up with a consensus without letting the discussion go longer than a couple of minutes. When you really can’t find a consensus, take an average rounding down or the lowest number (and consider the reasons why your team have such different views).

As I mentioned above, the aim of this exercise is to find the most important areas to improve and focus on improving them. It is quite a negative technique, focusing on what isn’t going well. You may want to mix this up with retros that have more positive focus, or consider the things that are going well and decide how to do more of them.

Possible Areas

The areas to discuss can be pretty much anything. Here are some topics that work for our team.