Post-Mortem Meetings

It takes a while for a team to get into their groove with goal setting and getting stuff done. It’s important to have some time to learn about what worked and what could be improved before you repeat your process on another quarterly sprint. Ideally, each sprint cycle should help you get more sophisticated in how you operate as a team.

It’s helpful to carve out an hour or so at the tail end of each quarter to reflect, share, and make commitments to change so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes all over again. In advance of a debrief - or post-mortem - meeting, it’s important to have your team do some pre-thinking and come ready to discuss. It’s also essential to practice your top-notch facilitation techniques so that everyone feels safe being vulnerable and honest so you can grow individually and as a team.

DEBRIEF QUESTIONS

Individual performance: These are questions for you to ask your team members to fill out about their own performance:

  • Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 for each of your goals

  • What were your successes this quarter?

  • What were some of your challenges?

  • What’s one way you could have helped someone else more effectively?

  • When could you have asked for help sooner?

  • What took the most time?

  • How could you have found ways to speed up?

  • Did you have the support you needed to be successful?

  • How might your manager or boss have helped you accelerate your progress?

  • How might you plan your day or week differently moving forward?

  • What, specifically, do you want to try differently this next quarter to improve your individual performance?

Team performance: These are questions for you to ask your team members to fill out about the team’s performance in advance of your post-mortem meeting:

  • Rate our team on a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best)? How well did we do in achieving our goals this quarter?

  • What were some of our successes this quarter?

  • What were some of our challenges?

  • Are we having the right meetings at the right cadence?

  • How could we improve our meetings?

  • How is our communication?

  • Do you feel that everyone is getting the information they need in a timely manner?

  • How are we doing on flagging mistakes in real time?

  • How effective were our goals? Should we consider writing them differently this quarter?

  • Did our goal-tracking system work? How might we improve it?

  • What, specifically, should we try to do differently this quarter?

  • How will we know if it’s working? How long do we want to try out this new strategy before checking in and seeing if it’s working?

  • How might we improve our goal-setting processes moving forward?

  • What, specifically, do you want to try differently this next quarter to improve our team’s performance?