Draw Our Sprint: A Creative Retrospective Template
Draw Our Sprint is a visually engaging retrospective technique that invites team members to illustrate their sprint experiences rather than just discussing them. This creative approach helps development teams uncover insights that might not emerge during traditional text-based retrospectives, making it particularly effective for remote teams looking to add variety to their agile ceremonies.
What Is Draw Our Sprint?
Draw Our Sprint is a retrospective format that leverages visual thinking to capture team members' sprint experiences. Instead of relying solely on verbal or text-based reflection, this template encourages participants to draw representations of their sprint journey. The approach taps into different cognitive processes, often revealing emotions, challenges, and successes that might otherwise remain unexpressed in conventional retrospective formats.
The template provides dedicated drawing spaces for each team member, allowing everyone to visually express their unique perspective on the completed sprint. This visual storytelling approach creates a more holistic view of the team's experience and can highlight patterns that text-based methods might miss.
Benefits & When to Use
This template is particularly valuable when:
- Your team seems stuck in retrospective routines and needs a fresh approach
- You want to uncover emotional aspects of team experiences that aren't easily articulated
- Team members have different communication preferences (visual vs. verbal)
- You need to break down communication barriers in newly formed or distributed teams
- The team has completed a complex or challenging sprint with many dimensions to process
Key benefits include:
- Engages different thinking modes, leading to new insights
- Creates a psychologically safer space for sharing feelings through metaphor and imagery
- Makes retrospectives more memorable and engaging
- Helps visual thinkers contribute more effectively
- Provides a welcome break from text-heavy agile ceremonies
How to Run a Draw Our Sprint Session
Total time: 30-45 minutes
Set up and introduction (5 minutes)
- Introduce the activity and its purpose—to visualize the sprint journey from each person's perspective
- Ask each team member to add their name to one section of the template
- Remind everyone that artistic skill isn't important—stick figures and simple images work perfectly!
- Pro tip: Reassure participants that explaining their drawings is helpful but not mandatory
Prepare drawing tools (2 minutes)
- Ask everyone to equip the marker pen from the left toolbar
- Suggest pinning the marker tool menu open for quick color switching
- Pro tip: Mention that each participant can control their own volume for background music in the bottom left
Creative drawing phase (10 minutes)
- Start the timer and optional background music using the built-in tools
- Encourage team members to draw representations of their sprint experience
- Remind them to focus on key moments, emotions, challenges, and victories
- Suggest using different colors to represent different aspects or emotions
Gallery walk and explanations (15 minutes)
- When the timer ends, have each person briefly explain their drawing to the team
- Ask gentle, curious questions: "What does this element represent?" or "Tell us more about this part"
- Look for patterns or shared experiences across different drawings
- Pro tip: Use the reaction tools to acknowledge interesting insights or connections
Discussion and action items (10 minutes)
- Identify recurring themes or insights from the drawings
- Discuss what these visual representations reveal about the team's process
- Determine 2-3 actionable improvements based on the visual feedback
- Document key takeaways to incorporate into your next sprint planning
Tips for a Successful Session
- Create a judgment-free zone: Emphasize that artistic ability isn't being evaluated—the focus is on expression and insight
- Use metaphors: Encourage team members to think about their sprint in terms of weather, landscapes, journeys, or other metaphors that might make drawing easier
- Provide prompts: If people are hesitant, suggest drawing elements like: "The highest point of your sprint," "The biggest obstacle," or "How you felt at the end"
- Enable privacy during creation: Allow team members to turn their cameras off while drawing if using video conferencing alongside Metro Retro
- Capture insights digitally: Take screenshots of the drawings to include in sprint documentation
- Mix with other techniques: Consider following this visual exercise with a more structured action-setting activity to ensure insights lead to improvements
By visualizing the sprint experience, teams often discover emotional and interpersonal dynamics that traditional retrospectives might miss, leading to more holistic improvements in team collaboration and process.
