Team Skills Retro: Assess and Improve Your Development Team's Capabilities
A Team Skills Retro is a structured assessment framework that helps engineering and product teams evaluate their collective competencies across key development areas. Using a boxing metaphor of "Novice" to "Pro," teams can visualize skill levels, identify improvement opportunities, and create actionable development plans.
What Is a Team Skills Retro?
The Team Skills Retro is a collaborative evaluation exercise that uses a boxing-inspired metaphor to assess your team's proficiency in various skills and competencies. Like a boxer who progresses from novice to champion, teams can plot their abilities along a skill continuum. This retrospective format provides a clear visual representation of where your team excels and where additional training or focus might be needed.
The template features two key metaphorical elements:
- Novice: Representing skills where the team is still in training and has much to learn
- Pro: Representing skills the team has mastered and performs at an expert level
Benefits & When to Use
This retrospective template is particularly valuable when:
- Onboarding new team members who need to understand the team's strengths and weaknesses
- Planning team training and development initiatives
- Preparing for upcoming projects that require specific skill sets
- Evaluating team growth over time (by comparing current and past assessments)
- Identifying potential bottlenecks in your development process
Teams that regularly use this template gain increased self-awareness, more targeted improvement efforts, and better resource allocation based on identified skill gaps.
How to Run a Team Skills Retro Session
Duration: 45-60 minutes
Introduction (5 minutes)
- Explain the purpose of the session: to assess team skills and identify areas for improvement
- Introduce the boxing metaphor (Novice to Pro) and explain how the ranking will work
- Clarify that this is about collective team skills, not individual performance
Select Skills to Evaluate (5-10 minutes)
- Review the pre-populated skill areas in the template (e.g., User Testing, Pull Requests, Development Process)
- Add or remove skills based on your team's specific context
- Ensure everyone understands what each skill area encompasses
Discuss and Place Skills (20-30 minutes)
- For each skill, facilitate a brief team discussion about current proficiency level
- Reach consensus on where to place each skill along the Novice-to-Pro continuum
- Move the skill cards to the appropriate position on the scale
- Capture key points or examples that support the placement
Review and Analyze (5-10 minutes)
- Once all skills are placed, step back and observe the overall pattern
- Identify clusters of strengths and weaknesses
- Discuss any surprising placements or disagreements about skill levels
- Select 2-3 priority skills to focus improvement efforts on
Create Action Plan (10-15 minutes)
- For each priority skill, brainstorm specific ways to improve
- Vote on the most impactful improvement initiatives
- Document actionable next steps, owners, and timelines in the Actions section
- Set a date to reassess these skills to measure progress
Tips for a Successful Session
- Focus on facts, not feelings: Encourage the team to provide specific examples that justify skill placements
- Maintain a growth mindset: Position "Novice" skills as opportunities rather than deficiencies
- Consider external factors: Some skill levels may be impacted by organizational constraints, not just team capabilities
- Look for balance: A healthy team typically has a mix of skill levels across different areas
- Keep it constructive: The goal is improvement, not criticism
- Repeat periodically: Consider running this retro quarterly to track progress
- Prioritize ruthlessly: Focus on improving just a few skills at a time for the best results
This retrospective format creates a safe space for honest assessment while providing clear direction for team development efforts.
