Building a Team Backlog: The Power of Retrospectives

“Inspect and adapt” is one of the basic tenets of continuous improvement, and agility in general. Holding retrospectives is one of the core processes that allows teams to look back and reflect on their progress. However, over time, teams may focus only on the product work and lose interest in their own improvement as a team. Kanchan Khera and Bhuwan Lodha believe that one approach to solving this problem is to bring the rigor, structure, and discipline we use for maintaining healthy product backlogs to team improvement by creating a “team backlog”—items the team needs to do to improve itself. The team backlog introduces three keys to successful and sustainable team improvement—a structured framework, visibility of its impact, and creative ways for building the backlog. Just as a healthy backlog is the basis for a great product, so a healthy team backlog helps create great teams.