How to Make Your Next Project Feedback Meeting More Effective: 4 Powerful Tools

Making mistakes is OK – after all, they are a great opportunity to learn. One way to do that faster is through project feedback meetings and retrospectives with teams and clients. Here are four simple yet powerful visual techniques that will make your next feedback meeting even more effective, plus some bonus tips.

We all know the value of feedback and why it’s important to collect it and actually do something with it. Even so, many feedback meetings and retrospectives involve a bunch of people in a room offering opinions without any resulting changes.

That won’t take you anywhere, at least not fast.

Having just a bit of structure at your feedback meeting can give a boost to the conversation. Contrary to what one might think, leading the meeting with a wee bit of predefined format, the conversation will flow better compared to doing it free form. The challenge is to provide just enough direction – scaffolding for the discussion – not a heavy-handed set of rules.

In my career serving in roles such as scrum master, project manager and consultant I’ve tried multiple feedback and retrospective meeting techniques. These are four of my favorites.

These techniques also work for virtual feedback meetings as long as you have some kind of shared space to put sticky notes.

Timeline: Create a Shared Understanding of Events and What Led Us Where

Using a feedback meeting for looking at a project from beginning to end can be a learning experience. The sequence of events will reveal causations. The team can then discuss the reasons why something turned out the way it did.

An easy way to center the discussion around the order of events is to draw a timeline. Before drawing the timeline, discuss in the group how far back it should go.

How to do it:

1. Once everyone is gathered, appoint a person to draw on the whiteboard.
2. Start by drawing a horizontal line, left to right.
3. Ask the team to come up with 4-5 milestones or key events during the time span and mark these on the timeline
4. Hand out sticky notes and ask the group to complete the timeline with events.
5. When everyone is finished, ask each person to go through the events they’ve added.
6. Facilitate a discussion in the group about that event and what other events led to it or were caused by it.

The 4 Ls: Channelling Feedback Into Actionable Improvements

One of the simplest formats for feedback meetings is the one called 4L which stands for:

• Liked
• Learned
• Lacked
• Longed for

Here’s how to do it:

1. Arrive in advance and prepare the whiteboard. Divide it into four rectangles, one for each L.
2. Ask the participants to write down, on sticky notes, everything they – you guessed it – liked, learned, lacked, and longed for. One idea per note.
3. Give them some time to think and then place the notes in each area.
4. Split the group into four groups, one for each L. Give the sub-groups time to go through the notes and group them.
5. Each sub-group reports their findings to the entire group.
6. The group then discusses actions to address the themes they found.

Speedboat or Sailboat: Discover the Things that Stop You From Accelerating or Could Give You a Boost

This is a popular metaphor-based exercise for feedback meetings and comes in two versions:

• Speedboat – answers the question: What’s holding us back? In this exercise, the group is tasked with putting sticky notes for things that anchor the boat and stop it from accelerating.
• Sailboat – answers the question: How can we go faster? The purpose here is for the group to come up with ideas that help the project go faster or flow better.

Many project managers prefer the sailboat version since it focuses on the positive.

Speedboat: A Feedback Meeting Focusing on the Things That Are Holding the Group Back

How you do it:

1. Be a bit early to the feedback meeting and draw a speedboat on the whiteboard. Underneath the boat, draw chains connected to anchors on the bottom of the sea. Draw the boat and the waterline rather high to leave room for sticky notes underneath the boat.
2. When the group arrives, explain the idea and goal of the exercise.
3. Hand out sticky notes and give your group time to write down ideas and suggestions and place them on the anchors. You can also let them team draw the anchors and the anchor lines. If you’re short on time you can limit the number of ideas per person.
4. Take down the sticky notes one by one and read it aloud. Ask the person to explain the idea. Discuss it in the group.

Sailboat: A Feedback Meeting Focusing on the Things That Could Make the Project Go Faster

How to do it:

1. Arrive early and draw a sailboat on the whiteboard. Make the sails disproportionately large to make space for sticky notes.
2. When the group arrives, explain the idea and purpose of the exercise.
3. Hand out sticky notes and give the group time to write down ideas and suggestions and place them on the sails of the ship. You can limit the number of ideas (and sticky notes per person) if you’re short on time.
4. Take down the sticky notes one by one and read it aloud. Ask the person to explain the idea. Discuss it in the group.

Always Take Down Actions

In the end, there should be a list of actions with clear due dates (think SMART). One of the best ways to do this is to appoint someone whose responsibility it is to document what the team agrees on.

Don’t Fear the Sausage Factory – Invite Your Client to the Feedback Meeting

When you do a retrospective, feedback meeting, after action-review – however, your nomenclature refers to it – consider inviting the client.

Perhaps you’re thinking “Are you nuts? Airing all that dirty laundry on an open stage???”

Naturally, a team with a lot of internal conflicts will not benefit from having an outsider being present at a feedback meeting. It can potentially prevent many from sharing and having much needed direct conversations. Involving the client requires a high degree of trust for all parties.

But isn’t being able to invite the client to these meetings a goal worth striving for?

Pre-Mortems: Plan For the Meeting Outcomes That You Do Not Want

In a recent article, I picked up the idea of doing a pre-mortem before each feedback meeting. That is, instead of writing an agenda, write down what the outcome should not be. For a feedback meeting, “no actionable ideas for improvements” could be a pre-mortem definition.

Final Tip: Make It a Standing Feedback Meeting

A finding by a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology was that sit-down meetings last 35% longer than those when participants are standing up, with no improvements in effectiveness.

How Do You Organize Your Retrospectives and Feedback Meetings?

Please share your tips in the comments.