The team really liked the Sailboat retro. If your team is familiar with the tool and you don’t spend time evaluating you could probably do it in 60 minutes. We also spent some time evaluating the retro and the tool. We spent some of that time explaining the Sailboat retro technique and some additional time trying out the new stickies tool. I had booked 90 minutes for this meeting and that was a good amount of time.
I copied the link to the board and sent it to the team members so they could join that board. I went into Boardthing and set the boat picture as a background in a board. I found Boardthing that seemed to fulfill everything that I needed and decided to try it out. Enabled me to set a picture as a background and the team members to put stickies on it.The team members could use without having to create their own account.I had a vision of us using an online sticky tool and putting our stickies on the picture of the boat. I read about the Sailboat retrospective and really wanted to try it, but I was not sure how I could make it work with the team being distributed. I wanted to do something different, and I wanted the retro to be as much like a live meeting as possible. They used slack video call and confluence for documentation during the meeting. My team had a history of using the 4L retrospective technique every sprint for a long time. In the retrospectives we always used video since it gives a feeling of being close to each other when being distributed. We used slack for our daily communication: text communication, audio and video calls. We were distributed in 2 locations with a 7-hour time difference. I had recently started working with a new team. How do I host a retrospective that feels like a live meeting even though we are distributed? Background