reviews-retros-reflection

# Reviews, Retros & Reflection

## Table of Contents
1. [Purpose](#purpose)
2. [When to Use](#when-to-use)
3. [What Is It](#what-is-it)
4. [Workflow](#workflow)
5. [Retrospective Formats](#retrospective-formats)
6. [Common Patterns](#common-patterns)
7. [Guardrails](#guardrails)
8. [Quick Reference](#quick-reference)

## Purpose

Reviews, Retros & Reflection helps teams and individuals systematically learn from experience through structured reflection, root cause analysis, and actionable improvement planning. It creates psychological safety for honest feedback while driving measurable progress.

## When to Use

**Invoke this skill when you need to:**
- Conduct sprint/iteration retrospectives (Agile, Scrum teams)
- Run project post-mortems or after-action reviews
- Facilitate weekly/monthly team reviews
- Reflect on quarterly or annual performance
- Process significant events (launch, incident, milestone)
- Improve team dynamics and collaboration
- Establish continuous learning culture
- Celebrate successes while extracting lessons from failures
- Generate actionable improvement items
- Build team alignment on priorities

**User phrases that trigger this skill:**
- "Let's do a retro"
- "What went well/wrong?"
- "How can we improve?"
- "Lessons learned from..."
- "Sprint retrospective"
- "After-action review"
- "Team reflection session"
- "Review our progress"

## What Is It

A structured reflection process that:
1. **Gathers data** (what happened during period)
2. **Generates insights** (why it happened, patterns)
3. **Decides actions** (what to change, keep, start, stop)
4. **Tracks progress** (follow-up on previous actions)
5. **Celebrates wins** (recognize successes, build morale)

**Quick example (Start/Stop/Continue format):**
- **Start**: Daily 15-min standup (async in Slack), mob programming for complex features
- **Stop**: Last-minute scope changes, weekend deployments
- **Continue**: Pairing on new features, celebrating small wins in team channel
- **Actions