Radars are a retrospective format that is perfect for gathering data with your team.
See this article if you'll be participating in a Radar but not facilitating.
Table of Contents
What is a Radar?
To measure your team's progress in areas such as development practices, culture and values, and agile practices, Radars are a great resource. The Work Happiness Radar is the most popular format, so if you need inspiration, begin there!
Radars are valuable as they help to align team members, reveal areas of agreement or disagreement, and encourage reflection at both the individual and team levels. They function as a brief survey that quickly identifies where things are going well (or not) and where viewpoints may differ. Since you can easily view aggregated results like the average and standard deviation, it's an efficient way to focus the follow-up discussion on the most important topics.
Unlike column-based retrospectives, Radars don't require team members to generate text-based notes. Instead, each team member provides a response using a 1-5 scale, and the results are automatically calculated and displayed on a Radar chart.
When would I use a Radar?
Consider using a Radar when you:
- Have limited time and need to narrow down topics efficiently
- Want to discuss broader topics, like work happiness
- Prefer numeric/quantitative output over text/qualitative output
- Want to add variety to retrospective meetings when the team seems bored
Responses are anonymous and choices are made simultaneously, but the analysis compares individual choices. Therefore, it's important to have a team with established trust and psychological safety for this technique to work effectively.
The phases of a Radar
Before starting the retro, you'll get a preview of the items included for the team's feedback. These items are labeled as the titles of each spoke. When you're ready to begin, click Start retro. If you're unsure about which format to choose, starting with the Work Happiness Radar is a great option!
Define
In this phase, the facilitator can add or remove spokes from the Radar template by clicking on the + sign, or edit the description of each spoke by clicking on the text. You can have up to seven spokes on your Radar.
When using a new Radar for the first time, the team should ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of the meaning of each label on a spoke, so everyone is rating the same ideas.
Collect
Unlike our column-based retrospective techniques, team members provide ratings on a set of pre-determined topics, attributes, issues, or categories during the data-gathering step of the retrospective. The category is listed as a label on each spoke. Everyone then anonymously enters their response on a scale of 1-5. Everyone participates at the same time, making it really fast! Line colors are randomly generated each time and do not correlate with specific people.
Analyze
Once everyone has made their selections, the facilitator can advance the retrospective to the Analyze phase using the menu in the bottom right corner of the page.
Retrium will show individual responses by default and automatically calculate metrics like the average, standard deviation, and more. All responses remain anonymous to maintain your team's psychological safety.
In the Explore the Results section, we walk you through a pre-selected combination of statistics to help you understand individual scores, agreement and disagreement, and divergence.
Anyone in the Radar can toggle statistical representations by clicking the checkboxes in the Legend.
Determine what’s next
After a Radar, you might consider using a column-based technique to dig into the topic further. You can run one of our standard techniques like "Mad, Sad, Glad," or "Stop, Start, Continue". Another option is to create a custom technique with one or more spokes as the column headings.
Once you have analyzed the results, your team may want to discuss the results with questions like:
- What interesting points or patterns are visible on the Radar?
- What is surprising or unexpected?
- What spokes warrant further feedback, discussion, or clarity?
- What spokes do we want to highlight or celebrate?
- What spokes warrant improvement, action items, or other next steps?
- What information should be shared with leadership or other teams?
- What trends have we seen over time in our Radars?
Because the analysis phase is the last step of the Radar, you may want to leave the board open until the team is done discussing what they see and deciding what to do. Once you advance the retrospective, it will end the Radar and it will be saved to your retrospective history.