Retrospectives are traditionally held to evaluate how a launch went, determine what went well (and what didn’t) at a recent conference, or recap a recent outage.
But what if we use the retrospective model with an open source community? If we encourage a safe and open environment to share candid opinions and experiences, a retrospective can be an effective way to solicit feedback beyond the questions asked on the forum.
By using tools like Kanban boards to organize “post-it notes” into columns of What’s going well? What’s going poorly? and What could we be doing better?, you can have an open and honest conversation with engaged community members.
This not only results in a happier community that feels listened to, but it also energizes your Developer Relations, Product, and Engineering teams to continue producing great content and tooling to better serve your audience.