Concepts

Why objectives

A retro is more useful when it asks whether the work is moving what the team said matters. Objectives are that “what”.

An objective is one goal, with acceptance criteria. It has a status of open, achieved or dropped, and it can have an owner, a target date, and a link to wherever it is defined. The default place to keep them is team/objectives/, one Markdown file each. A team whose strategy already lives in GitHub can also read issues labelled objective, in this repository or another one.

A retro focuses on the ones you tick

Since the retro chooses its objectives, Copilot’s summary, the feedback summary, the assessment and @retro /objectives are about those objectives. Work that is not about them can appear as a single “Outside focus” line. It is not analysed as if it were the point of the meeting.

Open objectives start ticked. Achieved and dropped ones are listed unticked, and you can tick them, for example to check that an achieved goal still holds. Zero objectives is allowed. You get a warning, and you can still create the retro.

That choice is what Realignment is for on the maturity curve. Without an objective, the later stages have nothing to line the retro up against.

Reviewed between retros, not once a quarter

Home lists every open objective with when it was last assessed and whether it needs review. The point of the page is that the check happens every retro, not only at the end of a quarter. The rule, and the buttons, are on the Home page. How to write criteria and record a verdict is in Objectives and assessments.