- A folder with reusable introductions of the entire team.
- A presentation or document of the history of DevRel at your company.
- An organized overview of current initiatives/projects that allows all stakeholders to understand current/past projects including feedback and ideas for improvements.
Before you can plan a strategy, you need to understand your team and your current situation. To this end, the first exercise will ensure team members get to know each other and meanwhile create information that can be reused for conference biographies etc. Questions answered will include:
- Who does what?
- Where is everyone based?
- Which languages do they know (human and programming)?
- What work do they enjoy?
The next exercise will be an exploration of the history of DevRel at the company. The last exercises will have your team create an overview and an analysis of current initiatives.
- Decide where information about the team and its initiatives should live (GitHub/Google Drive/...) and ensure this is accessible to the team.
- Ensure everyone has post-its and pens.
- Create your personal introduction.
- Notify team of the personal introduction exercise beforehand so that they can prepare theirs in advance if they want to.
- Research & create a presentation of the history of DevRel at your company (or designate this to another team member)
- Create a list of current initiatives and fill in the templates for them along with any comments/ideas/feedback. This will serve as a help to you in the session. It is recommended that you let the team create these from scratch to ensure that the outcomes are from the team's perspective (and not only from yours).
Have everyone create a brief introduction on themselves of the form personal-intro-template.md and collect these in the team Repository/Jira/Google Drive.
This can be in the form of a presentation by a member of the team who knows about the history of the company and the DevRel team in particular. Alternatively this can take the form of a pre-prepared Q&A or something completely different. People should have pen and paper to jot down notes and ideas. You may find it useful to record this presentation for future usage (for new team members or for creating a written version).
Chances are there are many initiatives/projects that are going on in your team. These may or may not be documented and you may or may not know about them and they may or may not be currently active. This exercise aims to create a common understanding of the initiatives that are owned by your team.
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Give everyone a stack of post-its and brainstorm for 10 minutes. Instruct team members to write down an initiative per post it (e.g. the blog, student hackathons, student ambassador program etc.)
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Take the next 10 minutes to create a list of all initiatives from the gathered post its with your team.
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Take each item on the initiative list and create an initiative overview for it as a team. A template for this can be found in initiative-template.md. If your team is big you can split into subgroups and draft overviews in parallel. Ensure that everyone has a chance to read and comment on each overview. The goal is to achieve a common ground for each initiative.
Now that we have an overview of all initiatives, discuss them as a team one by one. Questions to keep in mind are:
- Is this initiative healthy?
- Are there any known issues?
- Could this be improved?
- Is someone responsible for this initiative?
- Are all processes around this initiative documented?
- Are there any road blocks?
- ...
Gather all feedback in the respective team initiative documents in the notes section. To structure the retro, you may find it useful to adopt (Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats] approach.
It is likely that during this process the team has come up with many new ides and hopefully those were noted down in a new ideas section. Now is the time to speak through those.
After gathering feedback about each initiative, you may find it useful to also talk about other topics (team communication, processes, etc). Note that this should not be things about the initiatives. To this end, pass out post-its and ask team members to note down things that:
- they like/are grateful for
- things that they think could be improved, as well as
- thank you's they'd like voiced.
Once you have gathered post-its for a few minutes, put these on a wall and combine topics if applicable. Now ask your team to get up and mark the three topics they'd like to discuss with a dot.
Pick the topics with the most votes and discuss them as a team. Gather feedback and note down action items. You may not have time to discuss all issues but you should be able to discuss the ones your team deems most important.
You may also want to do this all the way in the end of the planning to see whether there are other things the team needs to talk about.
- Throughout this and subsequent steps, participants might have loads of ideas. Ensure that they have the materials to note these down. Try not to discuss anything that goes beyond the goals of each section as this may cause you to lose focus. For example, any ideas for new initiatives or changes should be noted down but not necessary discussed at this stage. Ensure team members are aware that their ideas are valued and that there will be time for these discussions in a later exercise.
- If the initiative documents are left incomplete, don't worry, these will be completed in later sections.
- Any action items on the initiative document notes should be followed up on.
- The initiative retro should focus on the initiative itself, not on actions of any current team members. It should not become a blame game.
- Discussions can easily get out of hand, ensure that everyone's voice is heard.
- Any action items and feedback from the team retro should be noted down and followed up on.