Every quarter, product teams hold retrospectives. Someone asks "what went well?" and "what didn't?" The team lists bullet points. Someone writes "we should communicate better." Everyone nods. Nothing changes.
The problem isn't the retro format. It's that you never defined what success looked like before the work started — so you can't actually evaluate anything now.
I've run product teams at iQIYI, NIO, and Alibaba. The retrospectives that mattered had one thing in common: a pre-written success criterion that existed before any work began. Every other retro was theater.
The retrospective trap
When you define success after seeing the results, you unconsciously fit the definition to the outcome. If engagement went up 5%, that was the goal. If it went down 5%, you pivot to "we learned a lot." The retro becomes a narrative exercise, not a learning exercise.
