Retrospective Skill

Goal

Run a blameless retrospective that turns a completed period of work (sprint, milestone, incident, project phase) into a small set of owned, dated improvement actions and durable lessons. The retro is blameless: it examines the system and process that produced an outcome, never an individual's fault. Its lasting value is the feedback loop — lessons are written into CONTINUITY.md so future sessions inherit them. The output ties to PROJECT_RETROSPECTIVE_TEMPLATE.md.

Steps

Set the frame. State the scope and time window under review and the blameless ground rule explicitly: assume everyone did their best with the information they had; focus on process and system, not people.
Gather data — build the timeline. Reconstruct what actually happened, in order, from objective sources: the audit trail (audit-trail.skill), commits, PRs, incidents, telemetry, and milestone dates. A shared factual timeline prevents the retro from drifting into opinion before the facts are agreed.
Pick a format. Choose one to structure insight-generation: Start/Stop/Continue (lightweight, action-oriented), 4Ls (Liked / Learned / Lacked / Longed-for, reflective), or Sailboat (wind = what propels us, anchors = what holds us back, rocks = risks, island = goal). Match the format to the situation; do not run all three.
Generate insights. Using the chosen format, surface what went well, what didn't, and the puzzles — things the team genuinely doesn't understand yet and may need to investigate. Group and cluster related observations; look for root causes, not just symptoms.
Decide actions — few, owned, dated. Convert insights into a short list (ideally 1-3) of concrete improvement actions. Each action has a single named owner and a due date. Resist the trap of generating a long wish-list that no one executes; a few completed actions beat many ignored ones.
Feed lessons into memory. Distill durable, reusable lessons (not one-off task notes) and append them to agents/memory/CONTINUITY.md so future sessions start with this knowledge. Cross-reference the audit trail for the source events.
Record the retro. Assemble the timeline, insights, and owned actions into the Output Format below.