retrospective
Retrospective
The team that doesn't reflect doesn't improve. Retrospectives close the feedback loop.
Context
Retrospective is the skill that completes the lifecycle loop. It feeds insights from operations and evolution back into discovery, making the next cycle better than the last. Without it, teams repeat the same mistakes and miss improvement opportunities.
In a lifecycle-aware system, a retrospective is not a generic feelings exercise. It must turn concrete evidence from postmortems, reviews, and delivery outcomes into a small number of changes the team will actually route back through intake and planning.
Inputs
- incident-timeline -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
- postmortem-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
- review-report -- produced by the preceding skill in the lifecycle
Process
Step 1: Set the Stage (5 min)
More from yknothing/prodcraft
system-design
Use when reviewed requirements or specifications are ready and the team must decide high-level architecture, component boundaries, integration seams, or brownfield coexistence strategy before API design, technology selection, or task planning.
6ci-cd
Use when a reviewed implementation slice needs an automated build, test, and deployment pipeline, especially when brownfield rollback, release-boundary checks, contract/integration gates, and staged delivery must be explicit before shipping.
6intake
The mandatory gateway for all new engineering work. Triage and route new products, apps, features, migrations, tech-debt, or any 'not sure where to start' request to the correct lifecycle path. Use before starting design or implementation. Do not use for ongoing tasks, specific debugging, or PR reviews.
6feature-development
Use when a reviewed task slice has tests or acceptance targets and the team must turn it into a small, mergeable implementation increment without expanding scope, breaking contracts, or hiding release-boundary risk.
6monitoring-observability
Use when a live service or newly delivered release needs actionable telemetry, dashboards, and alerts that expose real user-impactful boundaries, especially when brownfield coexistence rules, unsupported-flow safety, rollback health, or queue/backfill behavior must be visible before incidents escalate.
6incident-response
Use when a live production issue needs coordinated containment, severity triage, stakeholder communication, and evidence capture, especially when a recent release, brownfield coexistence rules, rollback decisions, or unresolved contract boundaries must be handled before root-cause work.
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