Exercise
The 10-Minute Retro
Nine stickies, ten minutes: three wins, three lowlights, three learnings — a retro small enough that you actually run it.
Run it at the end of every quarter — solo, with your coach, or with a cofounder. It works monthly too. Quarters blur together when they're never reviewed; ten minutes of structured looking-back is usually all it takes to stop repeating the same one.
Credit: Outstride original — a founder-sized cut of the classic team retrospective
How to run it
Three wins
Personal counts as much as company — "started therapy" belongs next to "we hit the revenue milestone". If all three wins are company metrics, that is itself a finding.
Three lowlights
Name them without fixing them yet. Look for the pattern underneath: not enough focus time, the same conversation avoided twice, energy spent managing instead of building.
Three learnings, written as rules
Not observations — rules you can act on next quarter.
“"Hard conversations don't fix themselves." · "Short-term pain is preferable to long-term suffering — the choice is mine." · "Some things are harder to do than to say."”
The learnings are the product; wins and lowlights are just the evidence. And ten minutes is the point — the retro you actually run beats the perfect one you skip.
Source / credit
Outstride original — a founder-sized cut of the classic team retrospective
Related capabilities
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