“We now have much higher engagement in the retros from ideas through to action”

Building on a strong agile culture at Eat Club with Metro Retro.

EAT Club Factsheet

Company: EAT Club
Industry: Corporate catering
Team: Remote development
Interviewee: Sam Hozman, Lead Project Manager

Summary

EAT Club is a virtual cafeteria for businesses in the US and Canada.
The company is 100% remote and asynchronous-first with employees in the Bay Area, Vegas & Europe timezones.

With asynchronous working, the Development teams only use meetings where necessary. The retrospective is one of those meetings that they continue to run synchronously.
They used to run their retrospectives in Confluence, creating a page for each retro.
The team were having good discussions in their retrospectives, but as a Wiki product, Confluence lacks mechanisms to guide a team through the process of getting from discussions to deciding impactful actions or experiments for the next sprint.
As the facilitator, Sam found that Confluence’s basic formats meant that he had to spend a lot of time thinking about how to structure each retrospective to get the most out of the team’s time together.

Eat Club have been using Metro Retro for their sprint and release retrospectives since 2022.
They use the tools designed for each retrospective phase to guide discussion through to prioritizing impactful actions and experiments.
Metro Retro’s range of templates and quick retro-builder means Sam can easily design a session that is uniquely catered to each sprint.

The teams feel they generate more impactful actions and experiments as a result of using Metro Retro.
The teams are better able to track and evaluate their process every two weeks, helping them operate more efficiently as they incorporate changes to how they work.
The Lead Project Manager’s time is better-used in designing and preparing context-specific retros.
The teams enjoy the variety of retro formats each sprint.

There’s now high engagement from team members for the whole process of the retro – from ideation through to actions.