Timeline Driven by Feelings is a great retrospective activity to get the team thinking about events on a timeframe, and how they felt about them.
Running the activity:
- Draw the timeline.
- Write a few events on the timeline (e.g. release started, high severity bug found in production, new person joined the team, a holiday).
- Draw a happy face on the top, and a sad face on the bottom.
- Ask participants to share their notes:
“Please write down your notes, place the sticky note on the timeline canvas with relative horizontal position to the identified timeline events (as per step 2) and relative vertical position to how you felt about it (from super-happy to really sad, as per step 3).”
This activity is especially useful for getting people to open up and talk about their feelings, connecting them to actual data related to a period of time.
Remote-team advice: This activity works well for remote teams. Use a remote board of your choice.