The Guide to Effective Agile Retrospectives

If you’re tired of having retrospective meetings greeted with groans and heavy, reluctant sighs or feeling like you’re rehashing the same old problems with no signs of improvement, the advice Mark shares with you will help make your retrospectives more effective.

There’s no need to have retrospectives that people hate and aren’t even useful – with a few tweaks, you can have meetings your team will look forward to, and start seeing real improvements and results!

Includes follow-up support emails to reinforce what you learned and help you make real changes right away.

Why This Book?

Our world is changing at a faster rate than ever, and the speed will only increase. Covid-19 gave us a taste of how vital it is to be able to quickly adjust. Scrum helps break change into manageable chunks and then gives us focus, with retrospectives as a critical tool in that arsenal for rapid adaptation. It’s worth learning how to use them properly.

In The Guide to Effective Agile Retrospectives, Mark shares his secrets to creating retrospectives that don’t suck!

You’ll learn about:

  • Common misunderstandings about retrospectives – let’s clear those up
  • Recommended techniques and activities to keep the meeting fun and engaging
  • How to run retrospectives with distributed teams
  • Why you need data for your retrospectives – what to gather, not gather, and what it can tell you
  • Turning vague ideas like “We need to do better Unit Testing” into concrete experiments
  • …and how to help these improvements actually happen
  • Remedies for anti-patterns like: “All Talk, No Action”, “Perennial Problems”, and “ScrumMaster Hero”

Why this book? Because Mark was failing at Sprint Retrospectives before it was popular. After years of study and experimentation, his findings are now collected in this Guide so you don’t have to have to suffer the same pain.

Hint: This free eBook, and the accompanying email series, qualify for Scrum Alliance Education Units (SEUs).

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The instructor and the course both were awesome.
Rajeev RToronto
Mark delivered an excellent course, it was a value-packed 2 days.
Brent COttawa
This course has validated what I want to do for the rest of my career.
Diane KVancouver
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Mark. I learned a lot and appreciate his teaching style.
Kendall APrivate Client
Very good and useful information. I like the format (no boring Powerpoint) and doing the meeting as a sprint was great.
Fred BPrivate Client
Instructor was amazing, easy to listen to and follow. Did not read from book and provided concrete examples.
Tricia AOttawa
Very knowledgeable in what he is teaching. Passion for scrum.
Mandi AEdmonton
Awesome speaker. Fantastic course.
Helen KMontreal
Mark was an excellent instructor and I learned a lot in this workshop considering it was only 2 days. I would recommend it to my friends and colleagues.
Mohamed EVirtual
Mark made a challenging and complex process (Scrum) very clear and highlighted the benefits and opportunities in an engaging and entertaining way.
Jeremy GVancouver
Mark is a very smart, passionate, knowledgable trainer, with a charismatic personality and great pedagogical skills. I see his potential to change companies culture. The course really taught me many things and made me want to read and know more!
Iulia AToronto
Mark was incredibly knowledge and experienced and it's very apparent. I learned more than I could have expected. I greatly appreciate all the additional reading materials. I would have never been able to collect such a library on my own and I have a fascination for good leadership and developing high performing teams.
Anly HOttawa
Great conversations. Thanks, Mark! My confidence in understanding the role increased!
Orville HEdmonton
Mark was very personable and knowledgeable about the subject. Nothing threw him.
Sharon GPrivate Client
The instructor demonstrates solid knowledge on Agile and scrum fundamentals. The course is interesting and easy to follow.
Don LEdmonton
Mark did an excellent job facilitating the course and the content was very helpful. We covered a lot of ground in three sessions and the pre-learning was helpful too! Mark was patient and respectful and very supportive throughout the sessions. It was a pleasure to spend the time with Mark and to learn from someone who obviously knows his subject.
Debbie BVirtual
Mark is very enthusiastic and responsive, good at eliciting participation, diverse exercises to keep us from getting bored, informative answers. Good focus on cross-functional teams and sharing non-dev where we fit in.
Carly HPrivate Client
Instructor Mark is great and very knowledgeable, with experience that can answer questions from many industries/environments. The use of examples, games, activities are great!
Anthony KToronto
Overall very well structured course. It helped me see the benefits of Scrum and learned how to apply it.
Nazir EOttawa
Mark was intellegent, able to improvise, and brought humor to the class. He supports diversity, no one should feel uncomfortable.
Jeffrey LMontreal
5 Stars
Yui HEdmonton
I had a great time and I highly appreciated the experience demonstrated by the instructor.
Frederick LMontreal
Instructor was great, very knowledgeable and open to questions. The course opened my eyes to scrum mechanics. I now understand what scrummaster in the team was attempting to do.
Sharon JEdmonton
Instructor was fantastic! Course content had some humour!
Joelle LPrivate Client
The course does an excellent job in this covid world. Lots was learned even though I have been working in an agile environment for years. Would certainly return to Agile Pain Relief if I decide to pursue future training.
Robert AVirtual
The combination of hands-on practice and excellent facilitation style made this course enjoyable, useful and very applicable to my day to day life as a Project Manager. The content was carefully curated and meaningful discussions were had during the session. It was engaging, interactive and insightful! I would highly recommend Mark and the Agile Pain Relief company for anyone looking to do their CSM training and pass the exam!
Valerie GVirtual
Lots of good information and exercises for a two day course. Instructor was clear and engaging in presenting concepts.
Marvin EPrivate Client
Excellent course content delivered in a direct, practical and memorable fashion.
Kimberley KOttawa
Brilliant! Engaging and enlightening while not promising the world.
Oksana KOttawa
Very thorough. The copious use of examples were very helpful!
Kevin HMontreal
Mark is a wealth of knowledge and makes agile super easy! The course is interesting, interactive, and extremely informative. I got a lot of takeaways from the course and excited to take this back to my team. I'm looking forward to taking the Advance Scrum and Advanced PO courses next Fall.
Jenny CVirtual
Mark was fantastic. Enjoyed his coaching very well. Course was very interesting.
Robert AOttawa
Mark is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter and topics adjacent to it. His attitude encourages engagement in the material.
Jamie CVirtual
Awesome instructor.
Faik FKitchener-Waterloo
Amazing instructor, was able to clearly explain complex concepts, made the course relevant and engaging! This will alow us to build strong agile teams.
Dylan HPrivate Client
Best training I've taken in a long time.
Susan DPrivate Client
I learned a lot and the content was far more enganging than I expected it to be. I come away with many improvements I can make to my organization. Thanks and well done.
Dan CKitchener-Waterloo
Instructor is very informative. Voice calming and clear with good balance of up/down/tone.
Hanh LToronto
Very engaging way of learning how to be a Product Owner, just like Scrum should be.
Teeba APrivate Client
Wanted to say thanks again for the great insights at the CSM course last month. I've had a fair amount of success thus far introducing and implementing the concepts at the agency I work for. We completed our first full Scrum project yesterday. Scrum really is a magnifying glass for issues. We identified quite a few with our systems within the first couple of days and are now radically overhauling how we assign budgets to projects.
Paul AOttawa
Mark was great! He was honest and open at points during the training - always resetting the expectations of Scrum, driving home the framework, what it will do and will not do. He is helpful and willing to answer questions.
Dawn DKitchener-Waterloo
Mark was really personable, engaging and put a lot of emphasis on our teams and their dynamic., I would recommend him again.
Riyad IPrivate Client
Great to get this training from the subject matter expert.
Nisha AToronto
Provocative, amusing, thanks!
Stefan BPrivate Client
Very good at keeping interest. Very dynamic, engages easily with students.
Paul PMontreal
Energetic, clear, helpful, inspiring, a great teacher.
Nadil POttawa
This course was a real eye opener and hope it will not be like preaching in the desert. You are a great orator and would love to listen to your thoughts for hours.
Marc-Andre LMontreal
Awesome. Enlightment for pain points like overtime, too many WIP, motivation, etc.
Susie LVancouver
Passionate, Articulate, Well organized, and knowledgeable. Highly recommended
Nick KVancouver
Time master- thank you for pushing us through topics. Honestly - stated that you can provide examples, up to us to decide.
Tracey OToronto

Your Guide to Everything Scrum

Mark Levison spent 12 years as a ScrumMaster and Coach, helping teams by chance before he started to systemize it. Armed with an insatiable love for research, he has been studying and teaching Agile since 2001, introducing Scrum, Lean, and Agile methodology to a broad range of individuals and organizations. Mark has helped launch Scrum practice throughout Canada including Government of Canada departments, major financial and insurance institutions, healthcare agencies, and leading payroll, HR services, and software companies.

Students and communities benefit from Mark’s more than thirty years of experience in the IT industry and over two decades of Scrum and Agile expertise, as he brings his uniquely fun and effective teaching style to thousands of individuals and teams so they can be more effective.

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