Taking the First Step in Retrospectives with Confluence Whiteboards

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Introduction 🌱

Recently, our distributed development team ran its very first sprint retrospective. With members working remotely across different regions, we wanted a way to lower the barrier to participation and ensure psychological safety.

Our tool of choice? Confluence Whiteboards.

Rather than using the default template as-is, we customized it to fit our team’s culture and context. This helped us make retrospectives easier to start, safer to run, and more effective overall. In this post, I’ll share how we approached it—and how you might take your own team’s first step into retrospectives.

Building on the Basics 📝

Confluence provides a built-in “Simple retrospective” template based on the well-known KPT method (Keep, Problem, Try).

We used this as a foundation, but adapted it with practices from Agile Retrospectives, Second Edition: A Practical Guide for Catalyzing Team Learning and Improvement—a book by Derby, Larsen, and Horowitz (PragProg, February 2024).

That book outlines a five-step retrospective structure:

1. Set the Stage

2. Gather Data

3. Generate Insights

4. Decide What to Do

5. Close the Retrospective

How We Customized the Board 🎨

To make the process more engaging and repeatable, we added a few key sections:

1. Check-in Column — A quick space to share how we’re feeling at the start, to break the ice.

2. Feedback & Appreciation Column — A place to reflect on the retro itself and end on a note of gratitude.

3. Facilitator Section — With bilingual (English/Japanese) instructions, so offshore members could easily follow along and anyone could step in to run the session.

4. Manager/Stakeholder Section — To highlight the importance of leadership support and psychological safety.

Making It Repeatable 🔁

To avoid retros becoming a one-off event, we also created a Sprint Operations Guide in Confluence. This included:

• A sample weekly schedule

• Roles and tools for each Scrum event

• Steps to duplicate and reuse the board

By documenting the process, we ensured anyone in the team could run a retrospective with the same level of quality.

Tips from Practice 💡

• Stick to timeboxes. Confluence Whiteboards’ built-in timer was surprisingly helpful.

• Keep it simple—less is more when starting out.

What We Heard from the Team 👂

At first, I wasn’t sure how actively the team would participate. But the feedback spoke for itself:

• “We have too many tasks within a sprint—it feels overwhelming.”

• “We sometimes struggle with communication.”

• “I want to make better use of Jira.”

• “Once we learned the format, we felt confident we could run retros on our own.”

Even quiet members felt safe to share honestly. That sense of psychological safety was the biggest success.

Closing Thoughts ✨

Retrospectives aren’t just another Scrum event—they’re the space where teams learn, adapt, and improve. To make them stick, the key is simplicity and repeatability.

This experiment was our first step, and it worked. I hope sharing it helps other teams take theirs.

With this, we wrap up our three-part series on using Confluence:

1. The Confluence Central Pattern (CCP): Building Your Team’s Single Source of Truth
2. No Slides, No Docs—Just One Confluence Whiteboard: How We Learned Agile and Scrum 
3. Taking the First Step in Retrospectives with Confluence Whiteboards (this post)

👉 How does your team run retrospectives today? Have you tried customizing templates—or do you keep them simple? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments!

[Julie Kremp]

Great idea! Whiteboards are so cool!

[HIROTA Takayuki_Ricksoft_]

@Julie Kremp Thanks! Yes, the use cases for Whiteboards are really broad—it’s not just retros, but all kinds of team collaboration.