Latest / Career Skills with Fexingo: Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and Future-Proofing Your Career / How to Use Retrospectives to Level Up Your Skills
Transcript
- Lucas: You know that feeling after a big project ends — the product ships, the campaign goes live, the quarter closes — and you just move on to the next thing without ever looking back? Luna: All the time. There's always another deadline breathing down your neck. Lucas: Right. And that's exactly the moment where most people miss a huge opportunity to learn faster. I'm talking about retrospectives — not for your team, but for yourself. Luna: Like a personal postmortem? Lucas: Exactly. A structured review of your own work and decisions. And it's surprisingly rare. I was reading a Harvard Business Review study recently that found teams that conduct regular retrospectives improve their project outcomes by 23 percent. But individually? Almost nobody does it. Luna: Twenty-three percent is not trivial. Why do you think people skip it? Lucas: Partly because it feels like navel-gazing. Partly because we're wired to look forward, not backward. And partly because performance reviews, the one formal reflection we get, are usually tied to compensation and feel adversarial. But a personal retrospective is completely different. Luna: How so? Lucas: No boss. No rating. No stakes. It's just you and four questions: What went well? What didn't go well? What surprised you? And what will you do differently next time? That's it. Luna: Those four questions — they're the same framework a lot of agile teams use for sprint retrospectives. Lucas: Exactly where I stole it from. But applied to your own career, not a project board. Let me give you a concrete example. I talked to a product manager at a mid-size SaaS company — let's call her Jen — who started doing quarterly personal retrospectives two years ago. Luna: What made her start? Lucas: She'd just finished a brutal quarter where two features she'd championed got deprioritized, and she felt like she was spinning her wheels. She decided to sit down for an hour and write honest answers to those four questions. What she found was that her biggest weakness wasn't execution — it was communication. She'd assumed stakeholders understood her reasoning, but they didn't. Luna: So she was working hard on the wrong thing. Lucas: Totally. The retrospective surfaced a pattern she'd missed in the day-to-day noise. She started sending a one-page rationale memo before every feature proposal, and her approval rate went from about 60 percent to over 80 percent within two quarters. She told me that single insight was worth more than any course she'd taken. Luna: That's a great story, but I'm wondering — how do you avoid just confirming your own biases? I mean, when I look back at something I did, I tend to remember the wins more vividly. Lucas: Hindsight bias is real. That's actually the hardest part of a personal retrospective. The trick is to anchor it in data, not feelings. Jen didn't just write 'I communicated poorly' — she looked at her calendar, her emails, her meeting notes. She saw that she'd spent 80 percent of her time on design specs and only 20 percent on stakeholder alignment. That's a number, not a vibe. Luna: So you need evidence. What's a good source of evidence for someone in, say, marketing? Lucas: Campaign performance data, obviously. But also time logs. I know a content strategist who tracks every hour she spends in a simple spreadsheet — writing, editing, meetings, research. At the end of the quarter, she compares where she actually spent time against where she thought she spent time. The gap is always illuminating. Luna: That's almost like an audit. Lucas: It is. And the best part is, you don't need to be a PM or a marketer. Anyone in any role can do it. A sales rep could look at her win-loss ratio by quarter and ask: what did I do differently in my best quarter versus my worst? A designer could review feedback on their last three projects and look for recurring themes. A finance analyst could compare their forecast accuracy over time. Luna: But that takes discipline. Most people won't sit down for an hour every quarter and write honestly. Lucas: You're right. And that's exactly why it's a competitive advantage. Most of your peers are running on autopilot. If you take that one hour, you'll compound your learning way faster than they will. It's like the difference between driving with your eyes open versus driving with a rearview mirror and a map. Luna: I like that. So what's the best way to start? Should you do it monthly or quarterly? Lucas: I'd say quarterly is the sweet spot for most people. Monthly might be too frequent to see meaningful patterns, and annually is too slow. Pick a consistent day — maybe the last Friday of the quarter — block an hour, and use a simple template. There are free ones online from Atlassian and others, but honestly, a blank document with those four questions is enough. Luna: And you keep them in a running document, right? So you can look back over time? Lucas: Exactly. That's the key. After a couple of years, you have a narrative of your own growth. You can see the exact quarter when you broke through a ceiling or the pattern that kept tripping you up. It's incredibly motivating. And it's also great material for performance reviews or promotion conversations, because you're not relying on memory — you have a written record. Luna: You know, this reminds me of something I read about poker players. The best ones review every single hand they play, even the ones they win. They're not trying to beat themselves up — they're looking for leaks in their game. Lucas: That's a perfect analogy. In poker, the difference between a good player and a great player is often the quality of their post-game analysis. Same with any skill. The retrospective is your post-game film session. Luna: And if you're not doing it, you're leaving learning on the table. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the whole point of this show — not just to tell you to learn, but to give you a specific, repeatable practice that actually works. Personal retrospectives are probably the highest-leverage habit I know for career growth. Luna: Alright, I'm convinced. I'm going to schedule my first one for the end of this quarter. Lucas: If we've helped you think through a career move or decision, and you want to support the show, you can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. We keep the show ad-free, and listener support is what makes that possible. Luna: Yeah, it really does help us keep going — and we appreciate every bit of it. Lucas: So back to the practice: one thing I want to emphasize is that the fourth question — 'what will I do differently?' — is the one most people skip. They write down what went wrong, but they don't commit to a specific change. And that's where the growth actually happens. Luna: Right. It's not a journal entry. It's a action plan. Lucas: Exactly. So after Jen identified her communication gap, she didn't just write 'communicate better.' She wrote: 'Before every feature proposal, send a one-page rationale memo to all stakeholders at least one week before the review meeting.' That's a concrete, testable change. Luna: And then she could track whether she actually did it. Lucas: And whether it worked. That's the feedback loop. Without that step, a retrospective is just navel-gazing. With it, it's a learning engine. Luna: What about the 'what surprised you' question? That one feels harder to answer. Lucas: It is. But it's also the most valuable. Because surprises are where your assumptions break down. Maybe you thought a certain client would love your proposal, but they hated it. Or you thought you were bad at public speaking, but your last presentation got great feedback. Those surprises are clues to blind spots. Luna: So you're looking for the gap between expectation and reality. Lucas: Yes. And that gap is pure learning signal. One of the most famous examples is from the investor Ray Dalio, who built an entire decision-making system around tracking his surprises and analyzing why his predictions were wrong. You don't need to go that far, but even just noting one surprise per quarter will sharpen your judgment over time. Luna: Let's talk about frequency again. You said quarterly. What if someone is in a very fast-moving role, like social media management, where things change weekly? Lucas: Good question. I'd still say quarterly for the big-picture retrospective, but you could add a lighter monthly check-in — maybe just ten minutes, asking: 'What's one thing I learned this month that I should carry forward?' The key is not to make it so heavy that you stop doing it. Luna: Sustainability over intensity. That makes sense. Lucas: Exactly. And if you miss a quarter, don't beat yourself up. Just restart next quarter. The real enemy isn't inconsistency — it's never starting at all. Luna: So to wrap up: pick a recurring time, use the four questions, anchor in data, write down specific actions, and track your progress over time. That's the formula. Lucas: That's it. And if you do that consistently for two years, you'll be a different professional than the one who started. I've seen it happen. Luna: I'm excited to try it. Let's check back in a quarter and see how we did. Lucas: I like that idea. Maybe that'll be an episode — a live retrospective on our own career skills journey. Luna: Now that would be meta.