The “safe place” is affected by the presence of people with positional authority, potential agendas or other implicit impact.?The team may decide to invite such people – usually to ensure that they are communicating improvements needed that are beyond their locus of control.?Having outsiders as guests at the retrospective will change the dynamics but at least it is a team decision to do so. This is a good reminder why we constrain attendance. There was a twitter debate lately that talked about a team being subjected to “a drive by criticism from 2 PM’s during a Retrospective”. The retrospective should absolutely be a closed door session for the stakeholders since the retrospective must be a “safe space”. I would suggest that the team should decide whether or not to include the Product owner. Retrospectives are about improving the process, and a non-trivial part of that is optimization of collaboration between the PO and the team. Hopefully the PO is engaged enough with the team to understand its weaknesses and support improvement in those areas whether then attend the meetings or not.
If the PO doesn’t participate, at least as an observer, the team runs the risk of having to “sell” the cost of their improvement actions (against other backlog items) after coming up with them. Having managers in the room can definitely have a dampening effect on the member’s willingness to be open and honest about problems and solutions. I have also seen many situations where the PO is also the resource manager of members of the team (which in itself is not recommended). I have also had several situations where as the coach I had to ban the PO from the retrospective because they were too commanding and disruptive in the meeting for the team to have an effective retrospective. Including the PO in the retrospective can help the PO assimilate with the team. I favor building trust between the business (the PO is their representative) and IT (the team). I have been in many situations where the PO was welcomed at the retrospective, and felt left out if not included. Keep in mind though that the PO may come and go but the team should stay together so it is most important that the team works well together.?As a coach, I usually talk to the PO beforehand to say that they are an invited guest and that it is a privilege to be part of the meeting so they should act accordingly. In general, I would start by including the PO in the retrospectives because the team does have to learn and adjust to working with the PO. Should the Product Owner participate in the retrospective? The team votes because they are on the hook for delivering based on the sizing and the estimates but the PO is not on the hook, so they don’t get a vote. They are not allowed to participate in the planning poker for the user stories for the same reason. They certainly interact with the team but they do not contribute to meeting the deliverables for the iteration so they are not a member of the team. This includes: developers, testers, BAs, QAs, or other specialists such as technical writers, database engineers etc. If the retrospective is a team ceremony, then what do we mean by team? The team includes: the team lead, the architecture owner and all other members that actively contributed to meeting the deliverables for the iteration. The team lead will facilitating the retrospective and should manage the interactions to keep the environment safe. This is a time of growth for the team and for the team to take ownership of improvement. This is their opportunity to air their dirty laundry and work through their inter-personal issues.
It needs to be a “safe place” where people are able to speak openly and honestly. This is the time the team spends together to assess how they are working together and define steps to improve that process. The retrospective is one of the most important ceremonies in all of agile.
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