Using MIRO to Build a Living Archive of Learning | Scott Smith

Summary

Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Scott Smith
Episode Title: Using MIRO to Build a Living Archive of Learning
Date: December 4, 2025

In this episode, Vasco Duarte and guest Scott Smith, an experienced Scrum Master, discuss innovative uses of Miro for retrospectives, methods for creating a ‘living archive’ of team learning, and techniques for measuring and nurturing team success. The conversation explores practical tips for Scrum Masters, celebrates the importance of team history, and highlights actionable ways to gauge and support thriving Agile teams.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Favorite Retrospective Format: Using Miro as a Team Archive

• Scott's Approach ([01:34] - [02:37]):

  • Prefers using a single, evolving Miro board for all team retrospectives.
  • Draws from the "Miroverse" to incorporate various themed templates (e.g., Christmas, Halloween, Easter).
  • Keeps retrospectives fun, varied, and engaging for the team.
  • Maintains a shared space for teams to revisit actions from past retrospectives and easily follow up on improvements.

  "It keeps everything on the one board as well. So you can easily see your last retrospective's actions, follow up on those prior to starting your next retrospective."
  — Scott Smith [02:37]

• Team History & Identity Building ([03:02] - [04:52]):

  • Vasco underscores the value of accumulating retrospectives in a single place for building team history and identity.
  • Reflects on earlier days where flip charts lined the team room, preserving key team moments and stories.
  • Highlights how such archives help introduce new team members and foster a sense of belonging.

  "It creates this concept of having a history as a team... The flip charts kind of told the story of some of the key moments of the team over time."
  — Vasco Duarte [03:30]

• Celebration & Onboarding ([04:52] - [06:43]):

  • Scott describes creating end-of-year videos from Miro board snapshots as a tool for reflection and team celebration.
  • Archives like these help onboard new team members and communicate progress to stakeholders.

  "A previous Scrum Master... had taken all of the boards and created a little end of year video... providing little celebratory moments... And watch this video and see what we had done."
  — Scott Smith [05:40]

2. Defining Success as a Scrum Master

• Human-Centered Success ([07:09] - [08:19]):

  • Emphasizes serving as a servant leader, with success defined not just by team growth but by whether the team is truly thriving—including the Product Owner.
  • Success means high engagement, satisfaction, and functionality across all roles.

  "If the team is thriving, so not just growing, but if the team is really thriving, then I feel that is a huge indication of success."
  — Scott Smith [07:09]

• Measuring Thriving Teams ([08:19] - [10:19]):

  • Utilizes a mix of lightweight, continuous feedback mechanisms and formal checkpoints:
    • Daily “Vibe Checks”: Informal, in-scrum discussions about the current sprint’s progress.
    • Quarterly Planning & Retrospectives: Reflection and celebration at longer intervals.
    • Mid-Quarter Anonymous Surveys: Pulse-checks with 6-7 targeted questions for more honest feedback.
    • Monthly Showcases: Provide indirect signals on team morale and excitement for the work.

  "On a sprint by sprint basis we will do things like mid sprint vibe checks... for the sprint vibe check we really take action there and then if someone raises an issue."
  — Scott Smith [08:19], [11:04]

3. Action Tracking, Continuous Improvement, and Team Evolution

• Action-Oriented, Transparent Facilitation ([11:04] - [12:37]):

  • Sprint vibe checks spur immediate actions during daily scrums.
  • Survey feedback is anonymized, themed, and shared back to the team to co-create improvement plans.
  • Patterns and recurring issues are tracked for insight and long-term team growth.

  "I'll collect the feedback... remove any duplicates, create any themes... I'll share that back to the department... and then co-create... the actions."
  — Scott Smith [11:51]

• The Value of Tracking Actions Over Time ([12:37] - [13:24]):

  • Retaining a record of actions and discussions allows teams to identify their evolving needs—reflecting growth or recurring challenges.
  • Teams with stronger foundations move on from “basic” issues to focus on innovation and continuous improvement.

  "If you keep that over time, you can see what kind of actions are relevant over time and you can observe the development of the team."
  — Vasco Duarte [12:37]

4. Leveraging AI for Team Insights

• Future Potential with LLMs ([13:24] - [14:12]):

  • Suggests leveraging large language models (LLMs) to automate tracking and scoring of team health based on retrospective actions.
  • Can help identify trends and support data-driven facilitation.

  "With today's LLMs, I guess we could even probably create a score based on the actions tracked over time and kind of track that score over time."
  — Vasco Duarte [13:53]

  "LLMs is a big piece of what we in our department being AI, an AI domain do a lot of work with. So creating LLMs for various use cases..."
  — Scott Smith [13:53]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Using Miro for Team Identity:
  "It creates this concept of having a history as a team." — Vasco Duarte [03:02]

• On Celebrating with Archives:
  "Creating a little end of year video... providing little celebratory moments where we could come together and... see what we had done." — Scott Smith [05:40]

• On Team Thriving as the Ultimate Measure:
  "If the team is thriving... then I feel that is a huge indication of success." — Scott Smith [07:09]

• On Tracking Team Health with LLMs:
  "With today's LLMs, I guess we could even probably create a score based on the actions tracked over time..." — Vasco Duarte [13:53]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:11 - Vasco introduces Scott and the theme of the episode
• 01:34 - Scott describes his favorite retrospective format using Miro
• 03:02 - Discussion on team history, identity, and benefits of an evolving retrospective archive
• 04:52 - Using archives/videos to celebrate and onboard new members
• 06:43 - Transition to defining success as a Scrum Master
• 07:09 - Scott shares his definition of success (team thriving)
• 08:19 - Measuring team health with "vibe checks," surveys, and showcases
• 11:04 - Action-taking and feedback mechanisms in practice
• 12:37 - Importance of tracking actions and team evolution
• 13:53 - Potential of LLMs to automate team health tracking
• 14:17 - Episode wrap-up

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Conclusion

This episode delivers practical advice for Scrum Masters looking to deepen team learning and engagement through digital retrospectives. Scott and Vasco showcase how tools like Miro can serve as evolving team museums, boosting reflection, celebration, and onboarding. Their focus on regular, human-centered feedback and action tracking—supported by emerging AI—provides listeners with fresh ideas to nurture and measure team thriving in the Agile space.

Transcript

[A]

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Hello everybody. Welcome to our success Thursday. This week we have with us Scott Smith. Hey, Scott, welcome back.

[B]

Hey Vasco, thanks for having me.

[A]

Absolutely. So Thursday is success day and we will talk about success in a minute. But first, share with us. Scott, what's your favorite retrospective format and why?

[B]

Yeah, so over the years there have been many different approaches to retros, but what I really enjoy for the last few has been using Miro or Miro.

So we set up a bunch of Miro boards. Well, actually it's one Miro board that I've set up for one team and I'll generally use the Miroverse where I can get many, many templates of retrospectives and I take copies of those onto a single Miro board for a team retrospectives. And we work our way through those various templates sprint by sprint. I find that the templates are often fun, engaging, often themed as well. So you have your Christmas ones, your Halloween ones, your Easter ones, and.

It keeps everything on the one board as well. So you can easily see your last retrospective's actions, follow up on those prior to starting your next retrospective. And the team really enjoy, I suppose, the variation of boards each Sprint or each retrospective. So it keeps things a bit interesting for them and fun.

[A]

Absolutely. I like the idea of having multiple retrospectives in one single digital board because you can zoom in and work on the current one, but you can quickly zoom out and check the other ones. It allows people to kind of browse through. Oh, how have I talked about the different aspects over the previous. And it creates what I think is very important for the growth of a team. It creates this concept of having a history as a team.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because if you look at it, most history artifacts for a team are either version control commits or issue tracking items. None of those we will want to look back on very fondly and remember. Right. They are all things we want to get out of our way, put it in the past, done, check and never look at it. But looking at retrospectives can become that. Especially if you bring in into the retrospective some, some history, some identity building exercises that then get collated through the multiple retrospectives over time. So I really like that idea. And we used to do that very early on. Like this was my first Scrum team where we had all of our retrospective flip charts because it was of course, many years ago, so we were all on flip charts and we had the flip charts all over the room. It was a big room. And the flip charts kind of told the story of some of the key moments of the team over time. And that really helped to create identity and it also helped introduce new team members because we could just go to the board and point to it and kind of discuss what had been going on. Have you used your own retrospective maroboards as kind of a, let's call it the team museum as well?

[B]

Yeah, you're absolutely spot on. We do.

We use them as a point of celebration. I think a couple of years back it wasn't myself that created it, but a previous Scrum master who was working on the team before I took over, had taken all of the boards and created a little end of year video. You know, put together a bit of a video using snapshots of the. The board and the. And the, the walked through the year, essentially providing little celebratory moments where we could come together and. And watch this video and see what we had done, all the good work that they had done throughout the year. So yeah, yeah, it's.

A great way to do it. And another actually way of telling that story as well, which we use is collecting our Sprint goals in a single place and, you know, having a walkthrough of those Sprint goals at a certain point in time. It might be the end of the year, end of the financial year, you know, gives a great history. And also, like you said, new people joining the team. And it's fantastic for them to be able to see a snapshot of things like Sprint goals or retrospectives. And Sprint reviews is another one that we do it with. So we have a single PowerPoint pack which gets built upon each sprint and it tells the Story of it tells the story from a Sprint review perspective, which also of course includes stakeholders and people who join the organization or the team can go in and listen to those and hear back what's happened Sprint by sprint. Absolutely.

[A]

Scott, thank you for sharing that. That was a great intro to a different aspect of the retrospective. Right. Like the logistics of how we collect information over time. But of course we do this retros because we want to help the team succeed and ourselves. We want to succeed as Scrum Masters. So share with us. Scott, when you think about yourself as a Scrum Master, how do you define success?

[B]

For me, always come back to the people and the human aspects of it. So as a Scrum Master, you're there in that servant leadership role. And if the team is thriving, so not just growing, but if the team is really thriving, then I feel that is a huge indication of success. And when I talk to the team, I mean that includes the product owner as well as, you know, the devs. So you're not only helping those on the ground, but they're doing the technical work, but also that product owner is important in that journey too.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. When you think about this idea, is the team thriving? That's a great question to start with and to start reflecting on. But how do you, Scott, how do you define that? How do you explore that question? What things do you look at? Do you keep any metrics? Do you journal regularly? How do you keep tabs on the answer to the question, is the team thriving?

[B]

Yeah, sure. So we keep, we do light touch on a regular basis as opposed to having sort of checkpoints every quarter or something like that. Although we do have those checkpoints because we do quarterly planning. But on a sprint by sprint basis we will do things like mid sprint vibe checks. So we're in daily Scrum and we'll have a quick vibe check on how we're going on the sprint.

So that doesn't necessarily tell you how the team's feeling or the team's health, but it tells you more about the health of the sprint. Perhaps. But we also then have quarterly planning where we do a retrospective. That's a point in time where we can check back and celebrate on the last quarter, see where we need to improve for next upcoming quarter and get a get a check in with the team in terms of how they're feeling, what their challenges are, what they're excited about, etc. And during that quarter we do a mid quarter vibe check. So that's more of.

An anonymous survey where we will get a Bit of a pulse check on the health of the team. So really just half a dozen questions.

To get a feel for how the team's tracking in terms of.

Each individual. And it really gives us some pointers as to is there anything that we need to change?

Is there anywhere we would need to pivot? So we have the, yeah, the quarterly check in the pulse and then we have our regular management who do their showcases each month. I suppose that's more of a show and tell.

But you also hear a lot from the team during those showcases, which gives you a bit of an indication as to, you know, what's the excitement and the buzz around the department.

[A]

So when you think about this, you call them vibe checks. So I guess these are kind of light, more kind of a question, maybe the fist of five type of checks. And when you think about that, the vibe checks that you do mid sprint and then the quarterly what kind of infrastructure have you put in place? For example, when you do the sprint vibe check, do you then somehow track that somewhere or like, how do you do it?

[B]

So for the sprint vibe check we really take action there and then if someone raises an issue that we're not tracking towards a sprint goal or part of the sprint goal, then we'll talk about it during that daily scrum there. And then to understand what is it that we need to do next to ensure that we stay on track. And when we talk those sort of mid quarter vibe checks, where it's more of an anonymous survey, I'll collect the feedback. I will start to pull together some, remove any duplicates, create any themes that are, that are starting to show any patterns. I'll share that back to the department.

And then co create, you know, working with them, the actions that we're going to take. And generally I'll perhaps be driving those, but working.

With certain members of the team to be able to achieve any of the actions that come out of those vibe checks. Similarly, the quarterly planning, those actions are taken themes, any patterns looked for and again continually track those. And it's all about, you know, that continuous communication at certain points to let people know how we're tracking towards the actions that we've taken from the vibe check or the portal planning.

[A]

And I really like the idea of tracking actions that we collect no matter when, of course, but then at those specific points when we actually do this, either mid sprint by check or then quarterly planning. And the reason for that is not because we want to track everything that is decided, that's not the goal, but rather that if you Keep that over time. You can see what kind of actions are relevant over time and you can observe the development of the team. Right. Like a team that is thriving will have certain needs. Like for example, a team that is thriving might need more support from management to continue to grow. A team that is not thriving will have internal problems with, will have basic things that are not in place. Like for example, lack of communication.

Dependencies that are not handled, surprises mid sprint. Like all of those things. Right. A team that is thriving is looking forward, is trying to get better and we can see that in the actions. While a team that is not thriving will be worried about day to day things and that will also be visible in the actions. And with today's LLMs, I guess we could even probably create a score based on the actions tracked over time and kind of track that score over time.

[B]

Yeah, great point. And LLMs is a big piece of what we in our department being AI, an AI domain do a lot of work with. So creating LLMs for various use cases across.

Business. So that's another use case that we can take on.

[A]

Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that with us, Scott.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

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