How to Organise a Review of The Year Session for Your Team
By: Lucie Mclean
Tags: Agile, Collaboration, Team Building, Product Management, Leadership

A lot has happened in 2020 which you’d probably like to forget. But chances are, your team also did some really good work.

It’s precisely because this year has been a bit rubbish that celebrating what you achieved is really important. An easy way to do this is through a team ‘Review of the Year’ session.

This is a good thing to do for several reasons.

It’s easy to lose track of what has happened over the course of 12 months. Those demos you did in January and February feel a very, very, very long time ago now.

Given that many of us have been working from home for a while now, these events are also a good way for team members to find out what their colleagues have been doing whilst working from their kitchens for the past nine months. They’ll know some of the details — but things get lost and overlooked when people aren’t sat together.

These sessions are also a goldmine of information for anyone who has joined your team in the past year. It helps them find out more about their team members (who they may not have actually met in person), find out a little about their lives and what they’ve worked on.

So if you put one more meeting in your team’s diary this year — make it one of these.

But there’s a bit of prep to do, so make it a team effort. I’m sharing how I’ve prepared and structured these for the past few years. You might want to do it a different way — but if anything in my method inspires you to set up an in-person or virtual session of your own, consider it my holiday gift to you.

Find a host or two

This is a great role for people in your team who want to build their presenting and public speaking confidence. It’s presenting positive messages to friendly crowd who will be rooting for them to succeed.

If you’ve got a big team or lots of work to include, you might want to divide the year up into chunks for different hosts or find a couple of people to run it together. Try to avoid hosting if you are the team lead — make it about the team.

2. Get a date in the diary soon

Between an hour and two hours (with a break) should do it — depending on how big your team is. Make it time-neutral by cancelling a meeting (or two) which you can live without at this point in the year. No-one needs any more Zoom-time right now.

3. Create a skeleton presentation

If possible, build the outline of the review in a collaborative tool like Google Slides. Make a title page for each month and add a couple of example pieces of content to give people ideas about what to submit.

If you don’t have access to a collaborative tool, one person can be responsible for building the presentation if you communicate who to send things to and what the deadline is.

4. Invite the team to add their events

Send a message to the whole team, including the link to the presentation and invite them to start adding their highlights of the year.

Stick to maximum of one slide per ‘thing’. A ‘thing’ is anything that someone did which they are proud of. It could be launching a new feature, bashing a really annoying bug, hitting a KPI target, a great sale, some funny user feedback, taking part in a conference, conducting user tests, winning an award — anything.

I’ve seen some teams also add quiz questions throughout the deck. Things like ‘How many lines of code did we write this year?’ But the team decides what goes in the presentation. These are their stories.

5. Don’t forget about the happy personal events

Did anyone get married? Have a baby? Made an impressive sourdough loaf? Did new people join the team?Have you got any pictures from team events earlier in the year? Let the people in your team and share and celebrate whatever they want to (but don’t force them).

6. Make sure everyone is included

Encourage people to namecheck people they collaborated with and make sure that everyone has had an opportunity to contribute if they want to. Also don’t forget to call out and thank the awesome people who keep your team running too — your team assistants, interns etc. The world doesn’t turn without them.

7. It’s show time! Turn off your messages and fully engage

Suggest people grab a coffee, get comfy and turn off their mails and messages. As you run through the year, the hosts can invite some of the people who submitted slides about their work to say a few words about what they did and what they learned. You might also learn a thing or two about your team. Pay attention and do not look at your phone.

8. Say a few words — including two very important ones

One the review is finished, it might be nice to say a few words if you’re the team lead. If difficult things have happened this year which it would be weird not to mention then do acknowledge them. You’re not trying to erase history.

But the most important words you can say at this point are thank you. Then you can wish your team a happy, healthy 2021 — ideally with another great Review of the Year session at the end of it.

If you have any end of year ceremonies in your team I’d love to hear about them. Please do share them in the comments.