It’s good practice for companies to try to keep the number of official job roles to a minimum. It saves on administration and prevents people from boxing themselves in their role. In this exercise, we’ll flip this concept and see, if everyone can get a very specific or even unique job title.

This is best suited as an icebreaker for a retrospective.

 Timing5-10 minutes

 

Materials:

Pens, one blank index card per participant, a container

Instructions:

  1. Each person thinks back about the last sprint or iteration and what they did. Then based on that writes a job title that would match what they did. Try to be funny or silly and stay away from something that HR would come up with (e.g. “SW Engineer”, “Test automation expert”).
  2. Collect each participant’s job title in a container and mix them up.
  3. Pull out one piece of paper and read it aloud. The team tries to guess, who came up with the title (for themselves) and why. If they’re right, move on to the next piece of paper.

Learning Points:

This a good way to look back at the past sprint / iteration. It also sets a more relaxed, maybe even playful, mood at the beginning of the retrospective. Team members acknowledge each other’s input as they guess each participants job title. Additionally, team members who may be disgruntled by the work they needed to do recently have a way to voice it.

 

 

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