Eurowings Turn Digital

Eurowings is part of the Lufthansa Group, one of the leading airlines in the European market. In 2018, the airline established a subsidiary called Eurowings Digital to support the transformation of the Eurowings brand from an airline to a holistic digital travel companion for the entire travel chain. 

Since its inception, Eurowings Digital has been tackling some crucial challenges within the travel industry, including: 

  • Customer needs are continuously changing and becoming more and more digital. Eurowings Digital has a strong focus on customer experience to enable the group to offer quick solutions for any change in this area. 
  • The airline and travel market are complex and changing significantly. By having a focus on new trends through Eurowings Digital, Eurowings wants to take advantage of its leading position in the European airline market to become a strong player in this new market.
  • To create the best digital services, Eurowings needs the best tech talents. Eurowings Digital wants to offer an environment that attracts these talents. 

Rebecca Graf is the Scrum Master at Eurowings Digital and her work focuses on being a key driver and problem solver in Eurowings agile environment, working within a team and supporting the entire organisation. 

In my role I help our Squad teams to live the agile values and also support them to remove blockers or to solve other dependencies, allowing the Squad teams to work at 100% capacity without issues.”

Rebecca Graff Eurowings

Image credit: Rebecca Graf

Remote Retrospective Challenge for the Scrum Team

remote retrospective challenge at Eurowings

Image credit: Eurowings Digital

Eurowings Digital follows a scrum methodology for its team’s sprints. While the team has worked in a partially remote environment before, they have always conducted their sprint change face to face and when every team member is in the office. 

When COVID-19 hit, the Eurowings team moved to complete remote work and were not able to continue the normal face to face component of their scrum methodology. 

“Suddenly I could not create flipcharts for retrospectives, distribute Post-It and have dots voting on them anymore,” commented Rebecca. 

“I had no previous experience in remote retrospective work and needed to find a way to handle the retrospectives in a structured and efficient way, particularly at this difficult time.”

“The important criteria for me was for the remote retrospectives to remain diverse and the team should have fun still with it.” 

An online solution to run remote retrospectives

Remote retrospective with TeamRetro

Remote retros with TeamRetro

To support her team and the Eurowings Digital organization to continue their retrospectives, Rebecca went in search for a remote retrospective solution. 

“I asked around, researched and tried out different options for remote retrospectives. These ranged from simple Google Doc to Confluence Templates and various tools, some explicitly made for this purpose like TeamRetro, others a bit more universally applicable,” explained Rebecca.

Rebecca signed up for the 30 days free trials of TeamRetro to gauge its suitability for her team and organization. The trial helped Rebecca decide to use TeamRetro for Eurowings Digital.

“In this trial phase, TeamRetro convinced me because it is easy and intuitive to use, offers a HealthCheck in addition to the functionality for the retrospective itself and also offers other pleasant features like tool integrations for Slack as well as a nice documentation.”

Benefits of going remote with your retrospectives

Rebecca explains that with TeamRetro, her team and organization are now supported to conduct their remote retrospectives effectively. 

Every remote retrospective now starts with a follow up on the action items which can be done really easy within the team dashboard in TeamRetro. This allows for the team to quickly discuss each single action item and check it if it’s done. 

Then the team would move on to the HealthCheck and they use the Custom Health Check here. The set of questions and the choices are the same for all teams, to allow a comparison of the results. 

“As the HealthCheck is meant to get a quick overview it really suits our need as it can be filled out in just seconds.”

Team health check with TeamRetro

Team health check with TeamRetro

Rebecca also explains that the various templates in TeamRetro helps to create a good structure to the remote retrospectives, keeping teams focussed and the retros highly productive. 

Remote retrospective templates

TeamRetro ready to use templates

“We use Retrospectives in various versions. Depending on what is required, we use the ready-made templates or create our own retrospective. We like the given process of Brainstorm > Group > Vote > Discuss > Review > Share very much. It’s easy to follow and gives the whole meeting a good structure.”

“The collection of topics can be done really easily, the grouping works quite well, the voting helps to focus on the most important topics and the timer ensures that you don’t lose track of time.” 

Remote Retrospective gets the tick of approval!

By using TeamRetro, Rebecca was able to support her squad team to continue to run one of the most important parts of the scrum methodology – retrospectives – remotely. 

Through the experience, Rebecca and her team have also provided many valuable feedback to enhance the TeamRetro experience so the platform continues to help teams around the world to run remote retrospectives and deliver every sprint effectively and productively, in the face of a global pandemic. 

“Teamretro helped us massively to run efficient and well-structured remote retrospectives. Furthermore, I can save myself the trouble of documenting the results afterwards, as everything is automatically available in TeamRetro.”

TeamRetro Health Check

TeamRetro Health Check

Try TeamRetro 

Are you and your team or organization looking to conduct remote retrospectives and team health checks? Whether you have a partially remote, fully remote or hybrid work environment, TeamRetro can help to make sure that your important retros run efficiently and in an engaging manner. 

Try it FREE today for 30 days!