Running retros on your own work
What went well? What didn't? What would you do differently? Five minutes of honest reflection after each project catches patterns that months of work misses.
Retros feel like a team thing. But solo builders need them even more. When there's no team to notice your patterns, you repeat the same mistakes project after project. A five-minute retro after each feature catches those patterns before they become habits.
After you finish any significant piece of work, answer five questions honestly:
1. What went well? Keep doing this. 2. What went poorly? Stop doing this. 3. What surprised you? 4. What would you do differently next time? 5. What's the one thing to remember for the next project?
Write the answers down. Not because anyone else will read them, but because the act of writing forces clarity. 'Everything went fine' becomes 'I skipped the plan and it cost me two hours' when you're honest on paper.
After every piece of work that took more than a day. The five-minute retro has saved me from repeating the same mistakes across projects. The deploy misrouting bug I wrote about? Caught in a retro. Now it's a permanent safety check.
The retro that saves you the most is the one where you're honest about what went wrong.
Product leader shipping across enterprise SaaS, AI in production, and 0→1. Writing about what actually ships — not what sounds good in a deck.