From designpowers
Conducts structured retrospectives after shipping design projects: evaluates what worked and didn't, taste decisions, process issues, and feeds learnings into design-memory for sharper future projects.
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A retrospective is not a post-mortem. Post-mortems examine failures. Retrospectives examine the whole process — wins, misses, surprises, and taste evolution. This skill runs after a project ships and turns hindsight into foresight for the next one.
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A retrospective is not a post-mortem. Post-mortems examine failures. Retrospectives examine the whole process — wins, misses, surprises, and taste evolution. This skill runs after a project ships and turns hindsight into foresight for the next one.
verification-before-shipping passes and the project is declared completeBefore reflecting, assemble the full record:
design-state.md — the decisions log, handoff chain, and open questionsFor each major design decision that survived to shipping:
### What Worked
| Decision | Why It Worked | Evidence |
|----------|--------------|----------|
| [Decision from state log] | [Why this was the right call] | [User approved, critic passed, no fix rounds needed] |
| ... | ... | ... |
Look for:
For decisions that required rework, debate, or user correction:
### What Didn't Work
| Decision | What Went Wrong | Root Cause | Fix Rounds |
|----------|----------------|------------|------------|
| [Original decision] | [What happened] | [Why it happened — misread brief? ignored taste? wrong assumption?] | [How many iterations to fix] |
| ... | ... | ... | ... |
Look for:
Evaluate the workflow itself, not just the output:
### Process Assessment
**Pipeline efficiency:**
- Agents dispatched: [X of 9]
- Agents skipped: [list and why]
- Fix rounds: [count] — [were they necessary or preventable?]
- Mode used: [direct/auto/mixed] — [did the mode serve the project?]
**Handoff quality:**
- Were handoff messages specific enough?
- Did any agent miss context from the previous agent?
- Were there gaps where information was lost between agents?
**Debate moments:**
- Were there decisions that should have been debated but weren't?
- Were debates held that didn't need to be?
- Did debate outcomes hold, or were they revisited?
**User engagement:**
- How often did the user override or redirect?
- Were overrides concentrated in one area? (signals a systematic gap)
- Did the user switch from auto to direct? (signals the system missed something)
Review the Design Debt Register from design-state.md:
### Design Debt
**Register status:**
- Total items created: [count]
- Resolved: [count] ([percentage])
- Accepted: [count] — [were these the right trade-offs?]
- Still Open: [count] — [should any escalate?]
- Escalated during project: [count]
**Debt patterns:**
- Most affected persona: [name] — [X items affect them]
- Most common source: [design-critic/accessibility-reviewer]
- Average age of open items: [duration]
**Debt health:**
- [ ] Are we resolving debt faster than we create it?
- [ ] Are the same types of issues recurring? (signals a systemic problem)
- [ ] Did any accepted debt turn out to matter more than expected?
Compare the taste profile at project start vs project end:
### Taste Evolution
**New strong opinions formed:**
- [Opinion] — from [evidence in this project]
**Soft patterns confirmed:**
- [Pattern] — now promoted to strong opinion because [evidence]
**Soft patterns rejected:**
- [Pattern] — this project showed it was contextual, not a preference
**New anti-patterns discovered:**
- [Anti-pattern] — rejected because [reason]
**Taste surprises:**
- [Unexpected preference] — the user surprised us by choosing [X] over [Y]
What should the next project know?
### Carry Forward
**For the next project:**
- [Lesson learned that applies broadly]
- [Process improvement to try]
- [Taste insight to remember]
**For specific agents:**
| Agent | Lesson |
|-------|--------|
| **design-lead** | [e.g., "User prefers to see colour options before committing — show swatches, not descriptions"] |
| **design-strategist** | [e.g., "Spend more time on the navigation model early — it affected everything downstream"] |
| **content-writer** | [e.g., "User reads everything — content quality matters more than expected"] |
| ... | ... |
**Open questions for next time:**
- [Unresolved question that might be relevant in future projects]
Compile everything into a single document:
# Design Retrospective: [Project Name]
**Date:** [YYYY-MM-DD]
**Duration:** [How long the project ran]
**Mode:** [direct/auto/mixed]
**Agents used:** [X of 9]
## Summary
[3-5 sentences: what was built, what worked, what was hard, what we learned]
## What Worked
[From Step 2]
## What Didn't Work
[From Step 3]
## Process Assessment
[From Step 4]
## Design Debt
[From Step 5]
## Taste Evolution
[From Step 6]
## Carry Forward
[From Step 7]
Save to: [project-root]/design-retrospective.md
After the retrospective is written:
design-memory to consolidate taste learningsShow the retrospective to the user as a summary:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
DESIGN RETROSPECTIVE: [Project Name]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
WINS:
• [Top 2-3 things that worked well]
MISSES:
• [Top 2-3 things that needed rework]
TASTE LEARNED:
• [Key taste insights from this project]
DESIGN DEBT:
• Open: [count] | Resolved: [count] | Accepted: [count]
• Most affected: [persona]
CARRY FORWARD:
• [Top 2-3 lessons for next time]
EFFICIENCY:
• Fix rounds: [count]
• User overrides: [count]
• Agents used: [X of 9]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Your taste profile has been updated.
Next project starts smarter.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
using-designpowers (after project completion or on user request)design-state.md (including Design Debt Register), taste profile, critique documents, verification results[project-root]/design-retrospective.mddesign-memory (to update taste profile with learnings)design-memory, verification-before-shipping, designpowers-critique| Pattern | Why It Fails |
|---|---|
| Skipping retrospective because the project "went fine" | Even smooth projects teach you something. "Why did this go well?" is as valuable as "why did this go wrong?" |
| Blaming agents for wrong decisions | Agents are tools. If the output was wrong, the question is what context they were missing, not what they did wrong |
| Only looking at what failed | Wins are data too. Understanding what worked is how you replicate it |
| Not updating the taste profile | The retrospective is wasted if it doesn't feed forward. The whole point is making the next project better |
| Running retrospective in auto mode | Retrospectives need user reflection. Always run in direct mode with pauses for user input |