Project Retrospectives#

Where experience accumulates.

A retrospective is a structured look back at a completed project (or project phase) to capture what worked, what didn’t, and what to do differently next time. It’s the difference between ten years of experience and one year of experience repeated ten times. In hardware design, where iteration cycles are long and mistakes are expensive, retrospectives are where the most valuable learning happens.

These entries are frameworks for reflection — templates for thinking about projects after they’re done. They’re less technical than other sections and more about developing the habit of deliberate learning from experience.

What This Section Covers#

• What Was Surprising — Identifying the gaps between expectation and reality that reveal where intuition needs recalibration.
• What Failed Quietly — Finding the subtle degradations and silent process breakdowns that don’t announce themselves.
• What Assumptions Broke — Tracing design failures back to the beliefs that turned out to be wrong.
• What to Do Differently Next Time — Converting hindsight into actionable changes for future projects.
• Turning Mistakes into Patterns — Building reusable checklists, templates, and rules from hard-won lessons.