My current team runs weekly retrospectives using the Lean Coffee format. More and more, I find that the items people are bringing up aren’t really important or could just be a question in Slack.

For example, someone recently made a topic for how we can test credit card payments. Another topic was navel gazing about how we use Jira and multiple team members asked “what’s the problem you’re hoping to solve?” to which the only answer was “That’s not what I’ve seen elsewhere”.

I’m beginning to think that there’s something wrong with our format or prompts, in that we aren’t identifying important issues for discussion. Perhaps the format is stale or there’s no serious issues lingering each week?

Any advice on alternative formats, how to get better feedback, etc. would be greatly appreciated.