During our sprint four retrospective we met as a team and reflected on our experience as a whole. We recognized that we made a nontrivial number of mistakes throughout the project, which hurt our ability to efficiently work towards our final product - but also led to a lot of positive learning.

Retrospectively, we see our biggest pitfall as how we began each sprint. We approached each sprint with a stressed mindset driven by the time crunch which resulted in making decisions before we spent enough time thinking about them. This stressed mindset early in the design process created a positive feedback loop where we rushed the design process which created poor designs, which we then had to rework.

The driving factor behind our sometimes stressful mindset was our struggle to make decisions early in the project. As a team, we were frightened by the commitment that those decisions would signify. Our collective fear of commitment resulted in a lack of a solid design idea until the second sprint, which subsequently created the stress that drove our positive feedback loop.

Now viewing our work with a reflective perspective, we have all learned the importance of making decisions and approaching projects as an integrated entity rather than four sub-entities. Moving forward, we are excited to apply the lessons learned in this project to future projects we will work on at Olin and beyond!