A Project Retro With a Client Changed How We Worked Together Afterward

I'd always run internal retros on myself after a project phase, but never a version with the client in the room, on the theory that clients want results, not process navel-gazing. One engagement finally pushed me to try it anyway, after a phase that technically succeeded but had felt tense throughout, and I wanted to understand why before starting the next phase.

The retro was simple: what worked, what didn't, what should change before the next phase, asked of both of us, not just me reporting to them. The client's answer to "what didn't work" surprised me — they'd felt like status updates were too infrequent and too technical, and had been quietly anxious about progress the entire time despite the work actually being on track.

The work can be going fine and the relationship can still be quietly deteriorating, because those two things are measured completely differently and almost never get compared out loud.

What changed after that one conversation

• Switched to a shorter, more frequent update cadence, with less technical detail and more "here's where we are against the plan."
• Started explicitly naming what was going well, not just flagging problems — the client said they'd assumed silence meant things were fine, but silence actually read as avoidance.
• Added the retro itself as a standing step after every phase going forward, not a one-off reaction to a tense project.

The anxiety I'd never noticed had been building the entire previous phase, invisible to me because the only signal I was tracking was whether deliverables shipped on time. They did, every time, and I'd assumed that meant the relationship was fine. It wasn't the work that needed fixing — it was the only communication channel I'd been relying on to tell me whether it was.