Six retrospective formats and how to pick the right one

Most teams pick a retrospective format once and run it until everyone is bored. That works for a while. A format is a set of questions, though, and the same questions every two weeks start to produce the same answers. By month four the board fills with copies of last sprint's stickies, and the meeting ends early because nobody has anything new to say.

Switching formats helps, but only if the new one fits what happened. A team coming out of a painful launch needs different questions from a team wrapping up a six-month project. This guide covers six formats. For each one you get the columns, when it fits, how long to plan for and one mistake to watch for.

A note before we start. We make Prompt Board, and four of these formats have a ready-made template there. The other two, sailboat and starfish, don't have one yet. They're in this list because they're good formats, and you can run them on any whiteboard.

How to pick a retrospective format

Start from what happened since the last retro. Which format you haven't tried yet matters much less.

• A normal sprint with nothing unusual. Run the four-column sprint retro. It covers what most sprints need.
• The team needs to change habits and you have 30 minutes. Use start, stop, continue.
• A launch, an incident or a crunch left people tired or annoyed. Use mad, sad, glad.
• A project or pilot just ended and you want lessons the next one can reuse. Use the 4Ls.
• You're at the start of a quarter or a new goal and want to look at risks ahead. Use sailboat.
• The team has run retros for months and "start" and "stop" feel too blunt. Use starfish.

Two more rules of thumb. Change the format when the answers start repeating, not on a fixed schedule. And when you can't decide, pick the simpler one. A three-column retro that ends with two owned actions beats a five-column retro that runs out of time before anyone commits to anything.

The times assume a team of five to eight that writes in silence, groups the notes, votes and agrees on actions. Three people finish faster. With twelve, the read-out alone takes twice as long, so add time or split into two groups.

The four-column sprint retro

The sprint retrospective template has four frames: Went well, To improve, Ideas and Action items. People write into the first three. The last one stays empty until the team agrees what to do.

It fits most sprints. Nothing dramatic happened, the team has five to eight people, and you have an hour. Keeping Ideas apart from To improve is what makes it work, because a complaint and a proposal lead to different conversations. Our guide to running a remote retrospective walks through the full hour step by step, so I won't repeat it here.

Plan for about 55 minutes: five to check last time's actions, ten to write, fifteen to read out and group, five to vote, fifteen for action items and five to close.

Watch out for an empty Ideas column. If everyone writes complaints and nobody writes proposals, the action-item step starts from nothing and turns into a brainstorm with ten minutes left on the clock. Ask each person to add at least one idea before writing time ends.

Start, stop, continue

Three columns. Start is for things the team should begin doing, Stop is for habits to drop, and Continue is for what works well enough to keep. The start, stop, continue template comes with a sample board from a marketing team's quarter.

Every note describes a behaviour, so the output turns into changes with little rewording. That makes it a good fit for a short slot, for teams outside software that don't run sprints, and for reviewing a process or a tool instead of one sprint's events. It works with three people or ten.

Thirty minutes is enough for a small team: seven minutes to write, ten to read out and group, ten to pick the changes. Give it 45 with eight or more people.

The usual mistake is adding without removing. Start fills up with new habits, the team commits to four of them, and nothing comes out of Stop to make room. Discuss Stop first. Then allow one new habit for each one you drop.

Mad, sad, glad

This format sorts notes by feeling instead of topic. Mad holds what frustrated people, Sad holds the letdowns and Glad holds what went well. The mad, sad, glad template adds a fourth frame for actions, which the bare format leaves out.

Use it after a launch that slipped, after an incident, or after any sprint where standups told you the mood was off. Feelings come up in every retro anyway. Here they get their own column, so they stop leaking into every other discussion. It works best in a team small enough that people know each other, roughly four to eight. If the group is new, or a manager joins for the first time, expect a quieter Mad column.

Plan for 45 to 60 minutes. The talk around Mad and Sad runs longer than in a topic-based retro, so protect the last fifteen minutes for actions.

The common mistake is stopping at the feelings. The team reads out Mad, everyone agrees it was a bad month, and the meeting ends with nothing changed. For each large cluster, ask what would have prevented it, and write the answer in Actions with a name next to it. Also ask people to describe events and leave names out. Otherwise the Mad column turns into a list of colleagues.

4Ls: liked, learned, lacked, longed for

Four boxes: Liked, Learned, Lacked and Longed for. Lacked is what was missing or held the team back. Longed for is what people wish they'd had, looking ahead. The 4Ls retrospective template lays them out as quadrants.

The Learned box sets this one apart. It records lessons someone can use on the next project, which makes the 4Ls a good choice at the end of a project, a pilot or an experiment, when lessons matter more than this sprint's annoyances. It also suits larger cross-functional groups, because none of the four questions assumes everyone worked in the same sprint.

Give it 60 minutes for a team of five to eight, and up to 90 for a long project with more people. Ten minutes of writing is about right, since four boxes take longer to fill than three.

The mistake here is vague learnings. "Communication matters" and "test earlier" teach the next team nothing. Rewrite each Learned note as a sentence someone outside the team could act on, such as "Users skipped the product tour, so the key step belongs on the first screen." Then copy those sentences somewhere the next project will see them, like its kickoff board.

Sailboat

The sailboat retro is built on a picture. An island stands for the team's goal. Wind pushes the boat towards it, anchors hold it back, and rocks ahead could sink it. Some versions add more elements, but these four carry the format.

It looks further ahead than the other formats. Anchors cover what slowed you down last sprint, while Rocks ask about risks that haven't hit yet. That makes it useful at the start of a quarter, before a big release, or for a new team that needs to agree on where it's heading. People who find "what went wrong?" uncomfortable often open up more here, because the picture gives them something less personal to point at.

Plan for an hour. Spend the first five minutes writing the island together, then run it like any retro: silent writing, read-out, grouping and actions.

The mistake is skipping the island. Without a shared goal on the board, the wind and the anchors have nothing to refer to, and people describe different journeys. A smaller mistake is spending fifteen minutes drawing a nice boat. Four labelled frames do the same job.

Prompt Board has no sailboat template yet. Add four frames named Island, Wind, Anchors and Rocks, or type "sailboat retro for a product team two weeks before a release" into the AI whiteboard and edit the frames it drafts.

Starfish

Starfish has five columns: Keep doing, More of, Less of, Start doing and Stop doing. Think of it as start, stop, continue with two extra settings in the middle, so a habit can be turned up or down instead of only kept or dropped.

Those middle columns are the reason to use it. A team that has run retros for a while rarely needs to start or stop much. It needs a bit more pairing and a bit less last-minute review. Starfish gives those notes a home. It fits a team that has worked together for several months and has habits worth adjusting. With a new team, the extra columns mostly stay empty.

Plan for 45 to 60 minutes. Five columns take longer to read out than three, and the grouping step crosses columns more often.

The mistake is arguing about columns. Is "shorter standups" More of or Less of? It doesn't matter, and the debate eats the time you need for actions. Leave each note where its author put it, and group across columns when you look for themes.

There's no starfish template on Prompt Board either. The start, stop, continue template is a quick base. Rename Continue to Keep doing and add two frames for More of and Less of.

What stays the same in every format

The columns change from format to format. The habits that make a retro useful stay the same.

• Review last time's action items first. A team that never checks them soon stops taking them seriously.
• Have everyone write in silence before anyone talks, so the first speaker doesn't set the agenda.
• Leave with two or three action items, each with a named owner and a date.

If your last sprint was a quiet one, the sprint retrospective template is ready to go. If it wasn't, pick the format from the list at the top that matches what happened, and open its board before the meeting.