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Retrospective Template

Pick a format, put the board on the shared screen and type the cards as the team calls them out. Tally the dot votes, turn the top cards into action items with an owner and a date, then print the summary or paste it into the team chat. No sign-up for anyone.

Five retrospective formats and when to use each

All five ask the same thing: what to keep, what to change, what to do next. They differ in how they get people talking.

  • Start / Stop / Continue

    The plainest format and the fastest to run. Good for a first retro, a short meeting or a team that wants straight answers. Every card is already half an action.

  • Went well / To improve / Action items

    Splits looking back from deciding. People fill the first two columns, then the team writes the third column together, so actions come from the discussion rather than from one loud voice.

  • 4Ls: Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed for

    Brings out learning and wishes, not only problems. Suits the end of a project, a launch or a quarter, when the team has more to say than "it went fine".

  • Mad / Sad / Glad

    Asks how people felt. Use it when morale is the real topic, after a hard month or a lost deal, and keep the facilitator strict about talking about events, not people.

  • Sailboat

    A picture people remember: the wind pushes the boat, anchors hold it back, rocks are the risks ahead and the island is the goal. Good for planning the next period as well as reviewing the last one.

How to run a retrospective in 45 minutes

The timebox on the board follows this plan. It is a suggestion: change the minutes to fit your team.

  1. Check-in (5 minutes): one question everyone answers in a word or a sentence, to get every voice in the room early.
  2. Add cards (10 minutes): people call out or write their points for each column; the facilitator types them on the board. One idea per card.
  3. Vote (5 minutes): everyone gets three dots (or the number you set) to spend on the cards that matter most. Tally them with + on each card.
  4. Discuss (15 minutes): sort by votes and talk through the top cards first. Ask what happened and why, not who.
  5. Agree actions (10 minutes): turn the top cards into one to three action items, each with an owner and a due date. Fewer actions that get done beat a long list.
  6. Print the summary or copy it into the team channel, and open the next retro by checking those actions.

Retrospectives beyond software sprints

The retrospective is best known as a software sprint meeting, but the questions work anywhere a team repeats its work. A sales team can run one at the end of a quarter (what moved deals, what stalled them), after a lost deal alongside the win-loss review, or after a trade show (which conversations were worth the booth). Event, project and onboarding teams use the same board.

Keep it blameless. The point is to change how the team works, so talk about what happened and what to do differently, not about who got it wrong.

Dot voting, done fairly

Set the votes per person before anyone votes; three is common for a board of 15 to 30 cards. Enter how many people are voting and the board shows how many dots are left, so nobody votes twice by accident. Let people put more than one dot on a card if it matters that much to them.

For sales teams: win-loss analysis, sales QBR, meeting cadence, parking lot in meetings, decision log template.

The reasons are in the discussion, not on the card.

A card says "handover was slow"; the five minutes of talk behind it say why and what to change. Record the retro with ParrotNotes and get the summary and action items, so the actions on the board match what the team agreed. Free for 100 minutes of recording a month.

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Related tools

Retrospective questions