All activities
Pick a format that fits your team, your time, and the conversation you actually need. If you know the question but not the format, start from the retrospective questions instead.
Start, Stop, Continue
Three simple buckets that surface what to begin, end, and keep doing.
4Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For)
A reflective four-column retro for end-of-project lessons.
Sailboat
A four-quadrant retro for naming structural friction without pointing at a person.
Two Truths and a Lie
A classic icebreaker that gets teams talking in five minutes.
Word Association
The lowest-friction warm-up there is — pick a meaty seed word and the room tells you its mood.
Personal Map
Your name in the centre, branches for the parts of life you choose to share. Connection, not disclosure.
Hopes and Fears
A pre-mortem that doesn't admit to being a pre-mortem. Run it before kickoff; come back at the halfway mark.
ESVP
A thermometer for the room. If half the team voted Prisoner, you're running the wrong meeting.
Plus / Delta
A five-minute closer for a one-hour meeting. Not a sprint retro.
The Prime Directive
Norman Kerth's frame for a blameless retro. Read it the first time. Skip it the tenth.
Dot Voting
Three dots, vote silently, the senior person votes last. Anything else is a popularity contest with a sticker budget.
Mad / Sad / Glad
Mad first or you wasted the meeting. Glad-first is hosting; Mad-first is working.
KALM (Keep / Add / Less / More)
SSC with the edge filed off. Run it when 'Stop' feels confrontational and 'Less' feels survivable.
DAKI (Drop / Add / Keep / Improve)
The four-column variant that splits Keep from Improve. Improve is where the work hides.
Lean Coffee
The retrospective for when you have more topics than time. The timer is the format.
Rose / Bud / Thorn
The format you run when 'Mad' is too sharp for the room. Engineering teams should pick something else.
Speedboat
Sailboat is Speedboat with a wind column. Run Sailboat unless you specifically want anchors-only.
5 Whys
A technique inside a retro, not a retrospective on its own. Twenty minutes on one specific incident.
Timeline Retrospective
End-of-quarter, end-of-project. The mood line is the format. Don't run it on a sprint.
What Went Well / What Didn't
Two columns is too few. If you want a retrospective, use Start/Stop/Continue. If you want a journal, use this.
Fishbone (Ishikawa) Diagram
Five Whys gives you a chain. Fishbone gives you a map. Software bugs almost always need the map.
One-Word Check-In
The cheapest diagnostic that exists. Treat the word as data, not warm-up.
Temperature Check
A barometer with a half-life. Anonymous extends the runway; rotating the question keeps it sharp.
Niko-Niko Calendar
A longitudinal mood format dressed as a daily ritual. One day's dot is nothing; six weeks of dots is the format.
Appreciations (Kudos)
Specific or skip. 'Thanks for being awesome' is worse than silence.
Roman Vote
A technique that lives inside Lean Coffee. Thumbs up extends; thumbs down moves on; sideways is the warning sign.
Fist of Five
A confidence check before commitment, not a vote. The signal is the low end.
Remember the Future
The press release dated six months out. Past tense or you're back to a wishlist.
Pre-Mortem
Anonymous or you wasted the meeting. The senior person's fears anchor the room.
Draw the Team
Works for design teams and offsites. Skip it for engineering on a Tuesday.
Strengths Spotting
'What's X really good at?' is the format. 'What's X's strength?' is a 360 review.
Starfish Retrospective
Start/Stop/Continue plus two dials — More of and Less of catch the practices that are mis-dosed, not broken.
Kerth's Four Key Questions (The Original 4)
Every column retro descends from these four questions. The paraphrases kept the columns and lost the point.
I Like, I Wish, I Wonder
A three-stem feedback retro for demo days — critique the thing you built, not the process you ran.
Circles and Soup (Circle of Influence)
A three-ring sort for the team drowning in complaints about things it can't control.
Hot Air Balloon
Sailboat's forward-looking sibling — half the board is about the sprint you haven't run yet.
Satisfaction Histogram
A 1-5 vote read as a shape, not an average. A bimodal team is two teams; the outlier's story is the retro.
Browse by category
Retrospective Activities
Formats for reflecting on the past sprint, project, or quarter.
Energizer Activities
Quick warm-ups that get a team talking, laughing, and ready to focus.
Team Building Activities
Slow-burn formats that turn coworkers into people who know one fact about each other beyond the job title.
Futurespectives
Retrospectives run forwards — surface the risks before they become incidents.
Check-in Activities
Two minutes at the top of the call to read the room before you commit to an agenda.
Check-out Activities
Five-minute closers that name what just happened — not retros disguised as closers.
The Prime Directive
The frame that keeps a retrospective about systems, not people.
Filtering Techniques
How a team turns twenty cards into one decision without the loudest voice winning.