Speedboat

When to use

Use Sailboat unless you specifically want anchors-only and the Speedboat name resonates with your team. Speedboat itself fits when you want a single-column gripe session with no positive column to soften it: end-of-project debrief, customer-feedback exercise, post-incident 'what slowed us down' inquiry. Skip it for sprint cadence — Sailboat is the same shape with more useful columns.

How it runs

1. Draw the boat

   Boat moving toward an island (the goal). Anchors hanging off the bottom of the boat, dragging it down. That's the whole drawing. Five minutes max.

2. Silent write — anchors only

   Ten minutes. One column: what's slowing the team down. The constraint is the format — no positive column means the cards have to come out as anchors or not at all.

3. Read every anchor aloud

   Cluster duplicates, then read each anchor out loud. Anchors named at someone go offline immediately; the retro is for systems.

4. Vote on the heaviest anchors

   Three dots each. Pick the top one or two. The single-column format makes the vote sharper than a four-quadrant retro — the dots aren't competing with positives.

5. Name owners and a deadline

   Each chosen anchor gets a name and a deadline. Otherwise you ran a complaint session.

Why it works

The anchors-only constraint is the format. By removing the positive column, you remove the team's escape hatch — there's nowhere to write 'we did great this sprint' to balance out the friction. That's useful when the goal is structural problems and useless when the team needs a balanced view. The original Speedboat was a customer-feedback game (anchors = product complaints); the lineage is why it has only one column.

Variations

• Add wind and rocks — that's Sailboat. Most teams want this. We have a Sailboat page; use it.
• Speed Car (Parabol's automotive variant) — same shape, engine and parachute instead of wind and anchor. Pick whichever metaphor lands for the team.
• Run anchors-only as a 30-minute pre-mortem before a project starts: 'what will become an anchor.' Different tense, same single column.

Facilitator notes

Speedboat exists in our catalogue because the format has its own attribution and history (Hohmann, Innovation Games), not because it's substantively different from Sailboat. If a team asks for Speedboat by name, run Speedboat. If a team asks 'which one should we run', the answer is Sailboat almost always.

Pitfalls

• Pretending Speedboat is meaningfully different from Sailboat. It isn't — Sailboat added wind to it. Be honest with the team.
• Skipping the positive column for a healthy team. The format is for surfacing structural friction; on a high-functioning team it produces a thin, grim board.
• Spending fifteen minutes drawing the boat. Five minutes. The metaphor is a tool, not the meeting.
• Anchors that name a person. Take it offline; the retro is for systems.

Remote tips

Single-column boards are the easiest format to run remotely — no zoom problems, no quadrant confusion. Pre-open the board 24 hours before; anchors benefit from overnight thinking.

Example outputs

• Anchor: the design review queue — three days median, blocking three of our six tickets.
• Anchor: the staging environment shared with QA. Every release week, collisions.
• Anchor: ticket scope creep mid-sprint. We've raised it three retros running, no change.
• Anchor: the on-call handover doc that nobody updates. Whoever inherits the rota is debugging from scratch.

FAQ

Speedboat or Sailboat?

Sailboat unless you specifically want anchors-only. Sailboat is Speedboat with a wind column added — same metaphor, more useful retro. The honest answer is most teams who think they want Speedboat actually want Sailboat; the only reason to run Speedboat is if you genuinely want a one-quadrant complaint board with no positive column.

Why do you have both pages then?

Speedboat has its own attribution (Luke Hohmann, Innovation Games) and history — it was a customer-feedback game before it was a retro. The page exists because the lineage is real. If you want the four-quadrant retrospective, the Sailboat page is what you want.

Related activities

Recommended use cases