Sprint Retrospectives
The meeting most likely to skip when the week is hard. Also the meeting most likely to fix the reason it was hard.
Why this matters
Sprints accumulate small frictions that nobody has time to flag in the moment. The retrospective is the contract that says: this is when we look at them. Done well, it converts last sprint's friction into next sprint's adjustment. Done badly — or skipped — the friction compounds until something breaks and the postmortem you're now writing is much more expensive than the retro you didn't run.
Recommended activities
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.
Word Association
The lowest-friction warm-up there is — pick a meaty seed word and the room tells you its mood.
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.
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.
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.
How to run it
Thirty minutes is plenty. Open with a one-word check-in to clear the throat. Run Start/Stop/Continue or a similar fast format. Close with one Stop and one Start the team commits to. Don't try to fix three things at once — pick one, run it for a sprint, see what happens. Steady small adjustments beat ambitious overhauls every time.