10 Retrospective Templates and When to Use Each One

Most teams pick a retrospective template once, usually Start Stop Continue, and then run it every two weeks until the heat death of the universe. The board fills with the same observations. "More documentation." "Fewer meetings." Someone owns an action item nobody revisits. Everyone leaves slightly more cynical about retros than they arrived.

The template isn't the problem. Running one template on autopilot is. A retrospective template is just a set of columns or prompts, and those columns quietly decide what the team talks about. A format built around emotion surfaces different things than one built around process. Same team, same sprint, different template, completely different conversation.

So the move isn't finding the one perfect template. It's having four or five and matching them to the moment. Here are ten worth knowing, what each one's actually good at, and when to reach for it.

Quick answer. For a normal sprint, Start Stop Continue or KALM. For the end of a project, 4Ls or Sailboat. For a team that feels off, Mad Sad Glad or Rose Bud Thorn. For turning talk into backlog items, DAKI. For a team bored of fixed columns, Lean Coffee. Rotate them so people keep thinking instead of pattern-matching.

The templates at a glance

You can run any of these in the browser from the retro prompt tool, which generates the prompts and keeps the timebox. The reasoning behind each pick is below.

The ten templates

1. Start, Stop, Continue

The classic. Three columns, fast to run, hard to argue with. What should we start doing, stop doing, and keep doing. It's the default for a reason, but it's also the one teams burn out on first because it blurs "we should fix this" and "we should keep this" into the same flat list.

Reach for it when you want a quick, low-ceremony retro and the team isn't carrying anything heavy. Run Start Stop Continue.

2. 4Ls

Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For. More texture than a three-column board because it splits learning from wishing, which Start Stop Continue tends to mash together. The "Longed For" column in particular pulls out the quiet wishes people don't usually voice.

Reach for it when a project or milestone just wrapped and you want reflection, not just a fix-list. Run 4Ls.

3. Mad, Sad, Glad

An emotional check-in. It surfaces the stuff the burndown chart can't see. What made people frustrated, what made them disappointed, what made them happy. The board looks soft, but a team that's quietly demoralized will tell you more here than in any process retro.

Reach for it when the metrics look fine but the energy doesn't. Run Mad Sad Glad.

4. Rose, Bud, Thorn

A garden metaphor that earns its keep. Rose is what's blooming, Bud is what's growing and could become something, Thorn is what's prickly. The Bud column is the useful part. It catches early-stage ideas and half-formed wins before they're obvious enough for a normal retro to notice.

Reach for it when you want to balance the good and the bad instead of letting the complaints dominate. Run Rose Bud Thorn.

5. Sailboat

Wind, anchors, rocks, island. A visual metaphor that travels well. The island is your goal, the wind is what's pushing you toward it, the anchors are what's slowing you down, and the rocks are the risks ahead. Because it's spatial, it remote-translates better than most, the picture does some of the facilitation for you.

Reach for it when the team needs to reconnect work to a goal, or you want to talk about upcoming risks, not just past events. Run Sailboat.

6. KALM

Keep, Add, Less, More. Subtler than Start Stop Continue because "Less" and "More" allow for dialing something up or down instead of the binary of starting and stopping. Most team problems aren't "stop doing X," they're "do less of X," and KALM gives that a column.

Reach for it when you're tuning a process that mostly works rather than overhauling one that doesn't. Run KALM.

7. DAKI

Drop, Add, Keep, Improve. Action-first, and easy to translate straight into a backlog. The "Improve" column is the difference-maker, it captures the things that are worth keeping but not quite right, which is where most real improvement actually lives.

Reach for it when your retros generate good discussion but never turn into anything the team changes. Run DAKI.

8. Three Little Pigs

House of straw, sticks, bricks. Which of our practices, processes, and systems are fragile, which are sturdy, and which are unbreakable. It reframes the retro as a structural audit instead of a feelings exercise, which suits teams that find the emotional templates a bit much.

Reach for it when you want to assess how durable your ways of working actually are. Run Three Little Pigs.

9. Glad, Sad, Mad, Wondering

Mad Sad Glad with a fourth column for curiosity. "Wondering" surfaces uncertainty, the open questions and the "is it just me, or..." that the three-emotion version leaves no room for. Often the Wondering column produces the most useful conversation of the whole retro.

Reach for it when the team is sitting on unspoken questions or ambiguity nobody's named yet. Run Glad Sad Mad Wondering.

10. Lean Coffee

Not a column template at all. An open-agenda format where the team suggests topics, votes on them, and works through the list in order, each one timeboxed. It's democratic by design, so the loudest person doesn't set the agenda.

Reach for it when the team is tired of fixed columns, or when the issues are too varied to fit a template. Run Lean Coffee.

Other formats worth knowing

A few templates show up in searches that are really variants of the above. Worked Well, Kinda Worked, Didn't Work is a three-bucket honesty format, a blunter cousin of Start Stop Continue that's good when the team needs to be candid about what actually landed. You can generate prompts for it and the rest from the retro prompt tool without committing to a fixed board.

How to actually use these

The templates are the easy part. Three things decide whether the retro is worth the 45 minutes.

Rotate them. The single biggest upgrade to most teams' retros is using more than one template. Rotating formats keeps people thinking instead of filling in the same columns from muscle memory. Pick three or four and cycle.

Match the template to what you're reviewing, not the calendar. A two-week sprint and the end of a six-month project deserve different formats. We made the fuller case for scoping retros to something specific in retrospective ideas your team won't dread.

Timebox it and write down one thing. A retro that produces ten action items produces zero. Pick the single change worth making before the next sprint and actually make it. The board is only worth the one thing that changes because of it.

Running these remotely

Every template here works remotely, as long as it lives in a shared browser tab instead of a physical whiteboard. That's the whole trick. The format matters less than making sure everyone can see and add to the same board at once.

If your team runs agile remotely, retro games sit alongside the other games for remote teams that make recurring meetings worth attending. And you can run any template on this page from the retro prompt generator, which handles the prompts and the timebox so you can focus on the conversation.

---

Halftime makes the recurring rituals a remote team runs, from retro prompts to a daily two-minute game, run themselves instead of falling on one person. Free for teams up to 6.