Last week, we talked about retros – the hidden career opportunity hiding in plain sight! This week, I want to run you through 3 classic retro formats as well as some tips for putting together your own.
⭐️ The standard retro format
No matter which template you decide to use for your retro, mine always follow the same basic structure:
Icebreaker (5-10 minutes)
Main retro (30 minutes)
Discussion + actions (20 minutes)
Icebreakers are unskippable if you’re in a team that’s still building trust. Before jumping into the meat of the retro, everyone practices sharing a bit of something with each other in a low-intensity environment.
(Some people start to skip icebreakers as they work with established teams, but I love them!)
The main retro is basically two parts: silent contributions and then sharing.
Everyone answers the questions in silence on sticky notes and then adds them to the board. Once the time for thinking is up, you can read through the stickies together.
Discussion and actions are the last part. You might vote to discuss particular stickies, or you might have time to run it more fluidly, but this is when the team gets into really dissecting the problems. Actions will probably naturally arise from there, which you can then assign to your participants.
Icebreakers, discussions, and actions are pretty independent from the format of the main retro, so let’s dive into our 3 classic retros.
🚥 Start, stop, continue
This is a practical retro you can use any time throughout a project. Great especially if you’re going to be working together continuously for a long time, because it really helps you focus on improving how you collaborate.
🟢 Start | 🔴 Stop | 👍 Continue |
|---|---|---|
What practices should we adopt or try? | What’s slowing us down or unnecessary? | What’s working well for us? |
📚 4 Ls
The 4 Ls – liked, learned, lacked, and longed for – are similar to Start, Stop, Continue, but lets you zoom out a bit and consider problems you don’t have clear solutions for yet.
❤️ Liked | 🧠 Learned | 🤷♀️ Lacked | 🥺 Longed for |
|---|---|---|---|
Things that went well | Things that surprised you, or you discovered | Support or resources you went without | Processes or systems that would have solved problems |
😀 Glad, sad, mad
This one lets you get a bit more emotional than just focusing on the work, which can be a good twist! I like to mix this one in occasionally because you’ll surface different things.
🥳 Glad | 😭 Sad | 😡 Mad |
|---|---|---|
What made you happy or excited? | What was disappointing? | What was frustrating or stressful? |
Keep your retros fresh for maximum engagement!
These are just 3 out of infinite retro formats you could run! Sometimes teams I’ve been in have even invented formats just to experiment, so you can play with it – or if that’s not your jam, just having a few formats you’re comfortable with can work too. Just make sure you mix it up a bit!
Stale formats can mean teams get bored, but worse – stuff might fall through the cracks because it’s not covered in a particular format, or participants aren’t being challenged to think differently.
