After each release or iteration, the Scrum Master or Team Leader should hold a sprint retrospective — sometimes called an intraspective. This session helps the team reflect on the previous sprint to identify what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve. To keep these meetings fresh and engaging, we’ve compiled a list of creative retrospective ideas you can use.
Every retrospective should focus on three core questions:
- What went well?
- What could be improved?
- What should we do differently next time?
A typical retrospective is time-boxed to about two hours and centers on brainstorming, committing to action items, and reviewing their impact in the next cycle. When done consistently and effectively, retrospectives provide real-time feedback on team performance and process efficiency — leading to continuous improvement, stronger collaboration, and better results. This results in:
- Improved productivity
- Improved capability
- Improved quality
- Improved capacity
Esther Derby and Diana Larsen defined a 5-step process for holding retrospectives.
Set the Stage for the Agile Team
Setting the stage is about establishing the right tone and mindset for the meeting while getting the entire team aligned. Retrospectives are most effective when there’s active participation and honest feedback from everyone involved. To encourage engagement early on, consider starting with a brief round of introductions or a quick check-in activity. However, if the team members remain consistent across sprints, repeating introductions may feel unnecessary.
In that case, focus instead on a brief icebreaker or a recap of the previous sprint’s highlights to get everyone talking. Next, the Scrum Master or Team Leader should set a clear agenda and establish ground rules for the meeting. This helps maintain focus and ensures everyone understands the session’s objectives. To make team members feel more comfortable participating and sharing openly, you can start with interactive games or warm-up activities such as:
Check In
Start with a simple round-robin where each participant shares, in two short sentences, what they hope to gain from the retrospective. This helps everyone get mentally present, understand each other’s expectations, and prepare for meaningful conversation and reflection about the previous sprint.
Focus On/Off
Present pairs of contrasting words, such as Conversation vs Argument or Understanding vs Defending. Ask team members to share their opinions on each pair. This activity encourages reflection on communication styles, helping the team adopt a more constructive mindset before diving into deeper discussions.
ESVP
The team anonymously identifies their attitude towards retrospectives as one of the following:
- Explorers: eager to discover new ideas
- Shoppers: look for useful info and to go home with one idea
- Vacationers: not interested in retrospectives but happy to be away from work
- Prisoners: feel like being forced to attend
The total scores are kept, and the individual votes disposed of. Then the team is asked how they feel about the results. This short reflection helps gauge engagement and morale before continuing with deeper discussions.
Working Agreements: Small groups create a set of agreements on how they plan to work together, then combine them into a master list. This exercise builds accountability, aligns expectations, and reinforces the team’s shared responsibility for maintaining a productive and respectful environment.
Gather the Data by Engaging All Team Members
The next step is gathering feedback from team members on what happened during the iteration. The goal is to determine a common vision of the iteration. The agile team leader is responsible for team engagement and can use the following team-based facilitation techniques to get more interaction between team members:
Timeline
Have the team create a visual timeline of the iteration that highlights milestones, accomplishments, delays, and issues that occurred. This helps everyone recall events chronologically, recognize dependencies, and identify recurring challenges that may have affected the sprint’s overall outcome.
Triple Nickles
Divide the team into five groups. Each group gets five minutes to work on five ideas, and this process repeats five times. The structured pace promotes creativity, rapid idea exchange, and collaborative refinement as concepts circulate between different perspectives.
Colour Coded Dots
Ask team members to use colored sticky dots to mark emotional highs and lows experienced during the iteration. This visual mapping exercise helps identify points of stress, satisfaction, or frustration, revealing how emotions influenced performance and teamwork throughout the sprint.
Mad, Sad, Glad
Provide team members with colored cards and have them record what made them mad, sad, or glad during the sprint. Sharing these reflections brings emotional awareness into the conversation, highlighting both challenges and positive moments worth repeating in future cycles.
Locate Strengths
Ask the team to identify what went particularly well during the iteration and discuss specific examples of success. Focusing on strengths reinforces positive patterns, helps recognize effective behaviors, and provides a foundation for consistent performance improvement in future iterations.
Satisfaction Histogram
Create a histogram to measure satisfaction across different aspects of the sprint, such as workload balance, communication, and quality of deliverables. The visual format quickly reveals which areas need improvement and where the team feels confident about their current performance.
Team Radar
Have the team evaluate its performance against previous improvement goals using a radar chart. This method helps visualize progress across multiple dimensions, such as collaboration, efficiency, and quality, making it easier to track development and measure consistency over time.
Like to Like
Ask the team to recall their experiences from the iteration and compare their reactions to key events. This activity highlights similarities and differences in perception, fostering empathy, open discussion, and a deeper understanding of how team members experience their work.
Generate the Insights using Brainstorming
Once all data from the iteration has been collected, the next step is to evaluate and interpret it. This phase focuses on turning raw observations into meaningful insights. Teams can use different brainstorming techniques to uncover patterns, root causes, and opportunities for improvement. These include:
Five Why
The team works in pairs to analyze an issue by repeatedly asking “Why?” in response to each identified reason. This process continues until the underlying root cause is revealed. The Five Whys technique helps teams move beyond surface-level problems to uncover deeper process or communication issues.
Fishbone Diagram Analysis
Also known as the Ishikawa diagram, this visual tool helps identify the root cause of a problem by mapping contributing factors. The team draws a fishbone diagram, with each branch representing a major category such as process, people, tools, or environment. Within each branch, possible causes are listed, helping the team visualize interconnections and pinpoint the primary source of the issue.
Prioritise with Dots
After gathering and analyzing ideas, the team uses colored dots to vote on which issues or insights they consider most important. Each member places dots next to the ideas they believe should receive the highest priority. This democratic approach ensures collective input and directs focus to the issues that matter most to the team.
Identify Themes
The team reviews the collected data to identify recurring patterns, trends, or shared themes. Grouping similar ideas together helps simplify complex findings, making it easier to recognize broader issues and improvement areas. This step ensures that insights are cohesive and can translate into actionable next steps.
Decide What To Do as an Agile Team
The “circle of questions” technique encourages open dialogue and creativity. One person selects an issue, and the next proposes a possible solution. The process continues around the group, generating multiple ideas from different perspectives. This approach helps teams find practical, team-owned solutions rather than relying on a single viewpoint.
Setting SMART Goals
Once potential solutions are identified, the team transforms them into SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Defining goals this way ensures clarity, accountability, and realistic expectations. SMART goals allow the team to track progress effectively and verify that improvements are achievable within the upcoming iteration.
Using an Action Wheel
To organize and prioritize improvements, the team can use an action wheel. Each item from the retrospective is categorized using criteria like Keep/Drop/Add or Start/More/Less. This visual sorting method helps clarify which practices to maintain, which to stop, and what new actions should be introduced moving forward.
Close the Retrospective Hosted by the Scrum Master or PO
The retrospective concludes with a formal closing led by the Scrum Master or Product Owner. This step ensures that the session ends on a clear and reflective note, allowing the team to summarize outcomes, express appreciation, and prepare mentally for the next sprint.
Plus/Delta
In the Plus/Delta exercise, the team identifies what went well and what needs improvement. “Plus” captures strengths or successful actions, while “Delta” represents desired changes. This method promotes open feedback and ensures the team continues doing what works while addressing weaknesses constructively.
Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis
This technique focuses on reviewing the retrospective itself. Team members share what helped them during the session, what hindered their participation or understanding, and any hypotheses they have for improving future retrospectives. It promotes reflection on both process and participation quality.
Sailboat Retro
The Sailboat Retro is a visual exercise where the team imagines the project as a sailboat moving toward its goal. Wind represents helpful forces, anchors represent obstacles, and rocks symbolize potential risks. This creative format helps visualize what’s propelling the team forward and what’s holding it back.
Return on Invested Time
The team collectively rates the retrospective meeting on a scale of 1 to 5 to assess its effectiveness and time value. This quick check ensures that retrospectives remain efficient, meaningful, and worth the time spent, encouraging continuous improvement in how the team reflects and collaborates.
Appreciations
To end on a positive note, team members take a moment to express appreciation toward one another. Recognizing individual or collective contributions fosters trust, strengthens morale, and builds a culture of respect and gratitude within the Agile team.
Agile Sprint Pre-Mortem (Rule Setting, Failure Analysis)
The pre-mortem is a structured Agile exercise designed to identify potential failures before they occur. Unlike a post-mortem, which analyzes what went wrong after the fact, this proactive approach helps the team anticipate challenges early. It encourages long-term thinking, risk awareness, and forward planning to strengthen the sprint’s overall success.
The Product Owner plays a key role by reviewing and approving any proposed mitigation or avoidance actions before they are added to the backlog. This ensures that all preventive measures align with business priorities and available resources. Below are the main steps for conducting an effective pre-mortem meeting.
Imagine the Failure
The facilitator guides the team to imagine that the sprint or project has already failed. The goal is to brainstorm every possible issue or reason behind that failure. Team members are encouraged to think freely and share openly, while the facilitator can introduce hypothetical scenarios to spark deeper analysis and creative thinking.
Generate Reasons for the Failure
Each team member works independently to create a list of potential causes for the imagined failure. These could include funding being cut, unclear requirements, technical dependencies, or poor stakeholder communication. By allowing independent thinking first, the team avoids group bias and captures a more diverse range of possible failure points.
Consolidate the List
After generating individual lists, the team reconvenes to share their ideas. Each person reads one item at a time while the facilitator records it on a shared whiteboard or virtual board. This round-robin approach prevents long speeches and keeps everyone engaged. Once all ideas are captured, the group prioritizes them based on likelihood and potential impact.
Revisit the Plan
The final step is for the Product Owner to review the prioritized list of risks and proposed mitigations. Only the most critical and feasible actions are approved and converted into user stories for the backlog. This ensures that identified risks are not just noted but actively addressed in the upcoming sprint planning.
Conclusion
Sprint retrospectives are essential for continuous improvement in Agile teams. By regularly reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and what to improve, teams can enhance productivity, collaboration, and delivery quality. The 25 techniques outlined here—from Mad, Sad, Glad to Sailboat Retros and Pre-Mortems—offer diverse approaches to keep these sessions engaging and effective.
Whether you’re setting the stage, gathering data, generating insights, or closing the meeting, the key is maintaining honest communication and actionable outcomes. Remember, successful retrospectives aren’t just about identifying problems—they’re about empowering your team to take ownership of solutions and drive meaningful change in every sprint.
FAQs
How often should you conduct sprint retrospectives?
Sprint retrospectives should be held at the end of every sprint or iteration, typically lasting 1-2 hours. For most Agile teams following 2-week sprints, this means conducting a retrospective every two weeks. The consistency is crucial for continuous improvement and maintaining team momentum.
What’s the ideal team size for an effective retrospective?
The ideal team size for a sprint retrospective is typically 5-9 people, including the Scrum Master and Product Owner. Larger teams may need to be divided into smaller groups for certain activities to ensure everyone can participate actively and share their perspectives effectively.
Who should facilitate the sprint retrospective?
The Scrum Master typically facilitates sprint retrospectives, but the role can rotate among team members to bring fresh perspectives. The facilitator should remain neutral, encourage participation from all team members, and ensure the meeting stays focused on the three core questions: what went well, what could be improved, and what to do differently next time.
How do you ensure action items from retrospectives are actually implemented?
To ensure follow-through, convert retrospective action items into SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) and add them to the sprint backlog with clear ownership. Review progress on previous action items at the start of each new retrospective to maintain accountability and track continuous improvement.
What should you do if team members aren’t participating in retrospectives?
If participation is low, try changing your retrospective format using different techniques like Mad, Sad, Glad, or Sailboat Retro to keep sessions engaging. Start with icebreaker activities, ensure psychological safety by establishing clear ground rules, and consider using anonymous voting methods like ESVP to gauge team sentiment and adjust your approach accordingly.
Suggested articles:
- 17 Sprint Retrospective Examples for Agile Teams
- Retrospective Voting in Agile: A 4 Step Guide To Conduct Retrospective Voting
- 9 Free x Sailboat Retrospective Templates Online + Word
Shane Drumm, holding certifications in PMP®, PMI-ACP®, CSM, and LPM, is the author behind numerous articles featured here. Hailing from County Cork, Ireland, his expertise lies in implementing Agile methodologies with geographically dispersed teams for software development projects. In his leisure, he dedicates time to web development and Ironman triathlon training. Find out more about Shane on shanedrumm.com and please reach out and connect with Shane on LinkedIn.