Retrospective templates
Conducting a sprint retrospective helps your team build a culture of transparency and continuous learning. It provides a dedicated space for honest feedback, reflection, and goal setting.
If your retrospectives feel repetitive, switching up the format can bring new energy and fresh perspectives. AgileBox offers 8 default retrospective templates designed for agile sprints and projects to keep your sessions engaging and productive.
If your team wants something different, you can create custom templates in AgileBox to tailor retrospectives exactly to your needs.
Default Retrospective Templates
Drop Add Keep Improve (DAKI)
DAKI is a straightforward and effective template designed to help teams reflect on their working habits and processes.
By categorizing feedback into things to drop, add, keep, or improve, it encourages thoughtful examination of what behaviors and practices support or hinder team progress.
Drop ✋🏻: What should we stop?
Add ✅: What should we try or adopt?
Keep ✊🏻: What should we maintain?
Improve ⭐️: What should we improve or revise?
Energy Levels ⚡
This template focuses on the emotional and motivational state of the team, giving members a way to express how energized or drained they feel about their work.
It promotes honest reflection about what aspects of the sprint or project are fueling enthusiasm and which are causing fatigue.
Fully Charged 🔋: What energized you?
Low Battery 🪫: What depleted you?
Sprint Energy ☀️: What's your energy level going into the next Sprint?
Glad Sad Mad
Glad Sad Mad uncovers a broad emotional spectrum within the team by inviting members to share moments that brought happiness, disappointment, or frustration. This template is valuable for surfacing underlying concerns or conflicts, as well as celebrating successes.
Glad 😊: What are you happy about?
Sad 😞: What could be improved?
Mad 😡: What are you angry or disappointed about?
Highlights & Lowlights 🎢
This template encourages teams to reflect on both successes and challenges. By identifying what went better than expected and what didn’t meet hopes, the team can celebrate achievements while honestly acknowledging setbacks.
The addition of a Kudos section also promotes recognition and appreciation, reinforcing positive team dynamics.
Highlights 🙌: What was great or exceeded expectations?
Lowlights 😫: What didn't go well or make us feel down?
Kudos ❤️: Who helped you or deserves some appreciation?
Hopes and Fears 🎭
Hopes and Fears is a forward-looking template that focuses on anticipation and concern for future work.
It helps surface both optimism and anxiety, providing insight into the team's mindset heading into the next sprint or project phase.
Hopes 🙏: What do you hope for in the next period?
Fears 🧟: What are you worried about for the next period?
Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For (4Ls)
This reflective framework prompts team members to consider what they enjoyed (liked), what new knowledge or skills they gained (learned), what they felt was missing (lacked), and what they wished had happened (longed for).
It encourages a balanced view of past efforts by combining positive reflections with critical observations, thereby fostering continuous improvement and learning.
Liked 👍🏻: Things you liked, enjoyed or appreciated.
Lacked 👎🏻: What was missing in the last iteration or sprint?
Learned 🎓: What did you learn during this iteration or sprint?
Longed For 💭: What was the thing that had you thinking, “If only we had…”?
Mountain Climber ⛰️
In this metaphor-based template, the team imagines their journey as climbing a mountain with helpful tools, obstacles, changing conditions, and needs for support.
This creative approach helps participants think deeply about resources that aided progress, barriers they encountered, emotional states throughout the process, and essential support to reach their goals.
Ropes 🧗: What helped us reach our goal?
Boulders ⛰️: What stood in our way?
Weather 🌡️: How did we feel about our work?
First Aid ⛑️: What more do we need to reach our goals?
SWOT Analysis 🎯
SWOT is a classic strategic planning technique adapted here for retrospectives. It invites teams to analyze internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats related to their project or work environment.
Strengths 💪: What are we good at?
Weaknesses 😮💨: What needs more work?
Opportunities 🌟: Where can we improve or what can we take advantage of?
Threats 🌪: What could be negative or dangerous to us?
Custom templates
Create your own templates to add variety and tailor retrospectives to your team’s unique style.
There are 2 types of custom templates:
Global templates: Available for use across all projects by any team member. (See more details at Custom retrospective templates)
My templates: Private templates accessible only to the creator within a specific project.
Create a template in My templates
Templates created in this section are sorted into My templates and apply only in the current project.
To create a new template, click the New button at the top right and complete the following steps:
General information
Enter the template name (required) and an optional description.
Add topics to the templates
You can have a maximum of 10 topics for the custom retrospective templates
For each topic, provide:
Topic color
Topic name
Topic description
You can edit, delete, or reorder topics as needed.
After finishing your changes, click Create at the bottom right to apply your settings.
Create a template in Global templates
Manage and edit custom global templates anytime under Custom retrospective templates in System settings.