Our 7 favorite retrospective formats

We’re not agile purists at Qualdesk. We use parts of the methodology where it helps, and we don’t worry about breaking out of the mold when we know it’ll help us ship features faster or work more effectively together.

Having said that, the one thing we do consistently is run retrospectives.

We have two regular cadences:

• ‘general’ retrospectives every 2 weeks, aligned with our sprint cycle, where we talk about the practicalities of day-to-day work and agree actions that help us work better together
• values retrospectives every 4 weeks, where we examine each of our values in turn – we’ve written more about these earlier this year and you should check out the blog post

Today we’ve launched templates in Qualdesk, and we’re happy to share our 7 favorite retrospective formats in ready-to-use templates.

They are:

• The Four ‘L’s retrospective
• Good, Bad, Questions retrospective
• KALM retrospective
• Mad, Sad, Glad retrospective
• Sailboat retrospective
• Timeline retrospective
• Values retrospective

and they play perfectly with our stack, ready button and timer features – everything you need to run a retrospective, and all included in our free plan.

Finally, we’re looking to run user research sessions during the weeks of June 21st and June 28th. If your team has a retrospective coming up and you’re up for spending 30 minutes with us afterwards, please get in touch.