Lean Coffee retrospective template
An agenda-less retro where the team votes on what to discuss, live.
Also known as: Lean Coffee retrospective, To Discuss / Discussing / Discussed.
Lean Coffee is a facilitation format rather than a question set: the team writes topics, votes on them, and works through the queue in timeboxes, moving each card left to right as it is handled. It gives you a retrospective with no fixed prompts, which is exactly what you want when the team already knows what needs saying.
The columns, and what goes in each
- To Discuss
- What topic do you want the team to spend time on today?
- Discussing
- The topic currently in its timebox — one card at a time.
- Discussed
- Finished topics, with whatever the team decided attached as comments.
When to use the Lean Coffee retrospective
- Experienced teams that find prompt-based formats constraining
- Sessions where the important topic is already obvious and picking a template would waste the first ten minutes
- Cross-team or community retrospectives with no shared sprint to reflect on
How to run a Lean Coffee retrospective
- Everyone writes topics into To Discuss for five minutes — a topic, not an opinion.
- Vote. The highest-voted card goes first; there is no other agenda.
- Move the card to Discussing and set a five-minute timer. When it ends, take a quick thumbs vote to extend or move on.
- Move the finished card to Discussed and pull the next one. Stop when time runs out, not when the queue empties.
Run this retrospective in RetroCanvas
Lean Coffee is built in — pick it when you create a board, or set it to recur automatically every sprint. Free, with no credit card required.