Mad Sad Glad retrospective template
Sort the sprint by how it felt, not by how it went.
Also known as: Glad Sad Mad, Mad / Sad / Glad, Emotions retrospective.
Mad Sad Glad sorts the sprint by emotional response rather than by outcome. It surfaces the friction people would not otherwise raise, because "this made me angry" is a much easier card to write than "our deployment process is bad" — and the second one is usually hiding underneath the first.
The columns, and what goes in each
- Mad
- What frustrated or angered you this sprint?
- Sad
- What disappointed you, or did not turn out the way you hoped?
- Glad
- What made you happy, relieved, or proud?
When to use the Mad Sad Glad retrospective
- After a difficult sprint, an incident, or a period of sustained crunch
- Teams where morale is visibly down but nobody has said why out loud
- Groups with enough psychological safety to be honest — this format needs it
How to run a Mad Sad Glad retrospective
- Say explicitly that emotional reactions are the point, not a distraction from the real feedback.
- Write silently for five to seven minutes.
- Read Glad first, then Sad, then Mad — ending on the hardest column keeps the energy where the work is.
- For each top Mad or Sad card, ask what would have to change for it not to recur, and record that as the action.
Run this retrospective in RetroCanvas
Mad Sad Glad is built in — pick it when you create a board, or set it to recur automatically every sprint. Free, with no credit card required.