Starfish retrospective template
Five columns that let a team tune a practice instead of scrapping it.
Also known as: Starfish retrospective, Keep / More / Less / Start / Stop.
The Starfish splits the usual binary into five degrees: keep, do more of, do less of, start, stop. The two middle columns are the reason to use it — most team practices are not simply good or bad, and a format with only Start and Stop pushes teams into deleting things that only needed dialling down.
The columns, and what goes in each
- Keep Doing
- What is working exactly as it is and should be left alone?
- More Of
- What is working, but we are not doing enough of it?
- Less Of
- What has value but is currently costing more than it returns?
- Start Doing
- What are we not doing at all that we should be?
- Stop Doing
- What should we abandon completely?
When to use the Starfish retrospective
- Mature teams whose obvious problems are already fixed and whose remaining issues are matters of degree
- Reviewing a working agreement, a ceremony schedule, or a definition of done
- Teams that have over-corrected before by scrapping a practice that was nearly right
How to run a Starfish retrospective
- Allow eight to ten minutes of writing — five columns take longer than they look.
- Read More Of and Less Of together; they usually reference the same practices from opposite sides.
- Vote across all five columns at once rather than per column.
- Convert the winners into a single revised working agreement rather than five separate actions.
Run this retrospective in RetroCanvas
Starfish is built in — pick it when you create a board, or set it to recur automatically every sprint. Free, with no credit card required.