4 Retrospective Templates to Help Your Team Reflect & Grow

What is a Retrospective?

Retrospectives are an opportunity for teams to deep dive into the root causes behind what did or didn’t go well in recent tasks or projects in order to learn from those findings for the future.

Retrospectives are an important part of any team’s growth and development because they provide a space to reflect on recent work. This gives every team member the opportunity to learn from both their own experiences and from others to optimize processes, try new things, and share their successes.

Types of Retrospectives

A retrospective can take many forms, but its goal is always to help teams reflect on their work to learn something and continue improving. Depending on how your team works, you might hold retrospectives at different times or milestones.

Sprint Retrospectives

Retrospectives are one of the typical Agile ceremonies for teams who use the Scrum methodology, which is defined by the way it breaks down work into defined lengths of time called sprints. 

In order to make the sprint format truly effective, it’s necessary to take some time after one sprint and before the next one to not only review what was accomplished, but also what your team can learn to improve or continue to succeed next time.

Want to learn more about managing sprints with Gliffy? Check out our Scrum board templates blog >>

Project Retrospectives

After any project it’s important to analyze not only the outcome, but also the process and how it did (or didn’t) contribute to the outcome effectively. Having a team retrospective after a project concludes is a great way to ensure that the next project will be just as or more successful. 

It’s especially helpful for long and multi-stage projects because it gives you a set opportunity to reflect on and analyze parts of the process that you may not have had time to consider during the project.

Try One of These Retrospective Templates

Gliffy’s retrospective templates give remote and hybrid teams a way to have retrospectives in an engaging, collaborative way and record everyone’s thoughts so you don’t forget what you have learned. 

Plus, if your team works in the Atlassian ecosystem, your thoughts and reflections from the retrospective are stored alongside the rest of your documentation, making your learnings easy to refer to during the next project or sprint.

To use one of these retrospective templates in Gliffy for Confluence Cloud, simply create a new Gliffy diagram on any Confluence page and select the “Retrospective” option on the left side of the panel. You can use the templates as is or modify them to fit your team’s needs and preferences!

Simple Retrospective Template

This retrospective template can be used either for projects or sprints and can be filled out independently or in a group. It encourages you to reflect on different aspects of your work and share those thoughts with your team in an organized format.

Kanban Retrospective Template

Even though the Kanban method doesn’t use defined sprints of time like the Scrum method does, it’s still a good idea to check in with your team once in a while to share experiences and learnings so the whole team can grow. 

This template is designed in the style of a Kanban board and provides a framework for sharing information and optimizing your team’s process of continuous improvement.

Does your team use the Kanban method? Check out these Kanban board templates >>

Timeline Retrospective Template

This template is especially helpful for project retrospectives because it allows you to break down the project into different stages and evaluate them each separately while also evaluating the project as a whole.You can divide the timeline either by project milestones or by actual periods of time (weeks, months, etc).

Start, Stop, Continue Template

“Start, Stop, Continue” is a different way to approach a retrospective that gets a little more specific than simply what did or didn’t go well. 

This framework encourages you to describe specific things that might be helpful to start doing or try for the first time, should be stopped for next time because they were ineffective or didn’t produce the desired outcome, and what was successful and should continue next time. 

This template is also great for either sprints or projects and is a perfect opportunity for expressing feedback on team processes.

Why Use a Template?

Using a retrospective template is helpful for two reasons.

First, having a visual organizer for your retrospective makes it easier to receive honest feedback from every member of the team, not just those who speak the loudest. 

During the retrospective meeting you can give everyone a chance to record their thoughts and then discuss it all together, giving everyone an equal voice.

Second, using templates can make your retrospectives more engaging by giving you ideas for how to do things a little differently. 

Especially if you do retrospectives often, after every sprint for example, using the same format for gathering and discussing feedback can get stale and disengaging for the team. 

There are a wide variety of templates you can find and use that structure the retrospective a little differently and give you different ways to reflect on your work.

To use one of the templates shown above for your team’s next retrospective, just start your free trial of Gliffy for Confluence Cloud!

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