Templates · Operations & projects
Retrospective template
What went well, what didn't, and what we'll change
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Filled example
The template filled in for a made-up company, so you can see what good looks like.
Payments squad retro, sprint 42
Author: Elena Brook · Date: 2026-06-19 · Sprint/period: June 8 to June 19
Went well
- The refund API shipped two days early because Hiro wrote the contract tests before the handlers, so the mobile team built against them in parallel.
- Pairing on the ledger migration (Ama and Felix, three afternoons) meant two people can now debug it instead of one.
- The new on-call handoff note in reph cut the Monday "what happened over the weekend" thread from forty messages to five.
Didn't go well
- The currency rounding bug reached staging because our fixtures only used USD. Nobody owned adding non-decimal currencies to the test data.
- Sprint planning pulled in three tickets that still had open design questions; two of them stalled for four days waiting on answers.
- Review turnaround averaged 26 hours, up from 14 last sprint, mostly on Thursdays and Fridays.
Puzzles / questions
- Is the Friday release freeze still worth it now that deploys are automated and rollback takes two minutes?
- Should payment-provider sandbox outages count against our sprint, or be tracked separately?
Action items
Previous actions review
The template
Show the blank template
Retrospective
Author: [your name] · Date: [date] · Sprint/period: [sprint or dates]
Went well
Specific enough to repeat on purpose. "Communication was good" isn't actionable, "the daily async thread caught a blocker early" is.
Didn't go well
Blameless and specific: describe the situation, not the person.
Puzzles / questions
Things that are unclear or worth discussing but aren't clearly good or bad yet.
Action items
Two or three, each with one owner and a date. An action without an owner is a wish.
Previous actions review
Check last retro's actions before writing new ones. An action item that never gets revisited trains the team to stop taking them seriously.
Questions
- Should the facilitator pre-fill it?
- Pre-fill facts like what shipped and last actions, but leave opinions for the team
- How many action items?
- Two or three with owners and dates; more rarely get done
- Who should see it?
- The team first; share a summary upward only if the team agrees
Fill it with your agent
Connect Claude to reph over MCP, then paste this. The draft arrives as suggestions you accept or reject section by section. How to connect Claude.
Find my reph doc "Retrospective" with search_docs, then read it with read_doc. Pre-fill from the sprint board, team channel and last retro's action items: what shipped, what slipped and why, and each previous action's status. Keep it blameless. File it with suggest_edit, one replace_section op per section (heading line kept) so each can be accepted alone. Ask each open question (topics for the team to discuss live) with add_comment quoting that section's heading line, then call request_review with a one-line summary.
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