Templates · Essentials

Starfish

Sorts the team's practices on a scale of five, from keep to stop, in place of good or bad.

What it is

Five columns, one per arm of the starfish, all about the team’s practices. Between keeping a practice and stopping it, the format offers two intermediate answers, less of it and more of it, and a place for what is new.

Goal

A calibrated view of how the team works: not only what to add or remove, but the right dose of what it already does.

When to use it

• With an established team that has many practices in place.
• When Start, Stop, Continue feels blunt.
• When discussions polarise, for example around a meeting some want to abolish: “less of” gives a third answer.
• When you have a full session: five columns take time to write and to read.

When to pick another format

For a short retrospective or a team that is just starting, three columns are enough: Start, Stop, Continue. Starfish asks about habits, not events: after a sprint with something to digest, take Went well, To improve, Action ideas or Mad, Sad, Glad.

How to run it

Before the writing, explain the two pairs that are easy to confuse: Less of against Stop doing, and More of against Start doing.

1. Keep doing: what works at the right level and must be protected when the team gets busy.
2. Less of: what is valuable in smaller doses, not something to abolish.
3. More of: what already happens occasionally and deserves a bigger share of the week.
4. Start doing: a new practice to try. The column asks for one or two per sprint, no more.
5. Stop doing: what has no remaining value at all. An empty column is a fine answer.

Two people may put the same practice in two different columns: that disagreement is the discussion to have. Group, vote and discuss the most voted cards. An action from More of or Less of needs a measure the team can check, and every action needs an owner and a date.

Columns

To start a retrospective from this template, see Create a retro.