Templates · Incidents, problem-solving & learning
Team retrospective template
Origin: Agile / Scrum; formats include Start-Stop-Continue and the 4Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed for).
Sections
- Goal review
- Data
- Insights
- Actions
- Prior action follow-up
How a tough reader scores it
When you score a draft against this format, the Critic evaluates this retrospective. The weights add up to 100; the fixes for the weakest criteria arrive as cards in the editor.
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Grounded in data, not only feelings | 20 |
| Themes get to underlying causes | 25 |
| Maximum 3 actions, each specific and owned | 25 |
| Previous actions reviewed | 15 |
| Psychologically safe, balanced tone | 15 |
How it works in SecondPen.ai
Open the template and the editor writes the blank once, with a line of guidance under each heading that you delete as you fill it in. Write your abstract and the editor names the format it reads like. Ask for a document with a slash command and it offers to start from the matching format. When the draft is ready, the Critic scores it against the criteria above, the way this format's toughest reader would, and the three highest-leverage fixes become Editor cards.
More in Incidents, problem-solving & learning
- Blameless postmortemGoogle SRE book, "Postmortem Culture"; adopted by Atlassian, PagerDuty, and Etsy
- Amazon COE (Correction of Error)Amazon/AWS post-incident process, reviewed weekly by leadership
- After Action Review (AAR)U.S. Army, 1970s; widely adopted in business and emergency management
- A3 problem-solving reportToyota Production System; one A3-size sheet following PDCA
- Pre-mortemGary Klein, Harvard Business Review (2007); endorsed by Daniel Kahneman