54 Fresh Retrospective Ideas for Healthy Agile Teams in 2024

Before we start, our view on this: These are the best Retrospective Ideas for striving Agile Teams:

What should a retrospective include? Well, a retrospective should include reflecting work from a different angle. Ever had a retrospective with low energy and zero feedback? Right - you don’t want that. 

This is why you need a different angle. And why you will find quite a few different retrospective format ideas you did not know yet in this post: If you want to challenge your team morale, do the "Team Morale Health Check". If you need a fresh perspective, do the 7 Dwarfs Retrospective. Or is everyone on vacation? Then go with the vacation retro.

The formats will bring out the creative veins of your team – and definitely maximize the likelihood of one: Valuable Action Items. Let's start with some hints and tips before diving deeper into retro methods.

If you don't have any experience with agile retrospectives or with retro methods, you can read through our short and crisp guide: Retrospectives – Everything you need to know.

Good to know: Typically, a Scrum retrospective lasts between 45 (up to 5 team members) and 90 minutes (up to 12 team members). If possible, you should plan for even more time. In any case, in each of the retrospective phases you should actively practice timeboxing. If you are not familiar with these, you can learn more about them here: The 5 phases of a retrospective. If you often have problems with timeboxing, here are some tips for you: A brief retrospective.

Given this tight schedule, you should definitely make sure to have your retro format and retrospective meeting notes well prepared - find some help for that below.

If the Retro Method takes place in a distributed team, you may be wondering: how to conduct a retrospective online? You can find the answer here: retro tool comparison. But to make it short: Our recommendation for this is our tool: Echometer. You will find a button below next to each retrospective method that leads to our tool.

In case you are searching for a sprint retrospective template ppt (i.e., a powerpoint), feel free to just copy the questions and image we have below into a powerpoint presentation. Although it would be even easier to just click on the button beside the retrospective meeting techniques - as you prefer. 🙂

Before we get to the main part of this post: How do you start a retrospective? If we look back again (The 5 phases of a retrospective)that's pretty easy to answer. You start with an icebreaker, retro check-in questions. If you need some inspiration for that, just take a look here: The best retro check-ins for any context. "Setting the stage" after the check-in questions is an important foundation for the retrospective formats that follow.