Start / Stop / Continue retrospective
Start / Stop / Continue is the format most teams learn first, and the one most teams come back to. It asks for behaviour rather than feeling, and every card is already shaped like a decision, which is why it produces actions more reliably than any other format.
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The columns
Start
Things the team isn't doing that it should be. New practices, experiments, habits worth trying for one sprint.
Ask: What should we try that we aren't trying?
Start pairing on anything that touches the migration
Stop
Things actively costing the team time, attention or morale. The column where the honest material lives.
Ask: What's costing us more than it gives back?
Stop taking bug reports directly in DMs
Continue
Things working that would quietly stop if nobody named them. Easy to skip and worth protecting.
Ask: What worked that we should make sure survives?
Continue the Friday demo, which caught two regressions
What a filled-in board looks like
A five person team two sprints into replacing a payments integration, running 45 minutes on a Thursday.
Start
Start pairing on anything that touches the migration
Start writing the rollback step before the deploy step, not after it
Start asking at standup what is blocked rather than what is done
Stop
Stop taking bug reports directly in DMs
Stop carrying the same two tickets across three sprints without saying why
Stop deploying on Friday afternoon and then watching it all weekend
Continue
Continue the Friday demo, which caught two regressions
Continue the shared on-call notes doc
Continue having support review the release notes before they go out
What grouping surfaced
- Three cards across Start and Stop were one card: work arriving through channels nobody else can see.
- The deploy cards and the Friday demo card were all about catching problems before a release rather than after it.
What they left with
- Priya opens a bug channel and the team stops answering bug DMs, by Friday.
- Sam adds the rollback step to the deploy checklist template before the next release.
When to use it
- A team new to retrospectives that needs an obvious structure
- Sprints where the goal is concrete process change
- Short retros, where 45 minutes is comfortable
- Teams that drift into venting and need the format to pull them back
When not to: Skip it when the team needs to talk about how the work felt rather than how it ran. Start / Stop / Continue is deliberately unemotional, and a team carrying a bad quarter will find it cold. Use Mad / Sad / Glad instead.
It comes out of the same lineage as Agile Retrospectives (Derby and Larsen, 2006), and survives because the three questions map cleanly onto what a team can control: things it isn't doing, things it is doing badly, and things worth protecting.
Running it
- 01Set the stage and say what period the retro covers.5 min
- 02Everyone writes into all three columns, silently, with cards hidden.10 min
- 03Reveal, read out, group the cards that are really the same card.10 min
- 04Vote. Three dots each is usually enough for three columns.5 min
- 05Take the top two or three and turn them into owned actions.15 min
Facilitation notes
Stop is the column that fills last and matters most. If it's empty, the room isn't safe yet. Ask directly rather than moving on.
Continue is not a participation trophy. A team that stops naming what works loses those practices to the next reorganisation.
Cap Start at two actions per sprint. A team that agrees to start six things starts none of them.
Variations
Good / Bad / Start / Stop
Splits the three columns into four: Good and Bad collect what happened, Start and Stop collect what to do about it. Worth using when people keep writing observations into Start, because it gives those cards somewhere to go. The cost is that the retro needs a grouping step between the two halves, so add ten minutes.
The Good / Bad / Start / Stop template in full →More of / Less of / Keep
The same three questions with the edges filed off. Useful for a team that reads Stop as an accusation, or a first retro where nobody yet knows how blunt they are allowed to be. It surfaces less, so move back to Stop once the room can take it.
Drop / Add / Keep / Improve
DAKI adds a fourth column for practices that are nearly right. It stops a team throwing out something that only needs adjusting, which is the most common way Start / Stop / Continue loses a good habit.
Reach for a different format when
The sprint was hard and the team needs to say so before it can talk about process.
Mad / Sad / Glad retrospective →
The goal itself is contested, or there is a risk ahead that nobody has raised.
Sailboat retrospective →
Common questions
›What is the Start Stop Continue retrospective?
A retrospective format with three columns: what the team should start doing, what it should stop doing, and what it should keep doing. Each person writes cards into all three, the team groups and votes, and the top items become actions.
›How long does a Start Stop Continue retro take?
About 45 minutes for a two-week sprint: 10 minutes writing, 10 grouping, 5 voting, and 15 on actions, with 5 minutes either side.
›What's the difference between Stop and Start?
Stop is about removing something the team already does. Start is about adding something it doesn't. Teams over-fill Start because adding feels productive, but removing usually frees more time.
›Is Good Bad Start Stop the same as Start Stop Continue?
Not quite. Good / Bad / Start / Stop splits the exercise in two: Good and Bad collect what happened, Start and Stop collect what to do next. Start / Stop / Continue asks for decisions directly and has a column for protecting what already works, which the four column version drops. Use the four column form if people keep writing observations where actions should go.
›How many cards should each person write?
Three to five in total is normal, not three to five per column. A team that writes twenty cards each spends the whole retro reading and never reaches actions.
›Can you use Start Stop Continue for an individual?
Yes, and it is one of the better formats for a one to one or a personal review, because all three questions are about behaviour rather than outcome. Write it yourself first, then compare with the other person's version of the same three columns.
Other formats
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