Best 10 Retrospective Templates for Product Strategists

Retrospectives allow product strategists to take a step back and evaluate past performance, identifying successful strategies and areas needing improvement. A well-structured Retrospective template in Notion can streamline this analysis, making it easier to organize insights and action items for future planning. Before diving into creating your Retrospective template, it's worthwhile to explore the examples provided below, which could simplify the process and enhance its effectiveness.

What Should Retrospective Templates Include?

Choosing the right Retrospective template can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your review sessions. Here are key components to look for in a high-quality template:

  1. Clear Objectives: Ensure the template outlines specific goals. This helps participants understand the purpose of the retrospective and focus their feedback accordingly.

  2. Structured Activities: Look for templates that include well-defined activities to guide the discussion and encourage participation from all team members.

  3. Actionable Items Section: A good template should have a dedicated area for defining actionable steps post-retrospective, ensuring the session leads to tangible improvements.

  4. Feedback Mechanisms: Choose templates that incorporate methods for collecting and discussing feedback, which is crucial for continuous team development.

Ultimately, the best template is one that aligns with your team's specific needs and promotes a culture of continuous improvement and open communication.

What Should Retrospective Templates Avoid?

Choosing the right retrospective template is crucial for effective team feedback sessions. However, certain elements can hinder rather than help this process. Here are three key components to steer clear of:

  1. Overly Complex Structures: Templates with complicated frameworks can confuse participants and detract from the main focus of identifying actionable insights.

  2. Fixed, Non-Customizable Fields: Avoid templates that don't allow modifications. Teams evolve and so should their tools to ensure they remain relevant and effective.

  3. Excessive Mandatory Sections: Templates that require too many mandatory fields can lead to fatigue and disengagement, making the retrospective feel more like a chore than a constructive session.

Remember, the goal is to foster open communication and continuous improvement. A good template should facilitate this process, not complicate it.

1Retrospective

Our Retrospective template facilitates efficient post-project reflection. It comes with designated sections for discussing what went well, areas needing improvement, innovative ideas, and future action items. Its interactive feature even logs who added each point, promoting transparency and accountability. This organized approach aids in learning from past experiences and planning effective strategies for future projects.

A template preview for Retrospective

2Agile retrospective

This is a retrospective template for agile teams using the traditional liked / didn't like / learned / actions method with a voting system.

It displays the various items as cards, which allows adding more content inside each card when required. It also includes the important "kudos" section, where your entire team can celebrate people for a job well done.

A template preview for Agile retrospective

3Software Development Retrospective

The best template to run a retrospective in notion. It leverages formulas to show only enough information about how many people agree with or want to discuss a subject.

This board has two steps: 1) In the first one, you can add cards and vote without being influenced by other people's votes. 2) In the second step, you can see a summary of how many people voted to agree or discuss without seeing who it was. This helps remove bias when discussing a card.

You can always open the card and see who voted, but you can choose not to. Anonymity is not the goal of this board.

A template preview for Software Development Retrospective

4Synctera's monthly company retro

As a fast-growing startup, Synctera runs monthly retros across the whole company to keep priorities straight and feedback flowing. These syncs used to take a full day — now they take one hour in Notion.

A template preview for Synctera's monthly company retro

5Agile Retrospective Template

Identify how to improve teamwork by reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and why. Run a Retrospective with your team every couple of weeks or at the end of a project milestone and track the session using this template

A template preview for Agile Retrospective Template

64Ls Retrospective Template

The Four Ls retrospective is an excellent way for teams to gain a more in-depth understanding of what occurred during the sprint and identify areas for improvement. It encourages team members to be critical of their work and allows the team to identify and implement concrete steps for improvement. It is also simple to implement and understand, making it a valuable tool for any team using an Agile development framework

A template preview for 4Ls Retrospective Template

7Sailboat Retrospective

The Sailboat Retrospective Notion template is a tool that helps teams evaluate their project, sprint, or overall process performance. It outlines 4 steps to reflect on sprint goals, strengths, blockers, and future ambitions. The template uses the analogy of a SAILBOAT heading toward sprint goals while dealing with anchors and rocks. The template provides a dedicated space for teams to identify actionable steps for improvement, as well as a parking lot to keep the team meeting on track. Additionally, it promotes recognizing and appreciating team members' hard work and accomplishments.

A template preview for Sailboat Retrospective

8Meeting Tracker

Track 1-1 or Retro activities

A template preview for Meeting Tracker

9Run Retrospectives with Rootly

A good retrospective is key to helping companies improve their overall system reliability. This template provides incident response teams with a quick and an organized way to create retrospectives following an incident. This will not only save time for the team, but also document all content in a consistent manner.

A template preview for Run Retrospectives with Rootly

10Retrospectives

Retrospectives are critical in college, whether you're facing disappointments in academics or career, falling-outs or breakups, the end of a long semester/job, or particularly tumultuous eras of life. In this extremely simple template, retrospectives ("retros") are organized by year, each with its own page; each page provides a space in which to dig into how and why your significant life events have shaped you.

Each page is also organized with #headers so you can use the "Table of contents" feature (/ + table of contents) to get a bird’s eye view of each page. Additionally, looking at your Retros page is always a reminder that if you made it through those days, you can make it through these :)

A template preview for Retrospectives

Closing Thoughts

Utilizing these templates can streamline your review process, ensuring that every strategy session is both efficient and productive. They help in identifying what works and what needs improvement.

By adopting these templates, you can foster a culture of continuous improvement and strategic clarity. Start implementing them in your next session to see immediate benefits.

What is a Velocity Chart?

A Velocity Chart is a visual tool used in retrospectives to measure the amount of work a team completes during a sprint and helps predict future sprint capacity.

What is a Burndown Chart?

A Burndown Chart shows the amount of work that has been completed in a sprint and the total work remaining, providing a simple view of sprint progress and scope changes.

What is a Sprint Goal?

A Sprint Goal is a single, concise statement drafted by a scrum team, which defines the intended outcome and purpose of a sprint.

Keep reading