Speed Car Retrospective Template: Engine, Parachute, Hazards and Bridges

The Speed Car retrospective treats the team as a race car. What speeds us up is the engine, what slows us down is the parachute, hazards on the road are the dangers ahead, and how we get past them is the bridge you build before you reach them. It's a 30-minute format for teams whose main question is delivery speed.

The four columns

Every hazard needs a bridge. The fourth column is what sets Speed Car apart. A hazard without a bridge is just worry, so whoever adds a hazard also adds a bridge note.

Where it comes from. Paulo Caroli described it on his Agile Tips blog in July 2011 as the Speed Car – Abyss activity: an engine and a parachute for the sprint behind you, an abyss and a bridge for the road ahead. His version runs 40 minutes. Notes added during the sprint get it down to 30.

When to use it (and when not to)

Use it when:

• delivery feels slow and the team wants to know where the time goes
• a release or a freeze is coming and the hazards are concrete
• you want a forward-looking retro that fits in 30 minutes
• the team just changed its workflow and wants to see if it helped

Speed Car or Sailboat? Both have forces for and against plus risks ahead. Speed Car is about pace on a short road: no destination, and a bridge for every hazard. Sailboat is about a goal on a longer trip, with the island in view and risks you mitigate in discussion. If the team feels overloaded rather than slow, the Hot Air Balloon asks what you could drop.

Pick something else when:

• the problem is quality or morale, not speed. Talking about speed makes it worse; try Mad Sad Glad.
• the slowdowns are all inside one workflow stage. A Kanban retrospective looks at flow stage by stage.
• you need a longer view. For a whole project, use Sailboat or a timeline retrospective.

How to run it live (30 minutes)

1. Check last time's bridges. Open the Previous Retro tab in the Action Items panel. Did you build the bridge before the hazard arrived? Old / Unresolved Items shows older ones still open.
2. Bring one number. Share median cycle time or deploys per week from your tracker. It makes "we were slow" specific.
3. Engine and parachute first. Six minutes on the shared timer, with a size on each parachute (see the tip below).
4. Hazards, then bridges. Each hazard's author adds a bridge note. If nobody has one, that hazard gets discussion time.
5. Group and vote. Drag duplicates together, vote with three dots each, then sort by Most Votes.
6. Decide. The top parachute gets a fix; each top hazard gets its bridge assigned.

How to run it async over a sprint

Parachutes are easy to spot: you're waiting. Note it while you wait, with how long.

1. Day 1: the next board opens as soon as someone clicks Start New Retro after the last retro.
2. During the sprint: any wait longer than half a day becomes a parachute note with the number of hours. Anything that saved real time becomes an engine note.
3. Mid-sprint: the facilitator adds the hazards already on the calendar (freezes, launches, dependency upgrades) and asks for bridges.
4. Two days before the end: everyone votes, and any hazard still without a bridge gets one.
5. The day before: the facilitator groups notes and reads the CarrotIQ Sprint Summary for the parachute column.
6. Retro day: a 15-minute call to assign the top bridges and the parachute fix, or a written round where each proposed owner accepts by end of day.

See how to run an async retrospective.

12 example prompts

What speeds us up

1. What saved you the most time this sprint?
2. Which change to how we work is already paying off?
3. When did a story go from start to done fastest, and why?

What slows us down 4. Where did work sit waiting, and for whom? 5. Which handoff cost us the most days? 6. What do we queue for that we could do ourselves?

Hazards on the road 7. What's on the calendar that could stop a release? 8. Which dependency upgrade are we putting off? 9. What would slow us most if it went wrong next sprint?

How we get past them 10. What could we do this sprint so the hazard never hits? 11. Who outside the team do we need to talk to first? 12. What's the cheapest test that tells us if the bridge holds?

Facilitator tip and a common pitfall

Tip: size the parachutes. "Design sign-off is slow" leads to a vague discussion. "Design sign-off added 11 days across five stories" leads to a fix. Ask for hours or days on every parachute note, even rough ones.

Pitfall: cutting a parachute you need. Some parachutes are safety gear: a security review, a staged rollout, a second reviewer on payment code. When one of them tops the vote, the action is to make it faster or start it earlier, not to remove it. Ask "what would we risk without this?" before anyone proposes skipping a step.

How AI helps with this format

On Pro AI (and during the free trial), CarrotIQ handles the admin:

• Group names. Drag "waiting on design sign-off" onto "copy approval from marketing" and CarrotIQ names the group, for example "Approval Wait Times".
• Summaries. The Sprint Summary covers each column and the whole retro. The parachute summaries from a few sprints show whether the same waits keep coming back.
• Suggested action items. CarrotIQ Suggest drafts an action from the notes, weighting the most-voted ones. It works well as a first draft of a bridge; edit it and assign an owner.

Example action items

Parachutes get a fix that shortens the wait; hazards get a bridge dated before the hazard.

The Previous Retro tab lists these at the next retro. More in retrospective action items that actually get done.

Use this template in Retro Rabbit

1. Start a 14-day free trial. No card is needed.
2. Pick Speed Car from the format library: choose "Browse all formats" when you create your Team Room, or later in the Team Room's Settings.
3. Ask the team to add a parachute note, with the hours lost, every time they wait on something.

See pricing for plans.

Related formats

• Sailboat: a longer trip, with a goal and risks
• Hot Air Balloon: when the team is overloaded, not just slow
• Kanban retrospective: flow, stage by stage
• Pre-mortem: a deeper look at hazards before a launch
• More formats in Fun and themed
• All retrospective templates