Starfish Retrospective Template: Start, More, Keep, Less, Stop

The starfish retrospective splits "what should we change?" into five arms: Start doing, Do more of, Keep doing, Do less of and Stop doing. Where Start Stop Continue asks yes-or-no questions, Starfish adds a dial: the middle arms catch practices worth turning up or down. It suits a team whose process mostly works and needs tuning, not a rebuild.

The five columns

More of and Less of are the point. Most changes a team wants aren't a start or a stop. Pairing isn't new and nobody wants to drop it; it just happens too rarely. Meetings can't be stopped, but there can be fewer. When a Stop note really means "less", move it to the middle.

Where it comes from. Patrick Kua wrote up the starfish in a March 2006 blog post, and Retromat credits the activity to him. His case for it: the five categories push people toward concrete actions rather than complaints.

When to use it (and when not to)

Use it when:

• the team's process mostly works and you want to adjust it, not overhaul it
• Start Stop Continue keeps producing blunt notes like "stop meetings" and people need a middle answer
• a process change has run for a few sprints and might need more, less or nothing

Pick something else when:

• the sprint went badly and people need to say how it felt. Run Mad Sad Glad first.
• you only have 30 minutes. Start Stop Continue covers most of the same ground.
• the team is three or four people. Notes spread too thin across five arms; KPT works better.
• one big problem dominates, like an outage. Tuning dials won't find a root cause; use 5 Whys.

How to run it live (45 minutes)

1. Place last retro's changes. Open the Action Items panel (Previous Retro, then Old / Unresolved Items) and ask which arm each item belongs in now. A Start that worked becomes a Keep; one that didn't becomes a Stop.
2. Write silently. Set the shared timer for 10 minutes. Ask for at least one note in each middle arm.
3. Sort before you group. Move any Start or Stop note that's really a "more" or "less" to the middle, then drag duplicates together.
4. Vote. Dot voting, three votes each, then sort by Most Votes.
5. Go arm by arm, about three minutes each. For Keep doing, ask whether anyone disagrees and move on.
6. Decide. Start and Stop items need an owner and a check. Dial items need a number (see the tip below).

How to run it async over a sprint

Starfish notes are small observations. "This should have been a call" is a Do less of note you can post before the thread ends.

1. Day 1: the next board is ready once someone clicks Start New Retro after the last retro. The facilitator adds a Keep doing note for each change agreed last time.
2. During the sprint: add notes on the board or in Quick Notes on the Team Room page. Turn off Show Name to post a Stop note without your name shown.
3. Mid-sprint: check the board's shape. If every note is in Start or Stop, ask for middle-arm notes.
4. Two days before the end: everyone votes.
5. The day before: the facilitator groups notes and reads the CarrotIQ Sprint Summary for each arm.
6. Retro day: a 25-minute call on the top-voted notes. Or skip the call: post the top note per arm with a proposed action, and owners accept or push back by end of day.

More in how to run an async retrospective.

10 example prompts

Start doing

1. What did we wish we'd had in place when the sprint got busy?
2. What one-sprint experiment could we drop if it doesn't help?

Do more of 3. What helped every time we did it, but we only did it once or twice? 4. Which habit do one or two people have that the whole team should?

Keep doing 5. What would you argue to keep if someone proposed dropping it? 6. Which change from an earlier retro has stuck?

Do less of 7. What's useful but taking more time than it's worth right now? 8. Where are we adding process to work that doesn't need it?

Stop doing 9. What do we keep doing only because nobody has said stop? 10. What would nobody notice if it disappeared next sprint?

Facilitator tip and a common pitfall

Tip: ask "how much?" for every dial note. "More pairing" could mean once a week or on every ticket. When a dial note gets votes, ask for a number: "pair on every ticket over 5 points". Without one, nobody can tell next retro whether it happened.

Pitfall: running out of time before Stop. Going from Start to Stop puts the hardest arm last, where a long Start discussion squeezes it to a minute. Time each arm with the shared timer.

How AI helps with this format

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

• Group names. Duplicates spread across arms: "too many chat threads" in Do less of, "stop debating in chat" in Stop. Drag them together and CarrotIQ names the group, for example "Chat Overload".
• Summaries. The Sprint Summary covers each arm plus the whole retro. A few sprints of Keep doing summaries show which habits have stuck.
• Suggested action items. CarrotIQ Suggest drafts an action from the notes, weighting the most-voted ones. For a dial note, add the number before you assign it.

Example action items

Next retro, the Previous Retro tab lists these, and older open ones sit under Old / Unresolved Items. 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 Starfish from the format library: choose "Browse all formats" when you create your Team Room, or later in the Team Room's Settings.
3. In the first sprint, post one example note in each arm yourself, so the team sees the difference between Do less of and Stop doing.

See pricing for plans.

Related formats

• KALM: the same dial idea in four columns, without Stop
• Start Stop Continue: the three-column version for 30 minutes
• DAKI: when you want an Improve column instead of a dial
• KPT: when you'd rather turn each problem into one experiment
• More formats in Kanban and lean
• All retrospective templates