Timeline Retrospective Template: Early, Middle and End of the Sprint

The timeline retrospective puts the sprint back in order before the team judges it. Everyone adds events to the part of the sprint when they happened: early, middle or end. Then the team reads the story in order and fills in the last column, what we'd do differently. Use it when a sprint was long or eventful and people remember only the last few days.

The four columns

Write events, not verdicts. "Staging down Wednesday afternoon" is an event; "staging is terrible" is a verdict for the discussion. Start each note with the day ("Day 6:") to keep the order clear.

Where it comes from. Norm Kerth described timeline exercises in Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews (2001), and Esther Derby and Diana Larsen included Timeline as a way to gather data in Agile Retrospectives (2006). Retromat lists it as activity #4 and credits the Derby and Larsen book. Nobody is credited with the simpler early, middle and end columns.

When to use it (and when not to)

Use it when:

• the sprint ran three or four weeks and people only remember the end
• a lot happened: a scope change, an outage, someone leaving, a rushed release
• people disagree about what went wrong because each saw a different part
• you're reviewing a project or a quarter, not one sprint

Pick something else when:

• the sprint was short and calm. Ordering five notes by day adds nothing; What Went Well is quicker.
• one incident dominated the sprint. Dig into it with the 5 Whys template or an incident review.
• the team needs to talk about how the sprint felt. Run Mad Sad Glad first.

How to run it live (45 minutes)

1. Check what carried over. In the Action Items panel, the Previous Retro tab shows last sprint's actions and Old / Unresolved Items shows anything older that's still open.
2. Write events silently. Set the shared timer for 10 minutes. Ask everyone to scroll back through their calendar, commits and the team channel; memory alone favors the last few days.
3. Read it as a story. One person reads every note in order; others add missing events. No discussion yet.
4. Find the turning points. Drag related events together, such as "design changed on day 2" and "export rework on day 7". Dot vote with three votes each on the moments that shaped the sprint, then sort by Most Votes.
5. Ask what you'd change. Write the answers in the last column. Early events often explain late ones.
6. Decide. Turn the strongest notes in the last column into action items with owners.

How to run it async over a sprint

A timeline gains a lot from async. An event written down the day it happened is accurate; remembered two weeks later, it's a guess.

1. Day 1: open the board right after the last retro. In Retro Rabbit, clicking Start New Retro opens the next board straight away; pick Timeline there with Try a different format.
2. During the sprint: add events the day they happen, on the board, Quick Notes on the Team Room page, or /retro Day 6: staging down all afternoon if the team uses Slack.
3. Mid-sprint: if the middle column is empty, ask at standup what happened this week that the team will want to remember.
4. Two days before the end: everyone reads the timeline, fills gaps and votes.
5. The day before: the facilitator groups related events and reads the CarrotIQ summary of each column.
6. Retro day: spend a 25-minute call on the top moments and the last column. Or stay in writing: each person adds a "what we'd do differently" note for the top three moments, and owners accept by end of day.

See how to run an async retrospective for the full playbook.

10 example prompts

Early in the sprint

1. What did we believe at planning that turned out to be wrong?
2. What changed in the first three days?

Middle of the sprint 3. Where did work stop and wait? 4. What surprised you halfway through? 5. Which day was the hardest, and why?

End of the sprint 6. What did we cut, and when did we decide? 7. What happened in the last two days that we hadn't planned for?

What we'd do differently 8. Which early event explains a late problem? 9. If we replayed this sprint, which day would you change? 10. What would we do the same, on purpose, next time?

For more question sets, see 60 sprint retrospective questions.

Facilitator tip and a common pitfall

Tip: read the board left to right before anyone discusses it. Teams want to jump to the loudest event. Reading in order first shows chains nobody saw alone: the design change on day 2, the rework on day 7, the cut feature on day 9. Those chains are why you use a timeline.

Pitfall: an end column three times longer than the others. That's recency bias: the last days feel biggest because they're freshest. If the early column is thin on retro day, give everyone five minutes with their calendar and commit history before voting.

How AI helps with this format

On Pro AI (and during the free trial), CarrotIQ does the summarizing:

• Group names. Drag "design changed after planning" onto "rework on the export screen" and CarrotIQ names the group, for example "Late Design Changes".
• Summaries. The Sprint Summary summarizes each column and the whole sprint. It reads like a short history for anyone who missed it.
• Suggested action items. CarrotIQ Suggest drafts an action from the notes, weighting the most-voted ones. Edit it and assign an owner.

Example action items

Timeline actions usually target the moment where a chain started, not the place where it hurt.

At the next retro, these appear in the Previous Retro tab, and anything older that's still open is 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. For one retro, click Try a different format in Start New Retro and pick Timeline: it applies to that retro only, and your Team Room keeps its usual columns. To make it the room's format, choose it under "Browse all formats" when you create your Team Room, or later in the Team Room's Settings.
3. Ask the team to add events as they happen, starting each note with the day number.

Reviewing a project? With Timeline as the room's format, rename the first three columns to months or milestones in Settings. See pricing for plans.

Related formats

• What Went Well: for an ordinary sprint where the order of events matters less
• Project post-mortem template: when the timeline covers a whole project
• 5 Whys template: to dig into one event on the timeline
• Quarterly retrospective: to look back over several sprints
• More formats in Project retrospectives
• All retrospective templates