Starfish Retrospective

Calibrate instead of overhaul — dial behaviours up and down rather than starting from zero.

Use this template free

Free · No credit card · Guests join by link

The board

MORE OF

What should we do more of?

LESS OF

What should we do less of?

KEEP

What is at the right level?

The Starfish retrospective replaces binary judgments with dials. Instead of asking whether something is good or bad, it asks for calibration: what deserves more investment, what deserves less, and what is at exactly the right level and should be protected.

That nuance matters for mature teams. After a year of retrospectives, few things are outright broken — but plenty of things are slightly over- or under-done: too many status meetings, not enough pairing, exactly the right amount of code review. Starfish captures that middle ground.

When to use a Starfish Retrospective

Mature teams whose processes work but need tuning, not replacement
When previous retros keep producing 'add a new process' actions and the team is drowning in process
Capacity conversations: More of / Less of maps directly onto where time goes
As a change-management pulse after a big process change has had a few sprints to settle

How to run a Starfish Retrospective

1
Narrow the scope
Starfish works best on one area at a time: meetings, code review, how work reaches the team. Put the area in the board's focus question so every card is about the same thing.
2
Write each card as a dial, not a switch
"More pairing on unfamiliar code" is a Starfish card. "Start pairing" is a Start-Stop-Continue card. Ask people to say how much more or less, if they can.
3
Pair every More of with a Less of
Time is fixed. When the team agrees to do more of something, ask what it will do less of to make room. This one question keeps Starfish from adding to everyone's load.
4
Protect the Keep column
Read the Keep cards before voting. They're the practices that work at exactly the right level, and naming them stops them being optimized away later.
5
Check the dial in two sprints
Turn the top More of and Less of cards into action items with a check date. Two sprints is usually enough to tell whether the new setting is better.

Anonymous writing, voting, grouping and action items work the same as in any Retromik retro.

Read the full facilitation guide

Example cards

What good cards look like for a software team. Specific, about the work, never about a person.

MORE OF

Pairing when someone picks up unfamiliar code.
Short demos to the support team after each release.
Writing down decisions made in Slack threads.

LESS OF

Status meetings that repeat the standup.
Slack pings during the no-meeting mornings.
Re-estimating stories that are already in progress.

KEEP

Code review within 24 hours.
The Friday afternoon slot for tech debt.
Rotating who runs the standup.

A 45-minute agenda

0–5 minName the area you're tuning
5–15 minWrite dial cards silently
15–20 minRead the Keep column, then vote
20–35 minDiscuss the top cards, pairing each More of with a Less of
35–45 minAgree on two or three dial changes and a date to check them

Common mistakes

Cards turn into starts and stops. If the team wants to add or remove something outright, Start, Stop, Continue is a better fit.
Vague dials like "communicate more". Ask: more of what, with whom, how often?
Every More of, no Less of. The team leaves with extra work and nothing taken away.
Skipping Keep. It's the column that tells you what not to change.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Starfish retrospective?

A retrospective format that calibrates team behaviours across five classic zones — keep doing, more of, less of, start, and stop. Retromik's template focuses on the three calibration zones (More of, Less of, Keep); pure additions and removals fit naturally at the discussion stage or in a Start-Stop-Continue retro.

When is Starfish better than Start, Stop, Continue?

When nothing is fundamentally broken. Start/Stop framing pushes toward adding and removing things; Starfish's More of/Less of framing pushes toward adjusting things you already do — usually the cheaper and safer change.

What belongs in the Keep column?

Practices at exactly the right intensity — and that is not filler. Naming what works protects it from being optimized away later, and voting on Keep cards shows the team which habits it genuinely values.

How do you make More of and Less of cards actionable?

Ask for an amount and a scope: not "more testing" but "integration tests for every new endpoint". Then set a check date two sprints out, so the team can see whether the new setting helped.

How many votes should each person get?

Three to five tokens works well. In Retromik you configure vote tokens per board, and each person's tokens are limited so the voting phase forces real prioritization.