A Waste Snake isn't a board you fill in during the meeting. It's a running log the team keeps all sprint: every time someone loses time to waste, they add it to the end of the snake. The retro is where you read it.
Because entries are written in the moment, the snake catches the small, repeated losses that never come up in a normal retro: the review that took a day, the spec nobody could find, the approval that added nothing. Reading them together, sorted by type of waste, shows where the team's time actually goes.
A strip of wall next to the team board, a dedicated chat channel, or a shared doc. If logging takes longer than the waste itself, nobody will do it.
Each entry says what happened and roughly how much time it cost: "Waited 2 h for the staging deploy to finish." A rough number is fine; the point is to compare, not to bill.
No sorting, no discussion, no fixing during the sprint unless something is on fire. The snake only works if adding to it is quick and judgement-free.
Remind the team at standup for the first sprint or two. A short snake is also information: either things went smoothly or people stopped logging, and the retro can tell you which.
Eight entries from a two-week sprint, already tagged with the TIMWOODS letter the team gave them in the retro.
TIMWOODS is the lean checklist of eight wastes. In the retro, tag every snake entry with one letter. The letters turn a long list of annoyances into a few piles you can compare.
Moving work between people, teams or tools.
In software: Hand-offs between Support, Product and the dev team.
Work started but not finished or not released.
In software: Branches waiting weeks to merge, features built but not shipped.
Effort spent searching and switching.
In software: Hunting for the latest spec, jumping between five tools.
Time blocked on someone or something else.
In software: Reviews, environments, approvals, answers.
Building more than is needed, or before it's needed.
In software: Features nobody asked for yet, gold-plating.
More process or polish than the work requires.
In software: Three sign-offs for a copy change, reports nobody reads.
Bugs and the rework they cause.
In software: Fixing, re-testing and re-releasing.
People's knowledge and talent going unused.
In software: Experts left out of decisions they could have improved.
Running it with Retromik
Retromik doesn't have a Waste Snake board, on purpose: the snake is collected over a whole sprint, and a Retromik board is for one session. Keep the snake wherever your team already talks during the sprint.
For the retro, open a board with the Kaizen template. Paste the snake's entries into Muda (waste), add anything that points to uneven flow or overload to Mura and Muri, then vote anonymously on the waste to tackle first. The action you agree on becomes a tracked action item, so next sprint's snake can show whether it worked.
It's a retrospective built on a log the team keeps during the sprint. Every time someone loses time to waste, they add a short note with roughly how long it cost. In the retro, the team reads the log, sorts it into types of waste and picks the biggest one to fix.
Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects and Skills: the eight types of waste from lean thinking, with Skills (unused talent) added to the classic seven. In software, Waiting, Defects and Motion usually fill most of the snake.
No, and that's deliberate. A Waste Snake is collected over the whole sprint, while a Retromik board is for one session. Keep the snake wherever your team already works, then run the retro on a Retromik board with the Kaizen template: paste the snake's entries into Muda (waste) and vote anonymously on what to fix.
About 45 minutes for a team of 5 to 9 with a typical two-week snake. If the snake is long, timebox the tagging step so there's still time to agree on an experiment.
Free, no sign-up for participants. Anonymous cards, voting and tracked action items.
See the Kaizen template →