4Ls Retrospective
What you enjoyed or valued about the period
Roman
Maria
Kirill
What you know now that you did not know before
Anna
Daria
Roman
What was missing and made the work harder
Maria
Kirill
Anna
What you wish existed, even if it is not ours to build
Daria
Roman
Maria
What is the 4Ls retrospective?
4Ls asks four questions about a period of work: what you Liked, what you Learned, what you Lacked and what you Longed For. It covers more ground than a two-column went-well/to-improve board without becoming an analytical exercise, and the wording is deliberately personal — people answer about their own experience rather than about an abstract process.
The two columns that make it worth choosing are Learned and Longed For. Learned captures knowledge the team gained and would otherwise lose, which is the part of a sprint that never appears on a board organised by good and bad. Longed For captures wishes, including ones outside the team's control — and a wish that recurs for three sprints is usually a real constraint that nobody has escalated.
When to use the 4Ls retrospective
- At the end of a project, a release or a quarter, where the Learned column has enough material to matter.
- After onboarding new people — Lacked and Longed For surface gaps that established members have stopped noticing.
- When retrospectives have narrowed to process complaints and the team is not talking about what it now knows.
- After a spike, an experiment or a proof of concept, where the output is knowledge rather than shipped work.
- With a cross-functional group, since the four questions need no shared engineering vocabulary.
- For a routine sprint, as a broader alternative to Went Well / To Improve when the team wants more range.
It is a weaker choice when you need to make a decision. 4Ls collects experience and produces themes; formats built around proposals — KALM, Starfish, DAKI — get to concrete changes faster.
The columns explained
Liked
What people enjoyed or valued about the period. A tool that removed friction, a colleague who unblocked someone, a stretch of uninterrupted time, a decision that turned out well. Ask what made it good, because the answer is usually a practice the team can repeat deliberately rather than a piece of luck.
Learned
New knowledge, whether pleasant or expensive: how a subsystem actually behaves under load, that an estimate was wrong by a factor of three, that a customer uses a feature in a way nobody designed for. Push for what was learned rather than what happened. This column is the reason to run 4Ls, and it is the one facilitators most often let people skip past.
Lacked
What was missing and made the work harder: documentation, access, a test environment, a decision, a second reviewer, clarity about who owned something. Lacked cards are usually the most directly actionable on the board, because most of them describe a gap someone in the team can close within a sprint.
Longed For
What people wished for, including things outside the team's control: a faster pipeline, fewer context switches, a design system, a product owner in the same time zone. Do not filter this column for realism while people are writing. A wish that appears in three consecutive retrospectives is not a wish, it is an unescalated constraint.
Example board
A seven-person team ran 4Ls at the end of a six-week project to add single sign-on to a customer portal.
| Liked | Learned | Lacked | Longed For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Splitting the work by identity provider instead of by layer — almost no merge conflicts | Our session handling assumed one login path; it broke the moment there were three | A staging environment with a real identity provider — we tested against a mock for four weeks | Someone from security in the room during design, not at the review at the end |
| The weekly fifteen-minute sync with support caught two edge cases early | Token refresh across tabs is a known problem with published solutions — we spent three days rediscovering that | A written decision on which providers we support — it changed twice | Fewer parallel projects; three of us were split across two |
| Nobody was on call during the cutover week | Customers use the old login page more than analytics suggested | Access to the provider's sandbox until week three | A design system, so login screens do not get rebuilt each time |
The Learned column drove the outcome. Three days lost rediscovering a documented problem turned into an action item to spend thirty minutes searching for prior art before starting any integration. The security wish in Longed For had also appeared in the previous two project retrospectives, which made it easy to raise with the security lead as a pattern rather than a complaint.
Timing for a team of 5–10
| Step | Time | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Frame the period | 5 min | State what is under review and walk through the main milestones so everyone recalls the same weeks. |
| Write in silence | 10 min | All four columns at once, cards hidden. Four columns need more writing time than three. |
| Read and group | 10 min | Reveal, read every card aloud, merge duplicates into themes. |
| Vote | 3 min | Three votes per person across the whole board. |
| Discuss the top themes | 20 min | Take the top three or four. Spend real time on Learned, not only on Lacked. |
| Close | 7 min | Action items with owners, plus anything from Learned worth writing down permanently. |
Facilitator prompts
- Liked: "What made the work enjoyable?" — "What would you want to repeat on the next project on purpose?"
- Learned: "What do you know now that you did not know six weeks ago?" — "What surprised you?" — "What would you tell a team starting this same project tomorrow?"
- Lacked: "What were you missing when you got stuck?" — "What did you have to work around?" — "What did you wait for?"
- Longed For: "If you could change one thing about how this work happens, what would it be?" — "What do you wish existed, even if it is not ours to build?"
- On Learned cards: "Where should that live so the next person does not learn it the expensive way?"
Common mistakes
- Rushing Learned. It is the column with the highest long-term value and the one teams treat as filler. Give it explicit airtime even when Lacked has more votes.
- Filtering Longed For for realism. Telling people a wish is unrealistic while they are writing empties the column that reveals structural constraints.
- Letting Learned stay in the meeting. Knowledge that is not written into a runbook, an ADR or a document is lost by the next sprint. Every retained Learned card needs a home.
- Confusing Lacked with Longed For. Lacked is what was missing during the work; Longed For is what people want for the future. Restate the distinction before writing starts.
- Using it for a routine two-week sprint with nothing new in it. Four columns need enough material; an uneventful sprint produces a thin Learned column and the format feels like paperwork.
- Ending with six action items. Four columns generate a lot of cards. Take three at most, each with an owner.
How to run the 4Ls retrospective in QRetro
- Create a board from the 4Ls template — Liked, Learned, Lacked and Longed For are already set up.
- Share the link; participants join in the browser without an account.
- Walk through the milestones of the period, then run ten minutes of silent writing with cards hidden.
- Reveal, read every card aloud and group duplicates into themes.
- Give each person three votes and discuss the top themes, reserving time for Learned.
- Record action items with owners, and give every retained Learned card a permanent home outside the board.
