Lean Coffee

What is Lean Coffee?

Lean Coffee is a meeting format with no agenda set in advance. The participants write the topics at the start, vote on them, and then discuss them one at a time in short timeboxes, deciding by vote after each timebox whether to continue or move on. The board has three columns — To Discuss, Discussing, Discussed — and topics move left to right as the session progresses.

It was created in Seattle in 2009 by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith for a group that wanted to meet regularly without anyone having to organise a programme. The mechanism that makes it work is the vote after every timebox: a topic continues only while the group actively wants it to, which is why Lean Coffee sessions rarely get captured by one person's agenda.

When to use Lean Coffee

• As a retrospective when nobody knows what the retrospective is about — the team surfaces the agenda itself instead of forcing material into fixed columns.
• For a recurring open forum: a guild, a chapter, a community of practice, an office hour.
• When one or two voices dominate your regular meetings — voting and timeboxes limit how much airtime any single topic can absorb.
• For cross-team or all-hands discussion, where a fixed agenda would only fit some of the people in the room.
• When a standing meeting has lost its purpose and half the agenda is status that could have been written down.
• For onboarding sessions and skip-levels, where the useful questions are the ones the organiser did not think to ask.

It is the wrong format when the meeting has a decision to reach by the end. Lean Coffee optimises for covering what the group cares about, not for closing a specific question, and a topic can end with the group agreeing to move on rather than agreeing on anything.

The columns explained

To Discuss

The backlog of proposed topics, written by participants in the first few minutes and then voted on. Cards should be short and specific: a question or a subject, not a paragraph. Everything that is not currently being discussed lives here, ranked by votes, so the group always knows what is next.

Discussing

The single topic currently in play. Only one card sits here at a time. Keeping the column strictly to one item is what makes the format work — the moment two topics are open, the timebox stops meaning anything and the session drifts back into an ordinary meeting.

Discussed

Topics that are finished, either because the group voted to stop or because the conversation reached a natural end. The column is a visible record of what the hour actually covered, and it is worth reviewing at the close: anything that produced a commitment should leave the session as an action item with an owner.

Example board

A group of eight engineers from three teams ran a monthly Lean Coffee. Topics were written in four minutes, then voted on with three votes each.

The runbooks topic ran for three five-minute timeboxes before the group voted to move on, and produced one commitment: whoever is paged updates the runbook before closing the incident. Staging took two timeboxes and produced a decision to give each team its own namespace. The HTTP client topic ran a single timebox — the group discovered in four minutes that only one team had a problem with it, and moved on. Two topics were never reached, and were carried over to the next session's board.

Timing for a team of 5–10

Facilitator prompts

• "Write anything you would like this group to talk about. One topic per card, no explanations yet."
• "Three votes each. You can put all three on one card if you care about it that much."
• "Top card is in Discussing. Whoever wrote it, give us thirty seconds of context, then it is open."
• "Five minutes is up. Thumbs up to continue, thumbs down to move on — vote now, do not argue for it."
• "We have been on this for three timeboxes. Is there a decision here, or are we enjoying the discussion?"
• "Before we move on: did anything in that topic turn into something someone will do?"

Common mistakes

• Skipping the vote after each timebox. Without it, the first topic eats the hour and Lean Coffee becomes a normal meeting with extra steps.
• Letting the topic author lead every discussion. Thirty seconds of context, then the floor is open to everyone. Otherwise the format just redistributes who presents.
• Long topic cards. A card that takes a minute to read has already used a fifth of its timebox. Keep them to a question or a subject.
• Two cards in Discussing at once. The moment the column holds more than one item, the timebox is meaningless.
• Closing without capturing commitments. Lean Coffee produces decisions in passing, and they evaporate unless someone writes them down with a name attached before the session ends.
• Deleting the unreached topics. The leftover To Discuss column is the best starting point for the next session, and a topic that survives two sessions unvoted can be dropped honestly.

How to run Lean Coffee in QRetro

1. Create a board from the Lean Coffee template — To Discuss, Discussing and Discussed are already set up.
2. Share the link; participants join in the browser without an account.
3. Give everyone five minutes to add topic cards to To Discuss, then three votes each.
4. Sort To Discuss by votes and move the top card into Discussing.
5. Run a five-minute timer, then take a quick continue-or-move-on vote. Move finished cards to Discussed.
6. At the close, turn commitments into action items with owners and leave the unreached cards on the board for next time.