Speed Car Retrospective
The Speed Car pictures the team as a vehicle racing toward its goals. The engine is everything that makes the team go faster, while the parachute is whatever drags it back and slows it down. This compact, two-part metaphor sparks a focused conversation about accelerators and brakes in the team's way of working.
What make us move faster?
Roman
Feature flags let us ship half-finished work safely
Maria
The shared component library killed a week of duplicate UI
What is slowing us down?
Anna
Waiting on one reviewer who is in meetings all day
Daria
Flaky tests we rerun instead of fixing
Introduction:
The Speed Car Retrospective is a simple and effective method for conducting team retrospectives. The metaphor of a speed car is used to represent the team's progress and identify the factors that are speeding up or slowing down their progress.
Template:
Engine
- What is making us move faster?
- List out the things that are contributing to the team's success and progress.
Parachute
- What is slowing us down?
- Identify the factors that are hindering the team's progress and holding them back.
Benefits of the Speed Car Retrospective:
- The metaphor of a speed car makes it easy to understand and remember.
- The format is simple and straightforward, allowing for quick and effective retrospectives.
- Encourages the team to focus on both positive and negative factors that impact their progress.
- Helps the team identify areas for improvement and take actionable steps to make progress.
Conclusion:
The Speed Car Retrospective is a useful tool for teams looking to improve their progress and performance. By focusing on both positive and negative factors, teams can identify areas for improvement and take actionable steps to make progress.
Similar templates
Other formats teams pair with this one — open any of them as a board in one click.
Happy - Meh - Sad
A quick emotional check-in that takes the team's temperature with just three faces. Participants sort their experiences into happy, meh and sad, giving a fast read on overall mood without heavy structure. It works well as a warm-up or for short, frequent retrospectives where time is tight.
Idea Prioritization
A focused format for turning a pile of ideas into a clear plan of action. The team sorts proposals into low, medium and high priority, making it obvious where to direct energy first. It's especially handy at the end of a brainstorm, when many ideas need to be ranked before anything can move forward.
Harry Potter
A themed retrospective that wraps familiar questions in the magic of Hogwarts. Felix Felicis collects the good things, Baruffio's Brain Elixir what the team learned, Petrificus Totalus what slowed it down, and the Triwizard Cup the shout-outs, all closing with clear action items. The playful framing lowers the guard and invites more candid feedback.
KALM Retrospective
KALM frames improvement around the value the team's practices deliver. Participants decide what to keep because it works, what to add that's currently missing, what to do more of and what to do less of. The four simple verbs make it easy to tune day-to-day habits without a heavy process.
Marie Kondo Method
Inspired by the famous tidying method, this retrospective asks the team to declutter the way it works. Practices that bring joy are worth keeping, those that went wrong are thrown out, and the rest are recycled — improved and reused. The metaphor turns process cleanup into a surprisingly enjoyable conversation.
Game of Thrones
A themed retrospective that maps the team's reality onto a fantasy kingdom. The castle is what the team is great at, the hole the current problems, the wall what could make it stronger, and the White Walkers the looming risks and challenges. The story-driven framing makes a strategic conversation feel engaging and easy to join.
