Sprint Retro Questions: 40 Examples That Improve Team Culture
The quality of your retrospective depends on the quality of your questions.
If you ask "What went well?", you'll get generic answers. If you ask "What was the single most frustrating moment of the sprint?", you'll get a story.
Here are 40 powerful questions categorized by their purpose, designed to help you dig deeper and build a stronger engineering culture.
I. Celebrating Success (Positive Reinforcement)
Start on a high note. These questions build morale.
- What was our biggest win this sprint? (Focus on outcomes, not just output.)
- Who helped you the most this week? (Encourages gratitude.)
- What did we learn that we didn't know two weeks ago? (Focus on growth.)
- What was the most fun part of this sprint?
- Which process change from the last retro actually worked? (Validates the retro process itself.)
- What are you proud of achieving personally?
- What feedback did we get from stakeholders that was positive?
- How did we live up to our team values this sprint?
- What was the smoothest part of our workflow?
- If we could bottle one thing from this sprint and keep it forever, what would it be?
II. Uncovering Challenges (The "Real" Talk)
These questions are designed to find the hidden problems.
- What was the biggest bottleneck in our pipeline?
- Where did we waste the most time? (Meetings? Waiting for reviews?)
- What kept you up at night? (Reveals hidden risks.)
- If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing, what would it be?
- What conversation are we avoiding? (The "Elephant in the room" question.)
- Did we over-commit? If so, why?
- What tools fought against us this sprint?
- Where did communication break down?
- What was the most confusing requirement?
- If we had to do this sprint over, what would we do differently?
III. Team Culture & Safety
Focus on the people, not just the code.
- Did you feel safe to ask for help?
- How are our energy levels? (Burnout check.)
- Did everyone feel heard in our meetings?
- Are we having fun?
- Do we trust each other to deliver?
- How can we support each other better next sprint?
- Did we respect our "Focus Time"?
- Are we learning enough?
- Do we feel connected to the product vision?
- What is one thing that would make our team environment 1% better?
IV. Future Planning (Action Oriented)
Focus on the future.
- What is the #1 thing we must fix before the next release?
- What experiment do we want to run next sprint?
- How can we speed up our code reviews?
- What skill do we need to acquire as a team?
- How can we improve our definition of "Done"?
- What risk is looming on the horizon?
- How can we make our daily standups more valuable?
- What can we automate?
- Who needs to be involved in our planning earlier?
- What is our goal for the next retrospective?
Conclusion
Don't ask all 40 questions at once! Pick 2-3 that are relevant to your team's current situation. Rotate them to keep things fresh.
Pro Tip: In Clear Retro, you can create custom column headers. Instead of "Start/Stop", try labeling your columns with these questions (e.g., "What kept you up at night?" / "What was our biggest win?").