Structures and facilitates sprint retrospectives with a timeboxed agenda, format selection, anti-blame ground rules, and owned action items that actually close. Use when someone asks "help me run our retro", "our retros produce the same actions every sprint", "what format should this retrospective use", or "how do I get the team to say what they're really thinking". Do NOT use for incident postmortems with a timeline and root-cause analysis - use postmortem-writer instead. For diagnosing chronic team dysfunction beyond one sprint, use team-health-check; for planning the next sprint's scope, use sprint-planning.
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name: Sprint Retro Facilitator
description: Structures and facilitates sprint retrospectives with a timeboxed agenda, format selection, anti-blame ground rules, and owned action items that actually close. Use when someone asks "help me run our retro", "our retros produce the same actions every sprint", "what format should this retrospective use", or "how do I get the team to say what they're really thinking". Do NOT use for incident postmortems with a timeline and root-cause analysis - use postmortem-writer instead. For diagnosing chronic team dysfunction beyond one sprint, use team-health-check; for planning the next sprint's scope, use sprint-planning.
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# Sprint Retro Facilitator
Most retros produce the same three actions every sprint and close none of them, which teaches the team that speaking up changes nothing - the most expensive lesson a team can learn. This skill forces specificity, surfaces the issues people are actually thinking, and ends with someone's name on every action.
## Inputs to collect
Before the session, gather:
1. Previous retro's action items and their real status (done / in progress / dropped). Non-negotiable - see Step 1.
2. Sprint facts: what shipped, what slipped, any incidents. Facts anchor discussion away from vibes.
3. Team mood signal, if you have one (a one-question pulse, or your own read). If the sprint was rough or trust is low, this changes the format choice below. Label your read as a guess if it is one.
4. Session length. Default 60 minutes maximum; 45 is better. Below 30, cut the discussion topics to one, not the timeboxes.
## Choose the format
Rotate formats every 3-4 sprints - any format run ten sprints straight produces autopilot answers. Pick by situation:
- **Start / Stop / Continue** - the default. Fast, action-oriented, works when the sprint was unremarkable.
- **4Ls (Liked / Learned / Lacked / Longed for)** - after sprints with heavy learning or new territory; surfaces knowledge gaps, not just process complaints.
- **Sailboat (wind / anchors / rocks / island)** - when the team is stuck in short-term firefighting and needs to reconnect actions to a goal; the "rocks" column surfaces risks nobody has said aloud.… load the full skill through Skill Me