4Ls retro
Definition
A retrospective format that organizes team feedback into four columns: Liked (what went well), Learned (new insights), Lacked (what was missing), and Longed For (what the team wishes existed).
The 4Ls retro was popularized by Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener as a structured way to surface both emotional and practical feedback after a sprint or project phase. Where Mad/Sad/Glad skews toward feelings, the 4Ls balances sentiment with action by adding a forward-looking column — Longed For — that points directly at future improvements.
How it typically runs: A facilitator draws four columns on a whiteboard and gives the team five to seven minutes to write sticky notes, one idea per note. Notes go up silently, then the facilitator groups duplicates and the team dot-votes on the most important themes. The Lacked and Longed For columns almost always produce the clearest action items.
What makes it different from Start/Stop/Continue: 4Ls captures richer emotional texture. Liked and Learned both land in the positive zone but mean different things — Liked is satisfaction, Learned is growth. That distinction often surfaces insights that a binary good/bad split misses.
Common failure mode: Teams conflate Lacked (something was absent that should have been present) with Longed For (something new the team wants). Keep them separate — Lacked is a gap diagnosis, Longed For is a wish list.
BoardSnap AI reads a 4Ls board and extracts items by column, then generates action items with owners from the Lacked and Longed For sections. Snap it at the end of the retro and the summary is ready before the team leaves the room.
Examples
- Liked: daily standups kept everyone unblocked. Learned: our staging environment doesn't match prod closely enough. Lacked: a shared design token library. Longed For: automated visual regression tests.
- A remote team runs the 4Ls async in a shared doc, then reviews the board together in the last 15 minutes of a video call.
- A product team uses the Longed For column as a direct feed into the next quarter's innovation backlog.
- An engineering lead photographs the whiteboard 4Ls board with BoardSnap, shares the AI summary in Slack, and closes the retro channel thread.
Snap a 4ls retro. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.