Starfish retro
Definition
A retrospective format with five categories arranged like the arms of a starfish: Keep Doing, Less Of, More Of, Stop Doing, and Start Doing — giving teams finer-grained control over feedback than a three-column format.
The starfish retro was created by Patrick Kua as an evolution of Start / stop / continue. The key addition is the distinction between More Of and Start Doing (and between Less Of and Stop Doing). These gradations matter: sometimes a team doesn't want to stop something, they just want to dial it back. Collapsing that into a binary Stop loses useful signal.
The five arms:
- Keep Doing — things working well at the right level. Don't touch them.
- Less Of — things that add value but are overdone. Reduce frequency or scope.
- More Of — things that add value but are underused. Do more.
- Stop Doing — things that add no value. Eliminate.
- Start Doing — things not currently happening that should be. Begin.
How it runs: Draw a five-pointed star on the whiteboard, one label per arm. The team writes sticky notes and places them on the relevant arm. Five to ten minutes of silent writing, then the facilitator groups items and the team dot-votes. Stop Doing and Start Doing typically generate the clearest action items; Less Of and More Of produce calibration commitments.
When it beats Start / stop / continue: When the team is mature enough to make nuance useful. In early teams, five buckets can overwhelm; in experienced teams, the extra granularity surfaces insights that the three-column version flattens.
BoardSnap reads all five starfish arms from the whiteboard photo and structures the summary by arm, preserving the distinction between Less Of and Stop Doing that a generic summary would lose.
Examples
- More Of: pair programming on hard problems. Less Of: full-team planning poker on small tickets. Stop Doing: weekly status emails no one reads. Keep Doing: Friday demos. Start Doing: post-mortem docs after every incident.
- A senior engineering team switches from start / stop / continue to the starfish retro after finding the three-column format too coarse.
- A product team uses the starfish format specifically because the Less Of column lets them acknowledge value without calling for a full stop.
- A facilitator draws the starfish on a large whiteboard so all five arms have room for full-sized sticky notes.
Snap a starfish retro. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.