The 4Ls retro goes beyond what went well and what didn't. It adds what the team learned and what they wished they'd had. Four columns, richer output than a standard retro. Snap it and ship the insights.
Use the 4Ls retro when your standard sprint retro has grown stale — when 'what went well / what didn't' stops producing new insights and the team feels like they're going through the motions. The Learned and Longed For columns push the conversation beyond immediate problems into knowledge gaps and systemic wishes.
The 4Ls also works well for project post-mortems, end-of-quarter reviews, and team offsite retrospectives — any session where you want to capture not just problems but learning and aspiration.
What the team genuinely appreciated about the sprint or project. Practices that worked, moments of excellent collaboration, decisions that paid off, energy that felt right. This column runs first and sets a positive tone. Be specific — 'liked how we handled the deployment incident on Wednesday' beats 'good teamwork.'
What the team learned during the sprint — about the product, the customer, the technical stack, the process, or each other. Learnings can be positive or negative: 'learned that caching the user profile cuts load time by 60%' and 'learned that our QA process misses edge cases in the mobile flow' are both valid Learned stickies.
What the team was missing that would have made the sprint better — resources, information, tools, skills, process, clarity. Lacked is distinct from 'what didn't go well' — it focuses on absence rather than failure. 'Lacked clear acceptance criteria on three stories' names a gap without blaming a person.
What the team wishes existed — a tool that doesn't yet, a process improvement they can envision but not yet implement, a capability they want to develop. Longed For items are often the seeds of long-term improvement: they name the ideal and open the conversation about how to get there.
Remind the team that the 4Ls goes deeper than a standard retro — Learned and Longed For require more reflection. Give people a moment to think before writing.
Everyone writes stickies independently for all four columns simultaneously. Silent writing prevents anchoring — no one reads their stickies until the write phase is done.
Post all stickies on the board and cluster related notes within each column. Read clusters aloud to make sure everyone understands the context.
These two columns are the 4Ls' unique contribution. Spend disproportionate time here. Ask: 'How do we capture this learning so the next sprint benefits from it?' and 'What would it take to get what we longed for?'
Extract 2–3 specific, owned action items from the full discussion. Longed For items often produce the most durable improvements — they name structural changes rather than one-off fixes.
Snap the board with BoardSnap. The AI reads all four columns and outputs a structured summary with action items drawn from the Lacked and Longed For clusters.
The 4Ls format produces a richer board than a standard two-column retro. The Learned column in particular tends to generate dense, specific stickies — technical insights, product discoveries, process observations — that deserve to be preserved and acted on, not erased with the board.
BoardSnap reads all four columns and preserves the full content: Liked wins, Learned insights, Lacked gaps, and Longed For aspirations. The AI identifies patterns across columns — when a Lacked and a Longed For point to the same systemic gap, that becomes the highest-priority action item.
The 4Ls format is generally attributed to Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener, who described it in the context of requirements and agile retrospective practice. It builds on the standard retrospective format by adding Learning and Longing dimensions that produce richer, more forward-looking output.
When the team's standard retro format has plateaued — when the stickies look the same every sprint and the action items are variations of the same three things. The 4Ls breaks that pattern by forcing two new reflective lenses: what did we learn and what do we wish we had? These questions produce different insights than 'what went well.'
45–60 minutes. The Learned and Longed For columns require more discussion time than the equivalent columns in a standard retro — budget extra time there specifically. If you're running short, prioritize Learned and Longed For over re-litigating the Liked and Lacked items.
Yes — it's particularly well-suited for post-mortems because the Learned column captures the institutional knowledge the project produced, and the Longed For column generates genuine improvement ideas rather than just problem identification. Snap the post-mortem board with BoardSnap and the output becomes a knowledge artifact for the next similar project.
No exporting, no transcription. Snap the board, get the action plan.