BoardSnap is an iOS app that reads starfish retrospective whiteboards and turns five-zone action guidance — Keep, Less of, More of, Stop, Start — into a structured team improvement plan.
The starfish retrospective improves on Start/Stop/Continue by adding two nuance zones: More of (things that are working but could be amplified) and Less of (things that aren't fully broken but are leaning the wrong way). Five zones instead of three gives the team a finer calibration.
The board looks like a starfish: five arms, five zones, sticky notes in each. It's visually satisfying to build. It's also denser than a three-column board — which means more to capture and more to lose if the only record is a photo.
Five arms radiating from the center. Label each: Keep / More of / Less of / Stop / Start. The center of the starfish is the team or project name.
Silent writing, five to eight minutes. Each person places notes on any arm they feel strongly about. All five arms should have content — if one is empty, prompt the team specifically.
Read notes aloud for each arm. Cluster similar ones. Name the clusters. Clusters with multiple notes get higher priority in the action list.
Stop and Start items are the highest-effort commitments. Dot-vote to identify which ones the team is actually prepared to act on this sprint.
Stop items need an owner who stops the behavior. Start items need an owner who starts the new practice. Write the owner's name or role next to the note.
BoardSnap reads all five arms, the cluster names, the vote counts, and any owner annotations. The output is organized by arm.
A five-section retrospective document: Keep (sustain these practices), More of (amplify these), Less of (reduce these), Stop (cease these immediately), Start (begin these). Stop and Start items generate tri-state action items with owners. More of and Less of items generate team commitments. Keep items are recorded as team strengths.
The 'More of' arm revealed that the team wanted more pairing sessions — something that had been happening but not consistently scheduled. BoardSnap captured it as a commitment, and the team added paired work sessions to their sprint ceremonies.
A content team's quarterly retro. The 'Less of' arm had five notes about approval process bottlenecks. BoardSnap grouped them into one cluster with a root cause summary, which became the input for a process redesign conversation.
Use starfish when the team needs finer calibration — when 'stop' and 'start' are too binary and you want to acknowledge things that are going okay but could be better (More of) or are trending wrong but not yet broken (Less of). It's better for mature teams that have done a few retros and need more nuance.
More of = something already happening that should happen more. Start = something not happening at all that should begin. The distinction matters for prioritization — More of items have less adoption resistance because the behavior already exists.
With a practiced facilitator, yes — thirty to forty-five minutes. First-time starfish sessions often run longer because the five zones invite more discussion. Set a timer per arm if time is tight.
Keep items are team strengths. BoardSnap captures them as commitments in the project, not as action items. They're useful context for future retros — if something moves from Keep to Less of, that's a meaningful signal.
Snap the board, ship the action items in ten seconds.