🦛🎲 Hungry Hippos Showdown
Chomp into our project just like hungry hippos chasing marbles! Let’s gobble up what works, spit out blockers, and power up our team for the next big feast. Ready to snap up some agile improvements?
Template Columns
🍉 Marbles We Want to Keep
Share the mighty moves and strategies we want in our hippo game next time, too!
Base column: Keep🍏 Power-Ups to Add
Suggest new ideas or tools that can help us chomp marbles even faster or better.
Base column: Add🍊 Chomps to Take Less Often
Point out areas where we’re maybe biting off more than we can chew.
Base column: Less🥕 More Marbles, Please!
Highlight what we should focus on even more to really win the retro game!
Base column: MoreAbout this template
The Hungry Hippos Showdown retrospective uses playful, food-themed columns to help teams discuss what should be kept, added, reduced, or intensified in their workflow, turning reflections into actionable insights.
When to use this template
Use this format when your team needs an engaging way to surface lessons learned and spark fresh ideas, especially after a fast-paced sprint or milestone delivery.
How to facilitate
Begin by introducing the Hungry Hippos theme and explain the meaning of each column to set a playful, open tone.
Give team members a few quiet minutes to reflect and add notes to all four columns, encouraging candid feedback and creative thinking.
Facilitate a round of sharing where team members explain their notes, grouping similar ideas to identify common threads.
Guide a discussion to clarify suggestions, surface blockers, and highlight high-impact strategies.
Collaboratively select and prioritize actionable items from the Power-Ups to Add and More Marbles columns for the next sprint.
Capture key decisions and assign clear owners for follow-up actions so improvements don’t get left behind.
Close with a quick round of appreciations or a fun check-out related to the theme to end on a positive note.
Pro Tips
Use playful language and visuals to keep energy high and encourage creative, honest input, especially if the team is feeling fatigued.
Invite quieter team members to share first in each round to ensure all voices contribute before groupthink takes over.
Timebox each discussion segment to prevent over-analysis and keep the retro moving at a lively pace.
Consider sharing the column descriptions in advance so everyone comes prepared with thoughtful notes.
Prompt the team to think about specific examples from the recent project instead of general statements for deeper insights.
FAQ
What if team members aren’t familiar with the Hungry Hippos theme?
Provide a quick, lighthearted introduction and make sure everyone gets the column meanings. Emphasize that the focus is on reflection, not on game knowledge.
How can we avoid focusing only on negatives?
Actively prompt the team for successes and wins in the first column, and celebrate what went well to balance discussion.
What if conversation stalls in some columns?
Use prompting questions based on recent sprint events or ask team members to give concrete examples to spark discussion.
At a glance
- Duration
45–60 min
- Team Size
4-12 people
- Columns
4 columns
- Base Format
Keep, Add, Less, More
Tags
Ready to get started?
Use this template to run your next retrospective