🤠🏜️ Wild West Showdown
Saddle up, partners! Ride through our sprint’s frontier, rustle up successes, lasso challenges, and blaze new trails for the next sprint.
Template Columns
🏁 Trailhead Start
Identify new practices to launch our journey across the prairie.
Base column: Start🛑 Deserted Paths
Spot habits or obstacles we should abandon before they sink us in the sand.
Base column: Stop🤠 Keep Riding
Highlight the tactics that keep our wagon rolling smoothly.
Base column: ContinueAbout this template
A fun, Western-themed sprint review that surfaces new ideas, discards unhelpful habits, and reinforces effective practices.
When to use this template
Use when the team needs a fresh, energizing perspective and wants to balance celebrating wins with pruning waste.
How to facilitate
Gather the team on a video call, share the Wild West Showdown board, and set a timer for each column.
Start with the Trailhead Start column: each member writes one new practice they’d like to launch, then discuss and vote on the top two.
Move to the Deserted Paths column: participants note habits or obstacles to abandon, group similar items, and decide which to drop this sprint.
Proceed to the Keep Riding column: capture tactics that are working well, cluster them, and agree on how to sustain them.
Conclude by summarizing the agreed actions, assigning owners, and ending with a quick ‘cheers’ moment to reinforce team spirit.
Pro Tips
Use a virtual whiteboard with sticky notes in the three colors to keep the theme vivid.
Limit each contribution to one sentence to keep discussion focused and timeboxed.
After voting, turn the top items into concrete action items with clear owners and due dates.
FAQ
What if the team runs out of ideas for new practices?
Prompt with examples from the last sprint or ask each person to think of one improvement they observed, keeping the focus on small, testable changes.
How do we handle dominant voices taking over the discussion?
Use a round-robin format for initial input and set a timer per person, then open the floor for brief follow-up comments.
Can we combine this with other retrospective formats?
Yes, you can run the Wild West Showdown as a quick 45‑minute warm‑up before a deeper analysis like a Start‑Stop‑Continue or a 5‑Whys session.
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At a glance
- Duration
45–60 min
- Team Size
4-12 people
- Columns
3 columns
- Base Format
Start, Stop, Continue
Tags
Ready to get started?
Use this template to run your next retrospective