The 4Ls retrospective creates more nuance than a positive-versus-negative review. It protects useful practices, captures learning, exposes missing support, and gives the team space to describe a better future.
Use the prompts to keep cards specific. The examples show the level of detail that makes discussion and voting useful.
What felt useful, enjoyable, effective, or worth repeating?
What new fact, skill, assumption, or pattern did we discover?
What information, capability, time, ownership, or support was missing?
What did we wish existed, happened sooner, or worked differently?
A complete path from framing the room to assigning one concrete follow-up.
Name the sprint, release, or project stage being reviewed and explain how Lacked differs from Longed For.
Ask everyone to contribute silently to each column. Encourage specific moments and one observation per card.
Read the cards by column and allow short clarifying questions. Save debate and solutions for the prioritized themes.
Cluster cards that describe the same pattern across different columns, such as a learning connected to something the team lacked.
Vote on the themes with the greatest effect on team outcomes, then discuss causes, tradeoffs, and what should change.
Choose one behavior to preserve from Liked and one small experiment addressing a Lacked or Longed For theme.
Review the whole phase rather than one sprint and ask which learning should change the next milestone plan.
Collect cards anonymously when the team is discussing missing support, workload, or decision-making confidence.
Write every card from the customer or user perspective to expose value, learning, missing needs, and desired outcomes.
Before the retro
The 4Ls are Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For. Together they cover positive experience, new knowledge, missing support, and desired future conditions.
Lacked describes something necessary that was missing during the period. Longed For describes an improvement or future condition the team wishes it had.
A focused 4Ls retrospective usually takes 30–40 minutes for three to ten people, including silent writing, grouping, voting, discussion, and actions.
It works especially well after learning-heavy sprints, experiments, project milestones, or whenever a binary positive/negative format no longer produces useful insight.
Both names refer to the same format. “4Ls retrospective” is usually clearer because the method uses four prompts beginning with L: Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For.
Open Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For on one shared board, then turn the strongest theme into an owned experiment.
