Plus Minus Interesting slows down snap judgment. It separates clear benefits and drawbacks from surprising patterns, unresolved questions, and consequences the team is not ready to label yet.
Use the prompts to keep cards specific. The examples show the level of detail that makes discussion and voting useful.
What created value, reduced risk, or deserves to be protected?
What introduced cost, friction, delay, or risk?
What surprised us, remains uncertain, or could change how we interpret the result?
A complete path from framing the room to assigning one concrete follow-up.
Name the sprint, experiment, proposed change, or decision being evaluated and define the evidence period.
Write benefits, strengths, and outcomes worth protecting. Ask for observable effects instead of general praise.
Capture costs, friction, delays, and risks without debating solutions during collection.
Record surprises, unknowns, second-order effects, and evidence that is not clearly positive or negative yet.
Cluster related evidence and vote by impact or uncertainty rather than by the number of cards in each column.
Choose what to preserve, what risk to reduce, and which unanswered question needs an owner and a next check.
Evaluate a proposed change before committing: expected benefits, likely costs, and assumptions that still need evidence.
Compare results with an explicit hypothesis and use Interesting to capture side effects and unanswered questions.
Collect each discipline’s perspective separately, then group cards to expose shared effects and important differences.
Before the retro
Plus Minus Interesting, or PMI, is a structured evaluation method that separates benefits, drawbacks, and noteworthy unknowns or possibilities before a team reaches a conclusion.
Interesting holds surprises, unanswered questions, neutral observations, second-order effects, and evidence that may change the decision but is not clearly positive or negative yet.
PMI adds a third space for uncertainty and curiosity. That prevents useful evidence from being forced into a positive or negative label too early.
Yes. A futurespective PMI can compare expected benefits, likely costs, and assumptions that need testing before the team commits.
Protect one high-value Plus, reduce one important Minus, and assign an owner and review point to the Interesting question that could most change the decision.
Open a board with Plus, Minus, and Interesting ready for the team, then turn mixed evidence into a focused next step.
