Lean Coffee Retrospective
Democratic, agenda-free discussion driven by the team's own priorities.
Lean Coffee is a structured but agenda-free meeting format. Instead of preset columns, the team generates their own discussion topics, votes to prioritise, and timeboxes each conversation—making it one of the most democratic retrospective formats available.
Board columns
To Discuss
Topics anyone on the team wants to talk about. No filtering—everything gets added and the group decides what rises to the top.
Discussing
The current topic being discussed within its timebox. Visible to the whole group.
Discussed
Completed topics. Cards move here when the timebox ends or the group votes to move on, keeping momentum high.
When to use this template
Lean Coffee suits Kanban teams, product teams, or any group that prefers a bottom-up, self-directed format over a facilitator-prescribed structure. Excellent when the team has diverse, unpredictable topics that do not fit a standard template.
How to run it
- 1
Give everyone 3–5 minutes to write topics they want to discuss—one per card.
- 2
Briefly read each card aloud.
- 3
Vote: each person has two or three dot-votes to allocate.
- 4
Sort cards by votes.
- 5
Discuss the top card with a 5–8 minute timebox. At the end of each timebox, the group votes thumbs up or down to continue for another timebox or move to the next topic.
- 6
Capture actions and learnings per completed topic.
Facilitation tips
Keep timeboxes short—5 minutes is often enough to surface the action without debating the solution.
Encourage quiet members to add cards before the vote so all voices shape the agenda.
Capture the Discussed column as a retro summary so outcomes are not lost.
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