The Advent Retro is an interactive, holiday advent calendar-themed retrospective template designed to help agile teams review an entire year or major milestone door by door. Uncover key moments, reflect on challenges, vote on improvements, and leave a message for the future in a multi-stage, countdown-style experience.
What's Included on the Board
The Advent Façade: A pixel-art building layout displaying 24 numbered doors structured across four distinct rows.
Behind the Doors (Doors 1 to 18): Dedicated reflection cards for silent writing and sharing across 18 unique prompt categories:
1. Biggest Win: What are we proudest we pulled off? (e.g., midnight release for the new subscription flow)
2. Best Decision: Which call paid off most?
3. Funniest Moment: What still makes us laugh?
4. Proudest Team Moment: When did we feel most like a team?
5. Best Collaboration: Who did we work brilliantly with?
6. Someone to Thank: Who deserves a shout-out?
7. Customer Moment: When did we truly make a difference for a customer?
8. Unexpected Surprise: What caught us off guard?
9. Biggest Challenge: What was hardest this year?
10. Risk We Survived: What nearly went wrong and why didn't it?
11. Moment of Courage: Who spoke up or stepped up?
12. What Drained Us: What cost us energy?
13. What Gave Us Energy: What lit us up?
14. Experiment That Worked: What bet paid off?
15. Experiment That Failed: What flopped, and what did it teach us?
16. Something We Learned: What do we know now that we didn't in January?
17. Skill We Built: What can we do now that we couldn't before?
18. One Thing We'd Redo: With hindsight, what would we change?
Vote, Reflect, Plan (Doors 19 to 24): The final convergence zone to synthesize takeaways and commit to action items:
19. Something We Should Stop (Dot-voting enabled)
20. Something We Should Start (Dot-voting enabled)
21. Something We Should Continue (Dot-voting enabled)
22. Wish for the Team: One wish each, read aloud
23. Priority for Next Year: Action planning where top votes turn into concrete commitments
24. Message to Our Future Selves: A time-capsule note to open next December
Facilitator Guide: Step-by-step facilitation instructions with breakdown timings (60 minutes default, scalable from 45 to 90 minutes).
Who Is It For?
Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Engineering Managers, and Product Leads looking for a comprehensive, highly engaging, and memorable year-end retrospective framework to review annual achievements and set strategic priorities for the coming year.
