The 4Ls retrospective helps a team reflect on what it Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For. The four prompts make room for useful experiences, new understanding, missing resources, and future needs. Teams can use them after a sprint, marketing campaign, product launch, or another shared period of work.
This guide explains the method, provides five examples, and shows how to prepare a Boardmix board for the discussion. The aim is to understand the work and choose a useful improvement, not to fill every column with an equal number of notes.
What is the 4Ls retrospective model?
Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener describe the technique in their original 4Ls retrospective article. Participants write observations, group related notes, discuss the themes, and decide how to use what they have learned.
- Liked: What helped or worked well, and why?
- Learned: What do we understand now that we did not before?
- Lacked: What was missing when we needed it?
- Longed For: What would we like to have or make possible next time?
“Lacked” looks at a gap in the period being discussed; “Longed For” opens up future possibilities. They can overlap. Understanding a concern is more useful than arguing about which column owns the note.
How to use the 4Ls retrospective technique
Step 1: define the period and purpose
Choose a shared scope, such as “the reporting feature release,” and invite the people who did the work. Explain the four prompts and ask for observations about events and their effects, rather than guesses about a colleague's motives.
A small team could use a 50-minute agenda: five minutes to frame the session, eight to write individually, ten to group and clarify notes, seventeen to discuss, and ten to choose a change. Adjust the time to the work and the people involved.
Step 2: prepare the space
Set out four areas on a physical wall or a shared Boardmix board. Put the scope and dates at the top. Recent work items or a release timeline can help people remember events, but should not become a presentation that consumes the meeting.
Step 3: capture what people liked and learned
Allow individual writing before discussion, with one observation per note. Ask what made a positive experience helpful and what participants learned from a challenge. “Support reviewed the release notes early and caught confusing terms” is easier to discuss than “communication was good.”
Participants can leave a category empty. Requiring a positive comment or a lesson from everyone can produce filler rather than honest feedback.
Step 4: explore what was lacking and longed for
Identify what people needed but did not have, such as representative test accounts or time to learn a new system. Then ask what would make future work better: a shared preview, clearer requirements, or a different handoff.
Read and group related notes without hiding their differences. Two notes about testing may concern access and acceptance criteria, which need different responses. Let people clarify their own observations and allow them to pass if they do not want to speak.
Step 5: choose a change the team can influence
Discuss the themes and select a manageable response. Record the action, a willing owner, and when it will be tried. A request for more budget may need escalation; it is not a commitment the team can approve on its own.
Step 6: return to the selected action
At the next retrospective, ask what happened and whether the change helped. If it was not attempted, discuss the constraint. Do not turn every observation into an assignment or carry forward a long list of unresourced actions.
Five 4Ls retrospective examples
These example boards show how the same prompts can fit different teams. Replace the broad observations with the events and details your participants actually experienced.
1. Software development team
Liked: Detailed documentation, useful code reviews, and a collaborative environment. Learned: New frameworks and better testing practices. Lacked: Clear requirements, testing resources, and cross-functional training. Longed For: Better requirements, a dedicated testing period, and stronger collaboration tools.
A facilitator could ask which missing requirement caused rework and when the team discovered it. That turns “better requirements” into a specific discussion about the next handoff.
2. Marketing campaign
Liked: Creative freedom, cross-department brainstorming, and encouraging customer feedback. Learned: More about market trends, content strategy, and measuring campaign returns. Lacked: Budget, analysis time, and research tools. Longed For: More room to test channels, stronger analytics, and training.
Before treating positive feedback as proof a campaign succeeded, examine what the audience did and which target the team was trying to meet. A useful improvement might be protected analysis time rather than another dashboard.
3. Product launch
Liked: The audience response to the launch event. Learned: More about customer preferences. Lacked: Coordination with sales. Longed For: A more complete post-launch analysis.
Ask which handoff failed: did sales lack a demo, an availability date, or answers to common objections? Keep those needs distinct so “coordinate better” becomes a concrete proposal.
4. Customer support improvement
Liked: The team's experience of a new ticketing system. Learned: Conflict-resolution techniques. Lacked: Training on the new system. Longed For: Better coordination with other departments.
Ask where cooperation breaks down. A ticket waiting between departments may need a named escalation owner and a clear response time.
5. Remote team collaboration
Liked: The flexibility of remote work. Learned: New ways to collaborate online. Lacked: Face-to-face interaction. Longed For: Occasional in-person meetings.
If an in-person meeting is not practical, ask which interaction people miss: informal questions, project kickoff discussion, or social connection. Those needs may call for different responses.
From an observation to a small experiment
Consider a release team that valued early support input but lacked usable test accounts and wanted a shared preview. “Collaborate better” is too broad to act on. Discussion reveals that accounts were requested only after testing began and depended on one unavailable person.
A volunteer can coordinate account preparation before the next sprint and confirm that testers can sign in. During the sprint, the team can note work still blocked by access. The shared preview remains a separate idea because it may involve different work and permissions.
Adapt a 4Ls template to the session
The Boardmix 4Ls template provides a four-area starting structure. Adapt the layout to the participants and the depth of discussion you need:
- Basic: keep the four prompts and generous writing space for a team's first session.
- Collaborative: use a shared board for a distributed team, with a separate area for themes.
- Detailed: add a prompt asking for the event and its effect when short notes lack context.
- Visual: place a relevant timeline or work sample beside the notes to aid recall.
- Custom: add space for questions or proposed actions while keeping the four prompts recognizable.
For Scrum teams, a retrospective examines how the team worked; it is different from a Sprint Review, which discusses the product outcome with stakeholders. The Scrum Guide describes the distinction. A 4Ls board is one facilitation option, not a required Scrum artifact.
Run the 4Ls retrospective in Boardmix
Create the board: open Boardmix, create a board, and set out the four labeled areas or use the template. Put the period and purpose above the notes.
Prepare participation: share access with the people attending and check that they can contribute before the meeting. Let participants draft individually before adding their notes; a shared canvas should not be assumed to be anonymous.
Add and discuss notes: use one observation per note, keep text readable at the same zoom, and group related points while retaining their original wording. Read the four areas together to spot relationships.
Keep the next action nearby: leave space below the themes for the change the team chooses, its owner, and when it will be tried. The shared board then retains both the feedback and the context behind the choice.
Create a 4Ls board in Boardmix and prepare the prompts before the session so the meeting can focus on the discussion.
Alternatives to the 4Ls retrospective
Choose the prompts that fit the discussion rather than changing formats merely for novelty:
- Starfish: asks what to start, stop, keep doing, do more of, and do less of. It is useful when the team wants to adjust the amount or frequency of existing practices.
- Sailboat: uses a visual journey to discuss what helps the team move forward, what holds it back, and what risks may lie ahead.
- Mad, Sad, Glad: begins with emotional experiences to make room for concerns that a task-focused review might miss.
- Start, Stop, Continue: focuses directly on behaviors to introduce, discontinue, or retain.
Use 4Ls when learning and unmet needs deserve explicit attention. For a serious incident, a timeline and investigation of contributing conditions may be a better starting point than four broad prompts.
