A metaphorical retro format where the team is a sailboat — Anchors hold you back, Wind pushes you forward, and Rocks are risks to navigate around.
Drag example cards between columns or try voting to explore the format.
What's slowing the team down? Processes, tools, technical debt, or friction points.
Manual deployment process — 45 minutes of click-ops
Unclear product requirements arriving mid-sprint
Legacy monolith — every change touches too many files
What's accelerating progress? Tools, practices, people, or momentum that helps the team.
New CI/CD pipeline is saving us 2 hours per deploy
Pair programming is catching bugs earlier
Team is motivated after shipping the big feature
What risks lie ahead? Upcoming deadlines, dependencies, or uncertainties.
Production DB migration scheduled for next sprint
Two team members are on PTO overlapping next week
PCI compliance audit coming up — need to prepare
Use these prompts and example cards to start a focused conversation.
What's slowing the team down? Processes, tools, technical debt, or friction points.
Example cards
Keep in mind: Don't list people as anchors
What's accelerating progress? Tools, practices, people, or momentum that helps the team.
Example cards
Keep in mind: Don't minimize wind — celebrate what's working
What risks lie ahead? Upcoming deadlines, dependencies, or uncertainties.
Example cards
Keep in mind: Don't ignore rocks because they're in the future
Sailboat takes about 20–30 min. Here's the flow.
Explain the sailboat metaphor: Wind (tailwinds), Anchors (drag), Rocks (risks). Draw a simple boat on the board.
Team adds cards to each column. Encourage cards for all three categories — don't let Anchors dominate.
Vote on the heaviest anchors, strongest winds, and sharpest rocks. Prioritize what's most impactful.
Discuss how to cut the top anchors, maximize the top winds, and steer around the top rocks. Assign actions.
Recap the top actions and relate them back to the metaphor. Assign owners for each navigation item.
The Sailboat retrospective (also known as the Sailboat exercise or Speedboat) is one of the most creative and engaging Agile retrospective formats. It uses a simple metaphor: your team is a sailboat navigating toward your goals. The Wind fills your sails and pushes you forward. The Anchors drag behind and slow you down. The Rocks are risks ahead that you need to navigate around.
This metaphor-based format originated from the Agile coaching community, where practitioners found that abstract process discussions often failed to engage teams. By framing the retro as a journey, Sailboat makes improvement feel like an adventure rather than a chore. The format was popularized in the Agile Retrospectives book by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, and has since become a staple of engineering team retrospectives worldwide.
The psychological power of the Sailboat metaphor is twofold. First, it externalizes problems — an anchor dragging behind the boat is easier to discuss than a teammate who isn't pulling their weight. Second, it naturally frames solutions as forward motion — cutting an anchor or steering around a rock feels proactive rather than punitive. This reframing is especially valuable for teams that struggle with blameless retrospectives.
If you like Sailboat, you might also enjoy these formats.
A forward-looking retrospective format that helps goal-oriented teams reflect on progress, identify blockers, and plan the next sprint like climbing a mountain.
A classic three-column retro format that helps teams identify new practices to adopt, unhelpful habits to drop, and winning behaviors to reinforce.
A four-column continuous improvement format — Drop, Add, Keep, Improve — that combines Start/Stop/Continue simplicity with actionable improvement granularity.
An intuitive traffic-light retro format — Red for blockers, Yellow for caution, Green for smooth sailing — that makes team health instantly visible at a glance.
Sailboat is a metaphor-based retrospective where the team imagines itself as a sailboat. Anchors are what slow you down, Wind is what pushes you forward, and Rocks are risks ahead.
Mountain Climb is forward-looking and goal-oriented. Sailboat is more about identifying current impediments (Anchors), accelerators (Wind), and risks (Rocks) — it's more diagnostic.
20–30 minutes. The metaphor makes it engaging, but don't let creative discussion extend the timeline.
Yes — LetRetro supports async Sailboat boards where team members add anchors, wind, and rocks throughout the sprint, then vote and discuss at retro time.
Extremely. The metaphor is universally understood and requires no special context. Remote team members can easily contribute to all three columns.
Some teams prefer direct formats like Start/Stop/Continue. If the metaphor isn't landing, switch to a literal format — the goal is honest reflection, not clever framing.
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