Retrospective Action Items: Examples That Make Follow-up Clear
Turn a recurring problem into one change your team can try, own, and review. These examples show what to write and what to check afterward.
A retrospective action item is a specific improvement the team agrees to carry out after discussing how it worked. A useful record names the change, an owner, and a review point, then explains what evidence would show whether the change helped.
“Improve code reviews” leaves the next step open. “For the next sprint, put each review-ready pull request in one shared queue; Maya checks for unclaimed requests each working day; review waiting time and interruptions at the next retro” gives the team something it can try.
The Scrum Guide describes the retrospective as a chance to improve quality and effectiveness and calls for useful improvements to be addressed promptly. The record format and examples below are practical suggestions, not additional Scrum rules.
In this guide
- Six action item examples
- Choose an owner and make room for the work
- A completed action can still need another decision
- Copy an action record
- Review what happened
- Keep the context in Agilo
Six retrospective action item examples
These are fictional software-team situations. People, timeboxes and review criteria illustrate how to make a decision explicit; adapt them to your team's capacity and working agreements. Choose an example that addresses an observed problem rather than adopting the entire list.
1. Pull requests wait because nobody knows who will review them
Vague action: “Review code faster.”
Specific action: For the next sprint, authors add review-ready pull requests to one shared queue. Maya checks for unclaimed requests each working day and asks an available reviewer to take them. Authors identify anything blocking the review, such as missing context or an unfinished check.
Review: Compare time to the first substantive review with the previous sprint, while noting request size, reviewer availability and interruptions. An acknowledgement alone does not count as a review. Faster responses are only useful if people still have time to inspect the code carefully.
2. The same flaky check keeps holding up delivery
Vague action: “Fix CI.”
Specific action: Before the next planning session, Leo investigates the intermittent checkout test that blocked the last two merges, records a reproducible cause or a narrowed hypothesis, and proposes the smallest repair. The team reserves time for the investigation.
Review: At planning, review the findings and agree the next decision. After a repair, inspect subsequent relevant runs for recurrence and bring the outcome to the next retrospective. Silencing the check or seeing one green run does not establish that the problem is solved; keep required coverage in place.
3. Another team's API change arrives too late
Vague action: “Coordinate better with the platform team.”
Specific action: Before starting the next integration item, Priya asks the platform counterpart to review one shared example request, response and error case. She records accepted assumptions and unresolved decisions in the integration task. If no counterpart is available, she brings that dependency to planning instead of treating it as agreed.
Review: At the next retrospective, check whether the agreed example remained valid during implementation and what rework came from missing or changed assumptions. Arranging a meeting is a step; resolving the dependency is the intended benefit.
4. A bug fix loses its reproduction steps during handoff
Vague action: “Write better bug reports.”
Specific action: For the next three bug fixes, Sam adds the reproduction steps, relevant environment and expected behavior to the issue before handoff. The developer and tester resolve missing details together before relying on those steps.
Review: After the third fix, ask whether the receiving person could reproduce and verify each fix without reconstructing the original chat. Record missing information without ranking the people who wrote the reports.
5. Support questions repeatedly interrupt the same developer
Vague action: “Protect focus time.”
Specific action: For one sprint, the team tries a rotating first contact for routine support questions. Noor publishes the rotation and a shared intake location, while keeping the existing urgent-incident escalation path available. The team allows time for the person covering support.
Review: At the next retrospective, look at interruptions across the team and unanswered requests. If one person absorbs all the disruption or important requests wait longer, adjust the arrangement. Fewer messages in a developer's inbox alone would not show success.
6. Only one person knows how to recover a failed deployment
Vague action: “Share more knowledge.”
Specific action: Before the next release, Alex organizes a rehearsal of the recovery procedure with another developer in an approved non-production environment. The second person follows the existing notes and records missing steps; Alex owns the rehearsal and updates the instructions with them.
Review: At the end of the rehearsal, check whether the second person can explain the recovery decision and carry out the rehearsed procedure without unwritten guidance. A document's existence is not enough. This exercise does not replace your production access or change-approval rules.
Choose an owner and make room for the work
One owner keeps the next step visible, gathers help and brings back evidence. That person does not have to perform every task or become responsible for everyone else's behavior. Confirm that they accept the action and can influence it.
Start with one or two changes if that is what the team can support. This is a capacity decision, not a universal limit. Before adding an action, agree what time it needs and where it will be tracked alongside delivery work. An investigation may need an explicit task; a changed handoff rule may fit an existing task description.
If a change depends on another team or a manager, make the request and decision point explicit. An owner can commit to seeking a decision; they cannot guarantee someone else's approval.
Use the Start Stop Continue template when the discussion is about practices to change or preserve. A “Start” note is still a proposal until the team has agreed the action and made room for it.
A completed action can still need another decision
Return to the review-queue example. The team records two different checks:
| Check | Evidence to bring back |
|---|---|
| Did we carry out the agreement? | Review-ready requests entered the queue, unclaimed work was checked, and gaps were recorded |
| Did it help? | Waiting time, request size, reviewer availability, interruption notes and feedback about review quality |
Suppose the team uses the queue throughout the sprint, but requests still wait whenever the only person familiar with one service is unavailable. That is a fictional outcome, not a reported Agilo customer result.
The queue experiment was carried out. The team learned that visibility alone did not resolve the specialist bottleneck. Its next decision might be to pair another developer on reviews for that service, keeping the queue if it remains useful. “Done” describes completion of the agreed work; it does not automatically mean the underlying problem disappeared.
If only a couple of comparable requests occurred, say the evidence is limited. You can choose to observe another sprint without claiming that the change succeeded or failed.
Copy this retrospective action record
Use this in your existing task tracker or team notes. Give the action a title that describes the change, then keep the reasoning beside it.
Observation and source:
Change we will try:
Owner who has accepted it:
People or decisions needed:
First step and time reserved:
When we will review it:
Evidence that the action was carried out:
Evidence that it helped, including possible side effects:
Decision after review: keep / adjust / stop / gather more evidence
For the review queue, the first step could be to agree where requests go before the sprint starts. The review point could be the next retrospective, with a brief check during the sprint if requests remain unclaimed. Use an actual date or event your team can find again, rather than “later.”
Review what happened before adding more actions
At the agreed check, ask the owner to describe the work and show the available evidence. Keep the discussion about conditions and decisions, including whether the team made the promised time available.
| What happened | Useful next decision |
|---|---|
| The change helped and is practical | Keep the practice and record where the ongoing agreement lives |
| The action was completed but the problem remains | Revisit the explanation of the problem and change the next experiment |
| Work could not start | Identify the capacity, access or dependency gap; agree a smaller step, new commitment or deliberate cancellation |
| The team tried it but has too little evidence | Choose what to observe and a new review point |
| The change created another problem | Adjust or stop it, and record the tradeoff |
Carrying the same action forward without changing the conditions gives the next sprint the same unresolved commitment. Make the new decision visible, even when the decision is to stop.
For the full meeting sequence, including preparation and prioritization, use the sprint retrospective facilitation guide.
Questions about retrospective action items
Does every retrospective note need an action?
No. Notes can preserve something that works, raise a question or provide context. Select improvements based on what the team learns and can influence. Turning every note into a task can hide the few changes that deserve attention.
Should the Scrum Master own all the actions?
Choose an owner who can move each change forward. A facilitator can help the team make and review agreements without becoming the assignee for every improvement. An action about build behavior may need a developer; a decision about external dependencies may need someone able to reach the relevant team.
Can an investigation be an action item?
Yes, when the uncertainty prevents a sensible change. Specify the question, the time available and the decision the findings will inform. “Investigate slow reviews” stays vague; “identify where three delayed requests waited and bring a proposed change to refinement” has a bounded output.
Keep the observation and action together in Agilo
In Agilo Retrospectives, an action item can have a title, description, assignee, priority and status, and can link back to its source card. Put the agreed review point and evidence to collect in the description; add the observed outcome in a comment when you review it.
This preserves the reason for the work alongside its progress. The team still decides whether the change helped and what to do next.
Create a retrospective and turn one observation into an action your team is ready to carry out.
