Joy, Fear, Excitement retrospective template

An emotions format that covers what energised the team and what it is dreading next.

Joy, Fear, Excitement is a three-column retrospective that does something most formats do not: only the first column looks backwards. Joy asks what energised people in the period just finished. Fear asks what worries them about what is coming. Excitement asks what they are genuinely looking forward to. The board ends up half retrospective and half futurespective, which is exactly what a team at a turning point needs.

That makes it the wrong choice for a routine sprint and the right one at a transition — a new quarter, a reorganisation, a project landing on the team mid-flight, the month before a launch. The most valuable column is usually Fear, because it surfaces the risks people have already spotted but have not found a formal place to raise.

Timebox

45–60 minutes

Team size

3–10 people

Cadence

At transitions — quarter boundaries, project kickoffs, reorganisations, or the retro before a launch

The Joy, Fear, Excitement board

Joy

What energised you in the period we just finished?

  • Pairing on the migration — I learned more in two days than the last quarter
  • Watching the error rate drop after the retry work landed
  • The customer call where they demoed our feature back to us
  • Finally deleting the legacy sync job
  • A sprint where nobody was pulled onto something else
  • The new starter’s first change shipping in week one

Fear

What worries you about what is coming next?

  • Only one person understands the billing code and they are on leave in March
  • We are committing to the launch date before the load testing is done
  • The new team split leaves nobody clearly owning the API
  • Two of us are already at capacity and the roadmap adds a third project
  • We have never run a migration this size with customers live on it
  • The integration depends on a team that has missed two deadlines already

Excitement

What are you genuinely looking forward to?

  • Getting to design the new onboarding from scratch
  • The observability work finally being funded
  • Working with the data team instead of filing tickets at them
  • Shipping something customers asked for by name
  • Having a real staging environment
  • The chance to learn the payments domain properly

How to run a Joy, Fear, Excitement retrospective

  1. 1

    Set the stage and name the horizon (5 min)

    State two periods explicitly: what Joy is looking back at, and how far ahead Fear and Excitement should reach. "The quarter just gone" and "the next three months" works. Without a stated horizon, half the team writes about next week and half about next year, and the columns do not compare.

  2. 2

    Silent writing (10 min)

    Everyone fills all three columns privately with cards hidden. Push for specifics in Fear especially — "the launch" is not usable, "we commit to the date before load testing finishes" is. Hidden cards matter here because the first fear posted sets the ceiling for how honest the rest will be.

  3. 3

    Read Joy aloud, then move on (5 min)

    Go through Joy in full without discussion. It is not a warm-up: it tells you which conditions produced good work, and those are the conditions to protect through whatever is coming next.

  4. 4

    Turn each fear into a warning sign (12–15 min)

    Group the Fear cards, then for the top themes ask one question: what would we see first if this were starting to happen? A fear with a named early signal becomes something the team can watch for. A fear without one stays an anxiety, and anxieties do not survive contact with a busy sprint.

  5. 5

    Match Excitement to the work ahead (8–10 min)

    Read the Excitement column against what is actually on the roadmap. Where they overlap, assign that work now while everyone is in the room. Where the roadmap contains nothing anybody wrote down, that gap is worth naming out loud — it is usually the most useful thing the session produces.

  6. 6

    Close with owners and a review date (5 min)

    Two or three actions, each with a named owner: typically one mitigation for the top fear, one signal somebody agrees to watch, and one reassignment out of the Excitement column. Set the date you will revisit them — for a quarter-horizon board, that is usually a month out, not the next sprint.

Joy, Fear, Excitement examples for engineering teams

Joy

  • The build going from 22 minutes to 6
  • A week on call with zero pages
  • Deleting four thousand lines of dead code
  • The architecture review that actually changed the design

Fear

  • The database migration has no tested rollback
  • We are hiring three people into a codebase with no onboarding docs
  • The vendor deprecates the old API in June and we have not started
  • Our load tests have never gone above half of Black Friday traffic

Excitement

  • Getting to pick the queue technology rather than inherit one
  • The tracing work meaning we stop guessing at latency
  • A real incident review process instead of a Slack thread
  • Shipping the public API we have been talking about for a year

Joy, Fear, Excitement examples for product and cross-functional teams

Joy

  • The pilot customers using it unprompted in week one
  • Killing a feature quickly once the data said no
  • Research that genuinely changed the roadmap
  • Design and engineering scoping together instead of handing over

Fear

  • We are committing to two launches in the same six weeks
  • Nobody owns the pricing decision and it blocks everything downstream
  • Support has not been told what is shipping
  • The success metric still is not defined and the build starts Monday

Excitement

  • Talking to customers weekly instead of quarterly
  • The rebuild finally letting us test pricing properly
  • Getting a designer embedded rather than shared across four teams
  • A launch we can actually be proud to put our names on

Joy, Fear, Excitement examples for remote and distributed teams

Fear is the column distributed teams under-report, because there is no corridor in which to mention that something feels wrong. Collect cards asynchronously over a day so people in other time zones write while they are fresh, and cluster before the live session.

Joy

  • Recorded demos meaning everyone actually saw the work
  • Overlap hours staying protected for decisions
  • A written decision log that people genuinely read
  • Meeting three teammates in person for the first time

Fear

  • The reorganisation splits our overlap window in half
  • Two people hold all the context and neither writes anything down
  • Onboarding someone remotely with no documentation to point at
  • Decisions drifting back into calls that half the team sleeps through

Excitement

  • The team offsite in April
  • Moving the status update to writing and deleting the meeting
  • Working with the new team in a timezone that finally overlaps
  • Owning a whole surface instead of a slice of one

Best for

  • The first retro of a new quarter, project, or team shape
  • Teams heading into something risky, where the anxiety is real but unspoken
  • Sessions where a pure look backwards would miss what people are actually thinking about
  • Deciding who takes what next, using what people say they are excited by

Facilitation tips

State the horizon before anyone writes

Fear and Excitement are about the future, and "the future" means different things to different people. Say out loud how far ahead you mean — the next month, the next quarter, the rest of the project — and write it on the board. It is the single change that most improves the quality of the cards.

Every fear needs an early warning sign

Ask what the team would notice first if the fear were coming true. "The vendor migration slips" becomes "we have not had the kickoff call by the end of the month". A fear with a signal is something a team can act on; one without is just a bad feeling that fades by Wednesday.

Use Excitement to assign work, not just to feel good

The Excitement column is the clearest statement you will get of what people would volunteer for. Read it against the roadmap in the session and hand out the overlaps immediately. It is the cheapest motivation available and most teams throw it away.

Notice what nobody is excited about

If a major piece of the next quarter appears in nobody’s Excitement column, that is a finding. It may be badly explained, it may be genuinely unrewarding work that needs sharing out, or it may be something the team quietly believes should not happen. All three are worth ten minutes.

Variations

Joy, Fear, Excitement, Hope

Adds a fourth column for what the team wants to be true but cannot yet commit to. Useful before planning, where separating "I expect this" from "I want this" keeps a wish list out of the roadmap.

Fear-first

Run the Fear column on its own for twenty minutes before a risky launch or migration, skipping the other two entirely. A pre-mortem in everything but name, and often the highest-value twenty minutes in the calendar that week.

Anonymous async collection

Collect all three columns anonymously over a day or two and cluster them before the meeting, so the live session is causes, signals and decisions. The right version for low-trust teams or any board where Fear touches the reorganisation everyone is worried about.

Paired with a timeline

Plot the period just finished as a timeline first, then write Joy against it. The dates tend to produce sharper cards than memory does, and the exercise warms the room up before it has to name what it is afraid of.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Joy, Fear, Excitement retrospective?+

It is a three-column retrospective where the team writes what brought them joy in the period just finished, what they fear about what is coming, and what they are excited about. Only the first column looks backwards, which makes it half retrospective and half futurespective — a fit for teams at a transition rather than in the middle of a routine sprint.

What goes in each column?+

Joy is what energised people about the work just done — specific moments rather than general positivity. Fear is what worries them about the period ahead: risks, single points of failure, commitments that look unsafe. Excitement is what they are actively looking forward to. Fear and Excitement both need a stated time horizon or the cards will not compare.

When should you use it?+

At transitions. The first retro of a quarter, a project kickoff, the session after a reorganisation, or the month before a significant launch. For an ordinary sprint where the team simply needs actions, an action-oriented format like Start, Stop, Continue will produce more.

How is it different from Mad, Sad, Glad?+

Mad, Sad, Glad is entirely retrospective — all three columns look at what already happened and how it felt. Joy, Fear, Excitement points two of its three columns at the future. Use Mad, Sad, Glad after a sprint that went badly and needs airing; use Joy, Fear, Excitement when what is coming matters more than what just finished.

How is it different from Hopes and Concerns?+

Hopes and Concerns is purely forward-looking and deliberately short — twenty minutes before something starts. Joy, Fear, Excitement adds a backward-looking column and takes closer to an hour, so the team carries what worked in the last period into the decisions about the next one.

How do you stop the Fear column becoming a list of anxieties?+

Require two things of every fear that gets discussed: a specific thing that could happen, and the earliest sign the team would see if it were starting to happen. That converts an anxiety into something observable, and gives someone a concrete thing to own. Fears without a signal should be acknowledged and left on the board rather than turned into actions.

Run Joy, Fear, Excitement online in FocusRetro

Start a blank board, name the columns Joy / Fear / Excitement, and invite the team with a link — then run the phases with timers, hidden cards, and blind voting. Free plan available at focusretro.com.

Start a board free

No credit card required

Related guides

Mad, Sad, Glad retrospective template

An emotions-first retro that surfaces how the sprint felt before anyone proposes a fix.

Hopes and Concerns retrospective template

Twenty minutes that surface what people want — and what they are quietly worried about.

Futurespective retrospective template

A retrospective run before the work starts: imagine the outcome, then work backwards.

Timeline retrospective template

Facts first, feelings second: the format that beats recency bias over long periods.

How to run a sprint retrospective (step-by-step guide)

A step-by-step sprint retrospective guide: the 5-phase agenda, exact timings for a 60-minute session, facilitation tactics, remote tips, and common failure modes.

What is a retrospective? The complete guide for teams

A retrospective is a recurring team meeting for inspecting how you work and deciding what to change. Learn the formats, agenda, timings, and mistakes to avoid.

Retrospective timebox calculator

How long Joy, Fear, Excitement should run for your sprint length and team size, split across the five phases.

Icebreaker and check-in questions

Openers for the first two minutes of a Joy, Fear, Excitement session, sorted by situation.