Lean Coffee template
An agendaless meeting that builds its own agenda in ten minutes — then actually sticks to it.
Lean Coffee is a meeting format with no agenda set in advance. The group spends the first ten minutes proposing topics, votes on them, and then discusses the winners one at a time in strict timeboxes of seven or eight minutes, with a quick thumb vote at the end of each one to decide whether to keep going or move on. The board is a simple kanban with three columns: To Discuss, Discussing, Discussed.
It fixes the two failure modes of recurring meetings at once — the ones with a stale agenda nobody cares about, and the ones with no agenda that drift for an hour. Because the topics come from the room and every extension is voted on, the group only spends time on what it chose to spend time on. Teams use it as a retrospective, a standing discussion slot, a guild or meetup format, and as office hours.
Timebox
45–60 minutes
Team size
3–12 people (split into tables above that)
Cadence
Weekly or fortnightly team meetings, meetups, and open discussion slots
The Lean Coffee board
To Discuss
What do you want to talk about? One topic per card, phrased as a question or a subject — not a conclusion.
- How do we stop carrying the same tickets over every sprint?
- Should we run our own on-call or stay on the platform rota?
- What does "done" mean for a spike?
- The release process — is anyone else finding it painful?
- How do we split the payments service without stopping delivery?
- What happens to the 40 tech-debt tickets nobody prioritises?
Discussing
The one topic in play right now, with the timer running. Never more than one card here.
- Timer visible on 8 minutes, one card in the column, everyone on that topic
- Decisions and owners get written on the card while you talk
- At the buzzer: thumb up to continue, sideways for neutral, down to move on
- A continue vote buys a shorter extension — 4 minutes, not another 8
Discussed
Closed topics, each with whatever came out of it: a decision, an owner, or an explicit "we talked, nothing changes".
- Carry-over: anything that rolls over twice gets re-scoped — Priya owns the rule
- On-call: staying on the platform rota, revisit at the end of the quarter
- Spike definition of done: written into the team agreement by Friday
- Release pain: three volunteers to script the manual steps this sprint
- Tech debt: no decision — needs the platform team, Sam to arrange
How to run a Lean Coffee meeting
- 1
Set the frame (3 min)
Say what the session is broadly about — this team, this quarter, this product — and how long it runs. Lean Coffee has no agenda, but it does need a boundary, or you get five unrelated conversations and no decisions.
- 2
Propose topics (7 min)
Everyone writes topic cards into To Discuss in silence, one topic per card. Ask for questions rather than conclusions: "how do we handle carry-over?" invites a discussion, while "we should stop carrying tickets over" invites a yes/no.
- 3
Pitch in one sentence, then vote (5 min)
Each author gives their topic a single sentence, with no discussion yet. Then everyone spends two or three dot votes. Sort To Discuss by votes — that ordering is your agenda, and you did not have to write it.
- 4
Discuss the top topic in a timebox (7–8 min)
Move one card to Discussing, start a visible timer, and talk. Capture decisions and owners on the card as you go, not afterwards from memory.
- 5
Thumb vote at the buzzer (30 sec)
When the timer ends everyone votes with a thumb: up to continue, sideways for neutral, down to move on. A clear majority up buys one shorter extension, usually half the original timebox. Anything else and the card moves to Discussed and the next topic starts immediately.
- 6
Close with what came out of it (5 min)
Reserve the last five minutes to read the Discussed column back: decisions, owners, dates, and which topics got no time. Roll the unfinished ones into next session — a topic that keeps winning votes and never finishes is a signal in itself.
Lean Coffee topic examples for team meetings
Ways of working
- Is standup earning its 15 minutes?
- Who decides when a ticket is too big?
- Should refinement move out of planning?
Technical
- What do we do about the 22-minute build?
- Do we quarantine flaky tests or fix them?
- Is it time to split the monolith, or is that the wrong problem?
People and growth
- How do we spread the on-call knowledge?
- What would make code review feel less like a gate?
- Who wants to pair on the parts they never touch?
Lean Coffee as a retrospective: a board mid-session
Run as a retro, the collection step is the topic pitch and the discussion is the retro. This is what the board looks like twenty minutes in — one topic in play, two closed, the rest waiting in vote order.
To Discuss (in vote order)
- Why did two tickets miss the sprint again? (5 votes)
- Do we still need the Monday status meeting? (4 votes)
- How do we handle mid-sprint scope changes? (2 votes)
Discussing
- Why did two tickets miss the sprint again? — 8:00 on the clock
Discussed
- Review turnaround: two-reviewer rota, Alex sets it up
- Flaky tests: quarantine them, revisit in two weeks
Lean Coffee topic examples for meetups and communities of practice
With a room of near-strangers there is no shared backlog to draw an agenda from, which is exactly the situation the format was invented for. Broader topics work better here than team-specific ones.
Practice
- What has actually improved your retros in the last year?
- How do you run planning with a team spread over four time zones?
- What is the smallest useful amount of documentation?
Organisation
- How do you get time for tech debt without a crisis?
- What do you do when the deadline arrives before the estimate?
- Who owns quality when there is no QA?
Career
- Staff engineer or engineering manager — how did you choose?
- How do you keep hands-on skills as a lead?
- What made the biggest difference to your first year as a manager?
Best for
- Recurring meetings that have run out of agenda but not out of things to say
- Retrospectives where the team already knows the problems and needs to talk, not collect
- Groups of near-strangers: meetups, guilds, communities of practice
- Any session where one person setting the agenda would miss what people came for
Facilitation tips
A visible timer is the whole format
Lean Coffee works only if the timebox is real and everyone can see it. Without a shared clock the first topic takes twenty minutes, the thumb vote becomes a formality, and the last three cards never get read.
Hold the one-sentence pitch
The pitch round is where sessions leak time: someone starts explaining and effectively gets their discussion before anyone has voted for it. Cap it at a sentence and enforce that cap on the first person, because everyone after copies whatever the first person did.
Extensions get shorter, not equal
Halving each extension — 8 minutes, then 4, then 2 — lets a genuinely rich topic breathe while making the cost of continuing visible. Equal extensions turn a 50-minute meeting into one topic and three unread cards.
Write the outcome on the card, in the room
A topic can legitimately end with "we talked, nothing changes" — but say it out loud and write it down. Otherwise the same card returns next week and nobody remembers whether it was resolved or just abandoned.
Variations
Lean Coffee retrospective
Drop the collection columns of a normal retro and let the team propose topics directly. Best when the problems are already obvious and people are tired of writing them into columns again; weaker when you need to surface things nobody has said yet, since only topics somebody is willing to pitch make the board.
Async Lean Coffee
Collect and vote on topics over a day or two on the board, then meet only for the timeboxed discussion. Cuts the live session to about 30 minutes and gives people in other time zones a real say in the agenda instead of arriving to a finished one.
Table groups for large rooms
Above a dozen people, split into tables of five or six, each with its own board, and close with two minutes per table sharing what they decided. Standard practice at meetups and conference sessions.
Lean Coffee office hours
A manager, architect, or staff engineer holds a standing slot and whoever shows up sets the agenda. A cheap way to replace a status meeting with something people attend voluntarily.
Frequently asked questions
What is Lean Coffee?+
Lean Coffee is a structured but agendaless meeting. Participants propose discussion topics on a three-column kanban board — To Discuss, Discussing, Discussed — vote on which ones to cover, and then discuss the winners one at a time in short timeboxes, voting at the end of each timebox on whether to continue or move to the next topic.
How does the voting work in Lean Coffee?+
There are two votes. Dot voting at the start decides the order of topics: each person spends two or three votes across the cards, and the highest-voted topic goes first. Then a thumb vote at the end of every timebox decides whether that topic continues — thumb up for more time, sideways for neutral, down for moving on.
How long should each Lean Coffee topic get?+
Seven or eight minutes for the first timebox, then halve each extension: four minutes, then two. A 50-minute session typically covers four to six topics that way, and the shrinking extensions make the cost of staying on one topic visible to everybody.
Can Lean Coffee be used as a retrospective?+
Yes, and it is a good rotation when the team already knows its problems and the usual columns have become a ritual. The trade-off is that it only discusses what someone is willing to pitch out loud, so alternate it with a format that collects cards silently — otherwise the quieter issues never reach the board.
Where does Lean Coffee come from?+
It was started in Seattle in 2009 by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith, who wanted a Lean and Kanban discussion group without the overhead of speakers and agendas. The format spread through the agile community and is now used for meetups, team meetings, and retrospectives worldwide.
Run Lean Coffee online in FocusRetro
Start a blank board, name the columns To Discuss / Discussing / Discussed, 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 freeNo credit card required
Related guides
Keep, Problem, Try retrospective template
Three columns that chain together: what to keep, what hurts, and the experiment you run next.
Open the Box retrospective template
Treat how your team works like a box of tools — then decide what stays, goes, and gets added.
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.
Remote and async retrospectives: a practical guide
How to run retrospectives for remote, hybrid, and distributed teams — including async formats that work across time zones without a live meeting.
Retrospective timebox calculator
How long Lean Coffee 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 Lean Coffee session, sorted by situation.