Plus, Minus, Interesting retrospective template

The three-column sort with a home for the observations every other format throws away.

Plus, Minus, Interesting sorts the sprint into three columns: what clearly helped, what clearly hurt, and what the team noticed that is neither — yet. The format is borrowed from Edward de Bono’s PMI attention tool, and the third column is its entire reason to exist. Every team accumulates observations that are not complaints and not wins: the module producing half the bugs, the feature customers use in a way nobody designed. In a good/bad format those cards get forced into a verdict or never written; here they get a column and, usually, the best discussion of the session.

You will also meet this format as Plus, Minus, Investing — same board, with the third column read as what deserves more of the team’s time next. Either way it is one of the fastest retros to run, needs no explanation, and — unusually — works as well on a single decision as on a whole sprint, because de Bono built it to evaluate ideas, not periods.

Timebox

30–45 minutes

Team size

3–10 people

Cadence

Every sprint, or whenever a specific change needs a verdict

The Plus, Minus, Interesting board

Plus

What clearly worked or made the sprint better?

  • The new PR template cut review back-and-forth in half
  • Demo shipped on time for the third sprint running
  • The support rotation meant nobody lost a full day to tickets
  • Bug triage is down to fifteen minutes
  • Pairing on the migration spread the context to three people
  • The client signed off scope without a second meeting

Minus

What clearly hurt or slowed the team down?

  • Staging was down for two days and nobody owned fixing it
  • Sprint scope changed twice after planning
  • The release checklist lives in three different documents
  • Standup regularly runs past twenty minutes
  • Two tickets bounced back from QA for missing acceptance criteria
  • We merged to main on Friday afternoon. Again.

Interesting

What did you notice that is neither good nor bad — yet?

  • Half of this sprint’s bugs came from the same module
  • The new hire’s onboarding questions all hit the same gaps
  • We closed more tickets the week the PM was on leave
  • Nobody has used the feature-flag tooling we adopted last quarter
  • Customers keep using the export in a way we never designed
  • Both incidents started within an hour of a deploy

How to run a Plus, Minus, Interesting retrospective

  1. 1

    Set the stage and name the subject (5 min)

    Say what is being evaluated: the sprint, or one specific change — the new on-call rotation, the monorepo move. PMI is one of the few formats that reviews a thing as well as a period, and the columns sharpen considerably when everyone is pointing at the same subject.

  2. 2

    Write one column at a time (8–10 min)

    This is de Bono’s actual mechanic and worth keeping: everyone writes Plus cards for two or three minutes, then only Minus, then only Interesting — attention pointed in one direction at a time. It stops the session becoming rebuttal-writing, and the Interesting column comes out noticeably richer when it gets minutes of its own.

  3. 3

    Read Plus and Minus quickly (8–10 min)

    Reveal, group duplicates, and keep moving — these two columns are usually the least surprising part of the board. Note the pluses worth actively protecting and the top minus theme, and resist solving anything yet.

  4. 4

    Mine the Interesting column (12–15 min)

    This is the session. For each card ask two things: is this a one-off or the third time we have seen it, and what question would tell us whether it matters? "Half the bugs came from one module" becomes "is that module under-tested, or carrying too much?" — a card with a question attached survives the week; a bare observation does not.

  5. 5

    Close with actions and one experiment (8 min)

    Take one fix from Minus and one protection from Plus, each with an owner. Then convert the strongest Interesting card into a small experiment with a review date — that conversion, observation into test, is what the third column is for.

Plus, Minus, Interesting examples for engineering teams

Plus

  • The build cache cut CI from 20 minutes to 7
  • Zero rollbacks this sprint
  • The migration ran inside its maintenance window
  • New alerts caught the memory leak before customers did

Minus

  • Flaky tests ate roughly a day across the team
  • The API contract changed without a heads-up
  • Only one person can review infrastructure PRs
  • Two hotfixes shipped without tests

Interesting

  • Most review comments are about naming, not logic
  • The oldest service had no incidents — and no deploys
  • Velocity was identical with one engineer on leave
  • Every slow query this month touched the same table

Plus, Minus, Interesting examples for product and cross-functional teams

Plus

  • Weekly customer calls are feeding directly into the backlog
  • The launch checklist caught the missing translations
  • Design reviews moved earlier and rework dropped
  • The pricing test shipped on schedule

Minus

  • Three stakeholders gave three different priorities
  • The brief changed after design was done
  • Support learned about the release from a customer
  • The A/B test ran two weeks longer than planned

Interesting

  • Trial users who import data on day one convert at twice the rate
  • The feature nobody prioritised got the most feedback requests
  • Churn emails mention onboarding, not pricing
  • Our fastest release had the least process around it

Plus, Minus, Interesting examples for remote and distributed teams

The Interesting column benefits most from async collection: observations surface days after the fact, not on demand in a meeting. Leave the board open for a day or two before the session and write columns in de Bono’s order — Plus first, Interesting last — so the final pass gets fresh eyes.

Plus

  • The written weekly update replaced two status calls
  • Handoffs across timezones ran clean all sprint
  • Recording decisions killed the repeat debates
  • The async standup thread actually gets read

Minus

  • A blocked PR sat for eleven hours waiting for a timezone
  • The kickoff call excluded a third of the team — again
  • Two people made the same fix in parallel without knowing
  • Meeting notes exist for half the meetings

Interesting

  • The quietest person on calls writes the most useful comments
  • Decisions made in writing get revisited less than decisions made live
  • The overlap hour is entirely meetings and nobody codes in it
  • Fridays are our most productive day and have no meetings

Best for

  • Sprints where a clean good/bad split would flatten the story — the signal is in the observations
  • Evaluating one specific change: a new standup format, a tool adoption, a process experiment
  • Teams that run Went Well / To Improve every sprint and want the same speed with a sharper third column
  • Quick reviews of a decision outside the retro cadence, in twenty minutes

Facilitation tips

Point attention in one direction at a time

Write the columns sequentially — all Plus, then all Minus, then all Interesting — rather than free-for-all. It is the discipline the format was designed around: nobody writes rebuttals, the positive column gets genuine effort instead of token entries, and Interesting stops being an afterthought.

Police the Interesting column

It is not a parking lot for criticism the author did not want to defend. The test for every card: could this plausibly turn out to be good or bad? "Standup runs long" already has a verdict — it is a Minus. "We closed more tickets the week the PM was away" genuinely could go either way, and that is what the column is for.

Attach a question to every Interesting card that survives

An observation without a question dies on the board. "Every slow query touches the same table" earns its keep as "is that table missing an index, or doing too many jobs?" The question makes it checkable, and checkable is one small step from an experiment with an owner.

Use it on decisions, not just sprints

PMI predates retrospectives — it was built to evaluate an idea from three directions before committing. Twenty minutes of Plus, Minus, Interesting on "we adopt the design system" or "we drop the Tuesday call", a month after the change, is the cheapest honest review a decision ever gets.

Variations

Plus, Minus, Investing

The variant behind the format’s other name: the third column collects what the team should put more time into next, turning observations into forward bets. Run it when the retro needs to end in resourcing decisions — what gets more attention next sprint — rather than open questions.

Weighted PMI

De Bono’s scored version: each card gets points, plus or minus, and the columns are summed. Overkill for a sprint retro, but genuinely useful when the subject is a choice between two options and the room suspects the answer is closer than the loudest voice claims.

Interesting-first

Open with the Interesting column while the room is fresh, then do Plus and Minus quickly at the end. The right order for a stale retro cadence — the familiar columns write themselves anyway, and leading with observations changes what the team pays attention to all session.

Async PMI

Leave the board open for a day or two before the session and spend the live time only on grouping and the Interesting discussion. The third column improves most: real observations occur to people mid-week, not in the meeting where they are asked to produce one.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Plus, Minus, Interesting retrospective?+

A three-column retrospective — what helped, what hurt, and what the team noticed that is neither good nor bad yet. It is adapted from Edward de Bono’s PMI attention-directing tool, which is why it works on a single decision as well as on a sprint: the original technique was built for evaluating ideas from three directions before committing to a verdict.

Is it the same as Plus, Minus, Investing?+

Same board, two readings of the third column. In the classic PMI, Interesting collects neutral observations and open questions. Teams and tools that run it as Investing use the third column for what deserves more of the team’s time going forward. The mechanics are otherwise identical — pick the reading that matches what you want the retro to end with: questions, or bets.

What goes in the Interesting column?+

Observations without a verdict: patterns, surprises, and things that could plausibly turn out good or bad. "Half the bugs came from one module", "customers use the export in a way we never designed". If a card already carries a judgment, it belongs in Plus or Minus; the test is whether the room could honestly argue it either way.

How is it different from Went Well / To Improve?+

Two of the three columns are the same idea. The differences: the Interesting column, which gives observations a home that Went Well / To Improve does not have, and the writing discipline — PMI is written one column at a time, attention in one direction, rather than everything at once. Went Well / To Improve reaches concrete actions slightly faster; PMI notices more.

Can you run it on something other than a sprint?+

Yes — that is its edge over most retro formats. Point it at one subject: a tool the team adopted a month ago, a process experiment, a decision about to be made. Twenty minutes, same three columns. For evaluating a proposed change before committing, it fills the same slot as a lightweight pros-and-cons — with a third column for what nobody can predict yet.

How long does it take?+

Thirty to forty-five minutes for a sprint: five to set the stage, ten of column-at-a-time writing, ten on Plus and Minus, and the balance on the Interesting discussion and actions. Scoped to a single decision, twenty minutes is enough.

Run Plus, Minus, Interesting online in FocusRetro

Start a blank board, name the columns Plus / Minus / Interesting, 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

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Related guides

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Retrospective timebox calculator

How long Plus, Minus, Interesting 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 Plus, Minus, Interesting session, sorted by situation.