Mad Sad Glad Retrospective
Conduct a retrospective on understanding the emotions and feelings of the team.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Mad Sad Glad Retrospective
What is Mad Sad Glad?
After a Sprint, it can be helpful for the team to pause and take stock of how they feel. This is crucial for maintaining morale and getting the most out of each Sprint. But sometimes, it can be hard to gauge your team’s feelings with open-ended questions like “How are you feeling?” That’s why many teams choose to employ the Mad Sad Glad retrospective.
Mad Sad Glad is a popular technique for examining your team member's emotions and encouraging them to think about how they feel. You can use the retrospective to highlight the positive feelings your team might have after a Sprint, but also to underline concerns or questions they might have going forward.
When should you run a Mad Sad Glad retrospective?
This type of retrospective can be especially valuable when there is a negative team dynamic, or if there is tension but team members haven't spoken about it yet. Participants can find it useful to use a structured framework to talk about their emotions – particularly in a fast-paced, results-focused agile environment.
How to use the Mad Sad Glad template
Miro’s virtual collaboration platform is perfect for running a Mad Sad Glad retrospective with your team. Simply select the template and invite your team to join.
The facilitator should give everyone 30-60 minutes to think about how they felt about the previous sprint. Then, allow the respondents some time to take stock of their feelings and write down the highlights on the Mad Sad Glad template. Were there parts of the Sprint that left them angry? Upset? Or satisfied? When the team is finished writing, bring everyone together to discuss. The facilitator can ask follow-up questions and take notes throughout the process.
4 tips for running a Mad Sad Glad retrospective
1. Give people space and time to reflect
Make sure the team has about 30 to 60 minutes of uninterrupted time to take stock of how they feel. Encourage people to take copious notes. Make sure the room is quiet and out of the way.
2. Make sure phones are turned off
Ask all attendees to turn off their phones so they can focus on the retrospective. If people are distracted by their phones, then they will find it harder to reflect.
3. Be inclusive
Assure everyone that there are no right or wrong answers. Remember, the goal of Mad Sad Glad is to take stock of how everyone is feeling, not to brainstorm processes or strategies.
4. Keep the focus on emotions
Encourage your team to focus on emotion, not action. People who might feel uncomfortable sharing their feelings sometimes instead try to pivot to strategy. Gently encourage them to avoid that.
3 reasons to use a Mad Sad Glad retrospective?
The Mad Sad Glad Retrospective is specifically focused on the team's emotional journey, and this is a unique approach with different benefits from a normal agile retrospective.
1. Build trust
By giving team members a space to discuss their feelings and emotions about the work they’ve done, you encourage honesty and forthrightness. Creating more honest, open, and positive teams ultimately help team members trust each other.
2. Improve morale
Almost everyone will struggle with certain things or get frustrated, and oftentimes workplaces don’t provide an avenue to talk about these frustrations. Giving employees an opportunity to talk through their difficulties will help them feel more welcomed, and ultimately boost morale.
3. Increase engagement
If team members are frustrated and don’t feel heard, they tend to check out. With a Mad Sad Glad retrospective, those team members can speak up and work towards solving their problems and building a more inclusive workspace where people can stay engaged.
You can also explore all project retrospective templates available through our collection.
Get started with this template right now.
Meeting Notes Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Meetings
When your meeting is a success (and Miro will help make sure it is), participation will run high, brilliant ideas will be had, and decisions will be made. Make sure you don’t miss a single one — use our meeting notes template to track notes and feedback in a centralized place that the whole team can access. Just assign a notetaker before the meeting, identify the discussion topics, and let the notetaker take down the participants, important points covered, and any decisions made.
Love Bomb Icebreaker Template
Works best for:
Icebreakers
Encourage team members to show their appreciation for each other using Miro’s free Love Bomb Icebreaker Template. Participants can add words or phrases that show what they appreciate about their colleagues.
4P Marketing Mix Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Brainstorming, Workshops
Product, Place, Promotions, and Price. Starting with this template (and those 4Ps) you can choose the best way to take your product or service to market. The secret is to create just the right mix—deciding how much each P needs in terms of investment, attention, and resources. That will help you build your strengths, adapt to the market, and collaborate with partners. And our tool is the perfect canvas to create your marketing mix and share with teams and across your organization.
Johari Window Model
Works best for:
Leadership, Meetings, Retrospectives
Understanding — it’s the key to trusting others better and yourself better as well. Built on that idea, a Johari Window is a framework designed to enhance team understanding by getting participants to fill in four quadrants, each of which reveals something they might not know about themselves or about others. Use this template to conduct a Johari Window exercise when you’re experiencing organizational growth, to deepen cross-functional or intra-team connections, help employees communicate better, and cultivate empathy.
Alignment Chart Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Brainstorming, Team Meetings
The alignment chart originated in the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game to allow players to categorize their characters according to their ethical and moral perspectives. Since then, people around the world have begun to use the alignment chart as a fun way to describe their own characteristics and personas, as well as fictional characters, famous people, and much more. In the conventional set-up, you figure out your placement in the alignment chart based on your views on law, chaoss, good, and evil. But you can adapt the alignment chart to reflect any characteristics you wish to use to create personas.
Lean Inception Workshop
Works best for:
Agile, Lean Methodology
The Lean Inception Workshop streamlines project kickoff by aligning teams on goals, scope, and priorities. It leverages Lean principles to eliminate waste and maximize value, guiding exercises to define user personas, map user journeys, and prioritize features. By fostering cross-functional collaboration and customer-centric thinking, this template accelerates project initiation and ensures alignment between stakeholders, empowering teams to deliver customer value faster.