
The speed car is an alternative retrospective at the excellent speed boat created by Paulo Caroli. It is a very popular retrospective for Scrum Masters to offer teams the opportunity to find axis of improvement. We will therefore see what is this retrospective and how to animate it.
Feel free to read our other retrospectives on this dedicated page:
Required material for speed car
For the Speed Car, here is the classic model that you find everywhere:

You can directly print this model on at least one A3 or decide to reproduce it yourself on a large whiteboard. I recommend the large whiteboard which will give you more space to store the post’it.
You will also need to have the material below to do this retrospective:
- fine pen / marker
- post’it
It is interesting to see that the exercise helps to highlight positive and negative points, but it also helps to prepare for possible future obstacles. The format is known but it has the advantage of being very complete.
The overall time to plan is 40 minutes.
All steps
Step 1 of speed car
The Scrum Master will first explain what are each elements which are on the sheet (or drawing on the board):
- parachute: what slowed us down during this sprint?
- engine: what allowed us to accelerate during this sprint?
- abyss: what are the future obstacles that you see today?
- bridge: how could we get around its obstacles tomorrow?
The Scrum Master will take the opportunity to give a small batch of post-it and pens to all participants of the retrospective.
Duration: 10 minutes
Step 2 of speed car
Then the scrum master will ask each participant to write their ideas and feelings on post’it in a legible way knowing that it will be necessary to put one idea per post’it. There is no limit at the number of post’it to write and there is no obligation to write a post’it for the 4 different themes. The scrum master will timebox this part of 5 minutes.

The next step will be for each participant to briefly explain why they put these post’it. Allow 10 minutes for this step depending on the number of participants.
Duration: 10 minutes
Step 3 of speed car
The scrum master will give participants 5 minutes to seek to suggest additional axis of improvement to add on the bridge part.
Thus, all participants will have 5 minutes to briefly explain them.
Duration: 10 minutes
Step 4 of speed car
The participants will make a Dot Voting to define the 3 main axis of improvement on which the team will work during the next sprint. These are represented by the “idea” part at the bottom right of the learning matrix.
The scrum master will not forget to ask participants to choose a volunteer to be responsible for monitoring the implementation of these axis of improvement. It is important to remember that it is essential to empower people to ensure that the axis of improvement will not be forgotten after the end of the retrospective.
Duration: 10 minutes
Conclusion: speed car
You have everything now that you need to properly animate the speed car retrospective. It is very popular in the scrum masters communities.
Useful link: retrospective in french
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