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A sailboat retrospective is a metaphor-based team retro: the island is the goal you're sailing toward, the wind is what pushes you forward, the anchor is what holds you back, and the sharks are the risks circling ahead. This template lays the whole scene out with sticky-note zones for each element. Teams reach for it when the standard formats have gone stale and the same feedback keeps surfacing.
Both exist to escape the start-stop-continue rut, by different routes. The starfish stays literal and adds resolution: five graded categories for tuning practices up or down. The sailboat goes lateral: a metaphor that asks where you're going, what fills the sails, what drags, and what circles beneath. Pick the starfish when the team's practices need calibrating; pick the sailboat when the answers have gone stale, the goal has blurred, or there are risks nobody is saying out loud.
A sailboat retrospective is a team retrospective format built on a nautical metaphor: the team is a boat sailing toward an island (the goal), pushed by wind (what's working), slowed by an anchor (what's holding it back), and threatened by sharks or rocks (risks ahead). The format evolved from Luke Hohmann's speedboat exercise in Innovation Games, which used only anchors; the sailboat adds the positives and the destination.
The island is the goal or vision the team is working towards. The wind is everything filling the sails: good practices, tooling, team morale. The anchor is drag: blockers, dependencies, heavyweight processes. The sharks (some versions use rocks) are risks ahead, not past problems: technical debt, a looming deadline, a dependency on one person. Some teams add a sun for positive external factors.
Plan 60 to 90 minutes for a full team: five for setting the island, ten of silent sticky-writing across the zones, then grouping, voting, and discussing the top items. Timebox each zone or the anchors will eat the meeting; teams have more to say about drag than about wind. Async works well too: open the board a day early and use the meeting for voting and decisions.
Reach for the sailboat when the direct formats stop producing new information. Start stop continue is faster and needs no explanation, which makes it the right default; but after enough sprints, teams answer it on autopilot. The metaphor forces a re-frame, and it adds two things the classic format lacks: an explicit goal (the island) and forward-looking risks (the sharks). It also suits project kickoffs.
The format ports well: share the board link, give everyone ten silent minutes to add stickies to all four zones, then group duplicates and run the built-in voting. For distributed time zones, run it async: the board collects notes for a day, and the live call only handles discussion and actions. Anonymous-feeling sticky notes help quieter teammates name the sharks nobody mentions in standup.