Mad Sad Glad Retrospective

An emotion-based retrospective format that helps teams surface how they felt about the sprint — building psychological safety and deeper team understanding.

What Is Mad Sad Glad?

Mad Sad Glad is a retrospective format focused on how team members feel rather than just what happened. By categorizing feedback into emotional states, it creates space for more honest conversations about team dynamics, morale, and interpersonal challenges that fact-based formats often miss.

😡

Mad

Things that frustrated, annoyed, or angered team members during the sprint — blockers, process failures, or situations that felt unfair or disrespectful.

😔

Sad

Things that disappointed the team — goals that weren't met, missed opportunities, or things the team wishes had gone differently.

😄

Glad

Things that made the team happy — wins, positive surprises, great collaboration, shipped features, or anything worth celebrating.

Example Cards

😡 Mad

Deployment was blocked by an undocumented dependency

Requirements changed twice during the sprint

No response from stakeholders for two days

The same bug came back for the third time

😔 Sad

We didn't get to finish the feature we were most excited about

Felt disconnected from the rest of the team this sprint

Code review feedback came too late to address

Missed our velocity target again

😄 Glad

Finally shipped the dashboard feature — it looks great

Team jumped in to help when I was stuck

Zero production incidents this sprint

New onboarding process worked really well

When to Use Mad Sad Glad

When the team seems stressed, burned out, or disengaged
After a particularly difficult or chaotic sprint
When you want to surface team morale issues early
When a purely process-focused retro hasn't been producing meaningful feedback
For newly formed teams building psychological safety

Benefits

Creates space for emotional honesty — not just technical observations
Helps Scrum Masters identify morale problems before they become retention issues
Strengthens team empathy and mutual understanding
Anonymous submissions make it easier to share sensitive feelings
Surfaces interpersonal dynamics that fact-based formats miss entirely

Potential Challenges

Some team members may find it uncomfortable to share emotions in a work setting — anonymous cards help
The Mad column can dominate if the team has had a very rough sprint — set a time limit per category
Without strong facilitation, Mad items can turn into blame sessions — keep the focus on situations, not individuals

💡 Facilitation tip: Start with the Glad column. Beginning on a positive note sets a constructive tone before moving into more difficult feedback.

🛠️ Need something different? BugNBrag's Scrum Master can add custom columns to any session — so you can extend or adapt any template to fit your team's specific needs.

Run a Mad Sad Glad with your team

Free. No account. Select the Mad Sad Glad template when creating your session.

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