Ikigai team exercise

Map your team's work against four questions: what you love, what you're good at, what brings the business the most value and what reaches the most people. The useful part is where the answers overlap, and where they don't.

What we love

Activities that bring joy and passion

What we are good at

Skills or activities the team excels at

What brings more financial rewards

Work that provides higher economic or business value

What reaches more people

Activities that impact a broader audience

Use this template — it's free

What the ikigai exercise is

Ikigai is a Japanese word usually translated as "a reason for being"; the diagram of four overlapping circles that most people now associate with it is a later Western adaptation, and the team exercise borrows that diagram. On the board, the circles become four columns: What we love, What we are good at, What brings more financial rewards and What reaches more people. Each person writes the team's activities into every column where they belong. The same activity can, and often should, appear in more than one.

The personal version of the diagram asks what the world needs and what you can earn a living from. The team version asks two questions a product team can check: which work brings the business more value, and which work reaches more people. That keeps the conversation tied to evidence, not only to taste.

Where a retro asks what to fix, ikigai asks where to put the team's time and energy. That helps because:

• It makes motivation discussable. "I'm tired of being the release person" rarely fits into a sprint retro. Here it shows up on its own: release duty sits under "good at" and nowhere under "love".
• It separates skill from enjoyment. Teams tend to collect more of the work they're good at, whether or not anyone likes doing it. The two columns side by side show where that has gone too far.
• It ties craft to impact. A favorite kind of work that brings little value and reaches few people is worth naming — not to ban it, but to decide how much time it deserves.
• It gives the team a map for planning. When the roadmap discussion comes, the team already knows which work it should argue to keep.

When to use it, and when not to

Ikigai is a once- or twice-a-year exercise, not a sprint ritual. It fits:

• a new team, or one reshaped by a reorganization, that has inherited more responsibilities than it can do well;
• the weeks before quarterly or annual planning, as input on what the team should own;
• a team-building day where you want an outcome, not only a good time;
• a team spread across too many things, where everyone is busy and nothing feels important;
• career and motivation conversations at team level: what people want more of, which a manager can then follow up in one-to-ones.

Choose a different format when:

• You need to fix next sprint. Delivery problems call for a regular retro such as Start Stop Continue.
• The team can't change what it works on. If the scope is set from above and won't move, the exercise raises hopes nobody can meet. Say up front what can change, or run something else.
• Trust is low. "What we love" asks for honesty. Where people would write what the manager wants to hear, start with something lighter, such as Three Wishes or Hopes & Fears.
• The real question is one person's career. That belongs in a one-to-one. The team board maps shared work.

The four columns

Write activities — kinds of work the team does — not values or results. "Quality" can't be mapped; "writing end-to-end tests" can. Use the same words for the same activity in every column, so the overlaps are easy to spot. The examples below come from a team that builds a web and mobile app for small businesses.

What we love: work that brings joy

Activities that give people energy — the work you would volunteer for. The test against the next column: you can love something you're only average at. Enthusiasm goes here even without a track record.

• Prototyping a feature in a week and showing it to customers
• Hunting down hard performance bugs together
• Customer calls with the onboarding specialists
• Polishing the components in our design system

What we are good at: skills the team excels at

What the team does well, with evidence: other teams ask you for it, it ships with few surprises, it gets done faster than anywhere else in the company. The test: would someone outside the team agree? Skills you would like to have belong in a different conversation.

• Database migrations: three large ones this year, none with downtime
• Incident response; other teams call us when the queues back up
• API documentation that partners rarely have questions about
• Cutting app start-up time on older phones

What brings more financial rewards: business value

Work that moves revenue, retention or cost. The test: can you name the number it changes? If not, the card probably belongs in another column. This is where opinions mislead most, so bring data — ask the product manager or an analyst for a few facts before the session.

• The audit log that sales hears about in every large deal
• Win-back emails for accounts that go quiet after the first week
• Cutting the cloud bill for the reporting cluster
• Faster setup for customers with hundreds of users

What reaches more people: wider impact

Activities that affect a broad audience: all users rather than one customer, other teams, the public. The test against the business-value column: count who is affected, not what it earns. Accessibility, shared tools and documentation often score low on revenue and high here.

• Accessibility fixes in the sign-up flow
• The shared UI library that four other teams build on
• Help-center articles for the ten most common support questions
• The public status page and our incident write-ups

Use this template — it's free

Reading the overlaps

After grouping, each activity sits in one, two, three or four columns. In ProstoRetro a card keeps the color of the column it was written in, even inside a group, so a group with four colors is an activity in all four circles. These are the patterns worth the discussion time:

• All four columns: the team's core. Protect it in planning, and say no to work that crowds it out.
• Good at and valuable, but not loved: the treadmill. Work the team is stuck with because nobody else can do it. It is the biggest burnout risk on the board; look at rotating it, automating it, documenting it or handing it over.
• Loved and good at, but little value or reach: craft. Keep it with a time box, or find the version of it that matters to users.
• Valuable and far-reaching, but not a strength: a growth area. It calls for learning, pairing or hiring — and an honest look at whether this team should own it at all.
• One column only. Activities that are only loved, or only valuable, are normal. Don't spend the discussion on them.

A 60-minute ikigai session

This agenda suits five to nine people who have seen the four questions at least a day in advance.

1. Warm-up, 5 minutes. Pick a question that points at the theme, such as "What part of your work would you describe as the most interesting?" — it's one of our icebreaker questions, and the work section has more like it.
2. Agree on the activities, 5 minutes. Share a starting list of fifteen to twenty-five things the team does, from code review to customer calls. People can add to it, but should keep its wording.
3. Silent writing, 12 minutes. Everyone puts activities into every column where they belong. Cards stay hidden, so nobody copies the first person's view of what the team loves.
4. Grouping, 8 minutes. Drag cards for the same activity together, across columns. AI grouping can do a first pass, which you keep or undo.
5. Voting, 5 minutes. Vote for the activities that deserve more of the team's time next quarter.
6. Discussion, 18 minutes. Five minutes on the core, eight on the treadmill and five on the top-voted growth area.
7. Action items, 5 minutes. Two or three changes with owners and due dates: a rotation for release duty, a handover plan, a learning goal.
8. Close, 2 minutes. Each person names one activity they want more of next quarter. It's good material for one-to-ones.

Running it with a remote team

• Collect cards over a few days. People think more clearly about what they love when they are not on the spot. An infinite room, a board with a permanent link, takes cards ahead of time and keeps them hidden until the team meets.
• Keep anonymity on. Cards are anonymous by default, and here it matters: "I don't enjoy on-call" is easier to write without a name. Each person can still sign any card.
• Show the numbers. For the business-value column, paste a chart or a dashboard screenshot onto a card, so the discussion starts from the same facts.
• Settle a split with a poll. If the votes divide between two growth areas, an anonymous single-choice poll decides which one the team takes on first.
• Keep the map for planning. ProstoRetro can write an AI summary of the session, and participants who signed in get the summary by email, which is handy input for the manager's planning.

Variations

Personal first, team second

Give everyone ten minutes to sketch their own four circles on paper, privately. Then fill in the team board. People who have just thought about what they love write more honest cards, and nobody has to show their personal sketch.

Product ikigai

Map features instead of activities: which features users love, which ones the team builds well, which drive the business and which reach the most users. The column names stay; the cards change. Features that sit in a single column become candidates for retirement, which makes this a good session before pruning a roadmap.

The classic wording

If your team prefers wording closer to the original circles, build a custom template: change "What reaches more people" to "What our users need", and add a fifth column, "Our ikigai", for the overlaps you agree on in the discussion. Custom templates take up to five columns, with your own descriptions and colors.

Common mistakes

• Writing values instead of activities. "Ownership" and "quality" fit every column and mean nothing on the map.
• Five names for one activity. If "user interviews", "customer calls" and "talking to users" go on the board separately, the overlaps vanish. Agree on wording before writing.
• Skipping the treadmill. It is the least comfortable overlap and the most useful one. Give it the most discussion time.
• Promising everyone only the work they love. The goal is a better mix, not a wish list. Say so at the start.
• Cards about individuals. "Anna is great at SQL" turns the map into a performance review. Write the activity instead: "query tuning".

FAQ

What are the four parts of the ikigai team exercise?

What the team loves, what it is good at, what brings more financial or business value, and what reaches more people. The answers are activities, and the discussion focuses on the ones that appear in several columns.

How long does an ikigai team exercise take?

Plan for an hour with five to nine people. A larger group needs closer to 90 minutes, or a second session just for the discussion.

Is ikigai a retrospective?

It runs like one — writing, grouping, voting, discussion — but it looks at focus rather than at the last sprint. You can use it in place of a regular retro once or twice a year, and follow it with a forward-looking format such as FLAP.

Can I run an ikigai exercise online for free?

Yes. Ikigai is one of ProstoRetro's built-in templates, the app is free to use, and colleagues join from a shared link. Our step-by-step guide explains each phase of a session, and the full list of templates has formats for the sprints in between.