Three little pigs retrospective

One house of straw, one of sticks, one of bricks, and a wolf that tests them all. Sort your systems and habits by how well they would hold up under pressure, and you get a priority list as a side effect.

Straw

Fragile bits that could fall apart—urgent fixes

Sticks

Decent but needs reinforcement—medium priority

Bricks

Solid practices to emulate and scale

Use this template — it's free

What a three little pigs retrospective is

Everyone knows the story: three pigs build three houses, the wolf blows down the one made of straw and the one made of sticks, and only the brick house stands. The retrospective borrows the picture to ask a question most formats skip: how well would the things we rely on hold up if something pushed on them?

The team sorts its systems, processes and habits into three columns. Straw is fragile and could fall apart soon, so it needs urgent fixes. Sticks is decent but needs reinforcement, a medium-priority job. Bricks is solid, and worth copying elsewhere. Because the columns come with urgency built in, the board ends up as a rough plan: short-term fixes, mid-term reinforcement and long-term patterns to spread.

Why it works:

• It separates "works" from "survives". Plenty of things work fine on a quiet Tuesday. The format asks what happens on a bad day, which is when fragility shows.
• The priority is part of the answer. Putting a card in Straw is already saying "this is urgent". You spend less time ranking and more time fixing.
• Bricks teach. In many retros, what went well gets a nod and nothing more. Here, the solid practices are studied for what makes them solid, so the team can apply the same ingredient to a straw problem.
• The story is disarming. Admitting that your deploy process is made of straw is easier with a fairy tale on the screen than in a formal risk review.

When to use it, and when not to

The format is strongest when the team is looking at the health of what it has built:

• after an incident or a near miss, once the immediate fix is done and you want to know what else is fragile;
• before a high-pressure period: a launch, a seasonal traffic peak, a big client going live;
• when you inherit a codebase, a service or a process from another team;
• before the team grows, to check whether onboarding, documentation and on-call will hold up with new people;
• as a quarterly technical health check alongside your regular sprint retros.

Pick something else when:

• The issues are about people and feelings. Straw and bricks describe things, not moods. Mad Sad Glad gives emotions a proper place.
• You want a quick review of the sprint. KPT is a shorter loop for ordinary sprints.
• You need to look at a goal and the road to it. The sailboat retrospective is about direction; the pigs are about the strength of what you already have.
• You are in the middle of an incident review. A post-incident review needs a timeline and causes. Run the pigs afterwards, to widen the view beyond the one thing that broke.

Start by naming the wolf

Before anyone writes a card, agree on what the wolf is. Without one, everything feels like sticks: fine, could be better. With a concrete wolf, the sorting gets sharp. Good wolves for a software team:

• traffic triples during launch week;
• two of the six engineers are out for a month at the same time;
• the release date moves two weeks earlier;
• a customer's security team audits how you handle their data.

One wolf per session is enough. Say it out loud before the writing starts, and come back to it whenever a card is hard to place.

The three columns

Straw: fragile and in need of urgent fixes

Things that would fall apart if the wolf showed up next week. Often they work today only because one person keeps them alive, or because nothing has tested them yet. The test: under pressure, would this break outright, with no workaround and nobody else able to step in?

• Production deploys only run from Alex's laptop
• Nobody has ever tested restoring the database backups
• The nightly import fails silently; customers tell us before our alerts do
• The release checklist lives in one person's head

Sticks: decent, but in need of reinforcement

Things that mostly hold, but bend under load. There is a process or a tool, it just has gaps, depends on effort, or covers only part of the problem. The difference from straw: a stick would bend before it breaks, so you have time to plan the fix instead of dropping everything.

• Monitoring covers the API but not the background workers
• The onboarding guide exists, but half of it describes last year's setup
• Feature flags work, but nobody removes old ones: there are 140 now
• The on-call rota works with six people and breaks with four

Bricks: solid practices to copy and scale

Things that would survive the wolf. The useful card says not only what is solid but why: an automated check, a shared habit, a second person who knows the system. That reason is what you will try to copy into a straw area.

• CI blocks the merge when tests fail; nobody can skip it
• Every incident gets a written review within a week
• Infrastructure is in code: we rebuilt staging in an afternoon
• At least two people can deploy and debug every service

Use this template — it's free

A 45-minute three little pigs agenda

For a team of four to nine. For a large system, book an hour and spend the extra 15 minutes on discussion.

1. Warm-up, 4 minutes. Something light before a slightly uncomfortable topic. Pick a question from the icebreaker questions list, or let ProstoRetro start the board with an icebreaker round.
2. Name the wolf and the scope, 4 minutes. One concrete threat, and the area you are looking at: the whole product, one service, or the release process.
3. Silent writing, 8 minutes. Cards in all three columns, one item per card. Cards stay hidden while people write, so one person's "this is fine" does not talk others out of a straw card.
4. Grouping, 6 minutes. Merge duplicates. When the same item lands in Straw for one person and Sticks for another, keep both cards and note the disagreement; it is worth a minute of discussion.
5. Voting, 4 minutes. Put votes on the straw and stick items you most want to fix. Bricks do not need votes; you will use them as a reference.
6. Discussion, 14 minutes. Start with the top straw items: what is the cheapest change that turns this into sticks by the end of next sprint? Then the top stick: when do we schedule the reinforcement? Finish with one brick: what makes it solid, and where else could that work?
7. Action items, 3 minutes. Owner and due date for each. Straw actions get short due dates; stick actions can go into the next planning.
8. Close, 2 minutes. Read the actions back and confirm which straw item you are fixing first.

Running it with a remote team

• Keep straw cards anonymous if people want. A straw card often describes someone's own area: "my service has no tests". Anonymous cards, which ProstoRetro turns on by default, make that admission easier.
• Show, don't describe. Cards can carry images. A screenshot of an alert that never fired or a graph of nightly failures settles a straw-or-sticks debate faster than three paragraphs.
• Let the app do the first sort. Technical cards tend to repeat with different wording. The AI grouping suggestion gathers likely duplicates; you keep the groups that make sense and undo the rest.
• Invite the person who owns the wolf. If the wolf is a launch, the product manager or the support lead knows how hard it will blow. With the room open to anyone, they join from the link with just a name.
• Track the move from straw to sticks. The next retro opens by reviewing open action items, so you see whether last time's straw item has actually been reinforced.

Variations

Add the wolf as a column

Make the threat part of the board: a fourth column, The wolf, where people write the pressures they expect. Discuss the top wolf first, and it becomes clear which straw items matter most. It takes about ten minutes longer and suits planning before a risky quarter. You can build it as a custom template with up to five columns.

One house at a time

Narrow the scope to a single service or process: "our deploy pipeline", "how we onboard engineers", "customer support escalations". A narrow scope gives more specific cards and works for non-technical teams too.

The quarterly rebuild

Run the same scope every quarter and compare the boards. Items that moved from straw to sticks to bricks show real progress; items that stay in straw for two quarters need a different kind of decision, usually about priorities rather than effort.

Common mistakes

• No wolf. Without a concrete threat, cards drift to the comfortable middle and Sticks fills up with everything.
• Trying to jump straight to bricks. A brick-level fix for every straw item is a project, not a sprint. Aim for sticks first; it is what makes the urgent fix possible this week.
• Treating straw as blame. "Alex's laptop is the deploy server" is a system problem that Alex has been quietly holding up. Thank the person, then fix the system.
• Skipping the bricks. They are not there to make people feel good. They are your cheapest source of fixes that already work in your context.
• Too many actions. A board full of straw is tempting to fix all at once. Pick two or three, and let the next session catch the rest.

FAQ

What is a three little pigs retrospective?

A retrospective format based on the fairy tale. The team sorts its practices and systems into straw (fragile, urgent), sticks (decent but needs reinforcing) and bricks (solid, worth copying), then plans fixes in that order.

How long does a three little pigs retrospective take?

About 45 minutes for one scope and one wolf, as in the agenda above. A whole-product health check with a larger team is closer to an hour.

Can non-technical teams use it?

Yes. Any team has processes that would break under pressure: approvals that depend on one person, handovers that live in memory, a support queue that only works when it is quiet. Name a wolf that fits their work.

Can I run a three little pigs retrospective online for free?

Yes. ProstoRetro has the Three Little Pigs template built in and charges nothing for it. If you want the wolf on the board as well, add it as a fourth column in a custom template. Read how to run a great retro for a walkthrough, or browse the other retrospective templates.