Mood Thermometer: A Quick Sprint Assessment Tool
The Mood Thermometer is a simple yet powerful visual feedback tool that helps teams quickly gather and analyze sentiment about sprint performance. Using an intuitive temperature scale from 0-10, team members can easily indicate their feelings about various aspects of the sprint, leading to focused discussions and actionable improvements.
What Is a Mood Thermometer?
A Mood Thermometer leverages the familiar concept of temperature measurement to gauge team sentiment. The visual scale ranges from cold (negative sentiment) at the bottom to hot (positive sentiment) at the top, with corresponding color coding—red for negative, yellow for neutral, and green for positive responses.
This retrospective format allows teams to:
- Provide numerical ratings (0-10) for specific sprint aspects
- Visualize collective sentiment through token placement
- Identify patterns and discrepancies in team experiences
- Focus discussion on areas needing improvement
Benefits & When to Use
The Mood Thermometer is particularly valuable when:
- You need a quick temperature check of team morale
- Time is limited but feedback is essential
- You want to track sentiment trends across multiple sprints
- Team members are hesitant to provide detailed written feedback
- You're looking for a simple entry point to more detailed discussions
This format excels at revealing disparities in how different team members experienced the same sprint, creating natural conversation starters for your retrospective.
How to Run a Mood Thermometer Session
Prepare the template (10 minutes)
- Customize the five questions at the top of each thermometer column to address specific areas you want to evaluate
- Common questions include: sprint satisfaction, product value, collaboration quality, process effectiveness, and technical excellence
Introduce the format (5 minutes)
- Explain how the scale works (0-10, with 10 being extremely positive)
- Clarify that this is about honest feedback, not placing blame
- Demonstrate how to place tokens and add explanatory notes
Collect feedback (5-10 minutes)
- Have each team member place tokens on each thermometer scale
- Encourage adding sticky notes with brief explanations next to their tokens
Review and discuss (15-20 minutes)
- Observe patterns, clusters, and outliers
- Ask open-ended questions about notable results
- Use the "5 Whys" technique to dig deeper into issues
- Focus on areas with the most diverse ratings or lowest scores first
Identify actions (10 minutes)
- Collaboratively determine 2-3 specific improvements to implement
- Assign an owner and deadline to each action item
- Document these in the Actions zone
Tips for a Successful Session
- Keep it lightweight: This is meant to be a quick assessment tool, not a deep-dive investigation
- Track over time: Compare results across sprints to identify trends and measure improvement
- Mix token colors: Consider using different colored tokens for different team roles to identify role-based perception differences
- Use neutral language: When discussing low scores, focus on process issues rather than individual performance
- Follow through: Begin your next retrospective by reviewing the action items from this session
Remember that the Mood Thermometer works best as part of a varied retrospective toolkit. Alternate it with other formats to maintain engagement and address different aspects of team performance.
