A Halloween retro: what's haunting your team?

2026-10-30 · The Scrums team

Halloween is tomorrow. A themed retro is an easy way to get a team talking about the things that quietly scare it, like the fragile deploy, the untested module and the meeting nobody wants.

Halloween is tomorrow, which makes today a good day for a retro with a theme. A playful format won't fix anything by itself, but it does get people talking about things they'd usually leave alone, and some of what haunts a team is worth dragging into the light.

The format

Four columns, each with a prompt:

Ghosts: problems that keep coming back, however many times we think we've fixed them.
Zombies: work that should have died months ago but keeps shambling on: the old feature nobody uses, the report nobody reads.
Monsters under the bed: risks we all know about and never mention.
Treats: what went well and deserves some credit.

Start with an icebreaker in the same spirit, such as What's the scariest message you could get at 5 pm on a Friday?

The zombies column is often the most useful. Teams are good at starting things and bad at stopping them, and a little humour makes it easier to say "can we just stop doing this?"

Running it in Scrums

Make the template. On your team's Templates tab, choose New template, and add the four columns, each with a title, a line of helper text and a colour.
Set the icebreaker. The Icebreaker step lets the facilitator write their own question, or shuffle through ours.
Run it as usual. Everyone writes privately and the cards are revealed together, so the monsters under the bed come out without anyone having to name them first. Group the cards, vote, and discuss the topics in order.
Leave with actions. Pick a ghost to lay to rest and a zombie to retire, give each an owner and a date, and they'll be waiting in the next retro's Review step.

Templates you make belong to your team. An organization's admins can also share templates with every team in it, so next October the whole company can be haunted at once.

Looking for a format that isn’t a costume party? Browse eleven retro formats, each with a guide.