Action items and success criteria

The actions phase is where a retro becomes concrete: the highest-voted topics get turned into action items your team will actually carry out.

Action items with an owner

Each action item gets a clear description and an owner — the person responsible for following through. Without an owner, an action stays a well-meant idea; with an owner, it becomes a commitment.

Success criteria: only done when it's really done

You can add one or more success criteria to an action item: concrete, checkable conditions that need to be met. An action is only "done" once all of its success criteria are checked off — this is deliberate (gated completion), so an action can't accidentally be marked complete while the underlying problem hasn't actually been solved.

For example: the action "Improve the deploy process" gets the success criterion "Three deploys in a row without a rollback". Only once that criterion is checked off can the action itself be marked done.

Follow-up in the next retro

Open action items from previous retros stay visible, so your team sees them again in the next session. This is how Retrospective Lab prevents agreements from quietly disappearing, keeping improvements genuinely on track.

More on how you reach this point in the session: the phases of a retro and voting.