Every retro I've ever run starts the same way. Screen shared, columns loaded, and a long quiet second where everyone waits for someone else to drop the first card.
So I got curious about what actually lands on those boards. We host a lot of retrospectives on Kollabe, so I pulled the aggregate: 79,868 retros, 986,317 cards. Anonymised, counted, nothing fancy.
The thing that surprised me most: retros have a reputation as a place to air what's broken, and the data says the opposite.
Teams write almost twice as much about what's going right. The "What Went Well" column collects 5.4 cards on average. Its "What we want to improve" neighbour barely clears 3. "Glad" beats "Mad" by more than two to one. Whatever the format, the positive side fills up first.
And the loneliest column in agile? "Stop." At 1.5 cards on average, it's the one teams reach for least. Starting new things is easy. Admitting you should stop doing something, apparently, is not.
