Most launch retrospectives are theater. A week after launch, everyone is bored, the metrics that matter haven't landed yet, and the doc becomes a feel-good recap with a "lessons learned" section nobody opens again. The template below is the opposite — eight structured sections, sixty minutes, two passes across the first month. It produces learning because it commits to a specific shape and a specific cadence, both boring on purpose.
The eight sections
What the doc must contain
Sixty minutes is enough if the template is filled in live, with the team in the room, during the meeting. Drafting it offline first and reviewing in the meeting is where retros turn into performance reviews and lose their usefulness.
The two-pass cadence
Two passes — because a retro run only at day 7 misses the pipeline data, and a retro run only at day 30 loses the freshness of the launch-week reactions.
The template works because it's short. The cadence works because it runs twice. The team that runs this discipline across four launches in a year gets four retros with comparable structure — which is the only way launch practice compounds. Without the structure, each launch is a one-off; with it, the fifth launch starts to look like the team has actually learned something from the first four.
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