Go/No-Go Retrospective Worksheet for Enterprise Campaign Teams
A moderate-rigor worksheet for individual contributors retrospecting on enterprise campaign go/no-go decisions — designed to surface the estimation bias that leaks into next year's gates.
The retro that turns a slipped campaign into a sharper next gate
Most campaign retros ask 'what could we have done better?' The useful question is 'what would we have asked at gate if we'd known?'
Enterprise campaign teams usually run retros, and the retros usually surface the same observations: legal took longer than expected, the partner was late, regional approval added a week. The observations don't translate into changes at the next gate, because retros and gates are owned by different people on different cadences.
This worksheet is the bridge. It's filled in by the IC who ran the campaign, after launch, and it converts retro findings into specific go/no-go gate questions. Used three times in a row, it changes the gate. Used once, it sharpens one decision.
Worksheet sections
0 / 7- Original committed date vs actual launch date. In days. No interpretation yet.
- Where the slip accumulated. Phase by phase: concept, production, review, launch readiness. Most slip lives in one phase; identify which.
- Original gate's stated assumptions about that phase. What the team told the gate would happen. Verbatim from the gate doc if available.
- What actually happened in that phase. In their own words.
- Gap analysis. Where did the gate's assumption diverge from reality? One sentence per gap.
- Translation to a gate question. Each gap becomes a specific question the next gate should ask. Phrased as a question, not a policy.
- Tripwire that would have caught this earlier. What single observation, made at week 4 or week 6, would have surfaced the slip before it became inevitable?
- Week 1 post-launchPull the dataOriginal commitments, actual dates, slip phase. Avoid editorializing.
- Week 1, day 3Talk to the people involvedThree 15-minute conversations: with the team, with the function that caused the largest slip, with the program manager. Capture verbatim where possible.
- Week 2Fill the worksheetAll seven sections. The tripwire section is the hardest; spend most time there.
- Week 3Bring to the next planning cycleSend the worksheet to whoever runs the next gate. The translation-to-gate-question section is what they'll act on.
The reason the worksheet works at the IC level is that you have proximity to the campaign that the executive running the gate doesn't have. Your retro findings are cheap to gather and politically expensive for executives to gather independently. Translating them into gate questions is the leverage move — it converts your campaign's slip into the organization's next-quarter discipline. For the executive-facing version of this same retrospective, see the executive retrospective playbook; for the heavier detective version on hardware projects, see spotting estimation problems on hardware.