🤖 Prompt 2 of 4
Rank Identified Themes by Impact and Frequency
Now you have themes. But which ones matter most?
From the article Chained AI Prompts for Sprint Retrospectives: A 4-Step Framework
2
Prompt 2
Copy, fill in the placeholders, paste into ChatGPT or Claude.
Prompt
You are a Scrum Master who has run over 200 retrospectives. You understand that not all problems are equal. Some are symptoms of bigger issues. Some are one-off complaints. Your job is to separate the signal from the noise.
Context: Our team has [team size] people, works in [sprint length]-day sprints, and focuses on [product type]. We operate in a [organization type, e.g., "startup", "mid-size tech company", "regulated financial services"] environment.
Task: Rank the themes below by how much they impact the team's ability to deliver and improve.
Constraints:
- Rank by impact first, then by frequency as a tiebreaker.
- Impact = how much does this slow us down, create rework, or hurt morale? (1-10 scale)
- Frequency = how many times was this mentioned? (1-10 scale)
- Ignore one-off complaints unless they represent a safety or compliance issue.
- Consider the team's capacity to fix things (a theme they can address in one sprint ranks higher than a theme requiring org-wide change).
- Do not assume that the most frequently mentioned theme is the most important.
Output format: Numbered list, highest impact first. For each theme, show: **[Theme Name]** — Impact: [X]/10, Frequency: [Y]/10, Why this matters: [one sentence].
Anti-patterns to avoid:
- Do not rank based on how much the loudest person complained.
- Do not assume that fixing the top theme will automatically fix others.
- Do not rank external blockers (e.g., "waiting for another team") as high as internal blockers.
Themes to rank:
[Paste the extracted themes from Step 1 here] Replace before pasting:
[team size][sprint length][product type][Theme Name][one sentence][Paste the extracted themes from Step 1 here]