30 start, stop, continue feedback examples for work

Start, stop, continue sorts feedback into three buckets: a habit to begin, a habit to drop, and a habit to keep. It takes about ten minutes to fill in, which is exactly why most of them come back as nine bare verbs nobody can act on. The 30 start, stop, continue feedback examples below are sorted by who you’re writing to, and every one carries the reason it’s on the list.

Picture the usual situation: a form lands on a Thursday asking what a colleague should start, stop, and continue doing, and it’s due Friday. You know roughly what you think, and you’re missing a sentence that says it without sounding like a complaint or a greeting card. This page is for that Thursday.

After the examples there’s a template you can copy, a short section on writing a “stop” that doesn’t start a fight, and the cases where this format is the wrong tool.

Key Takeaways

• A start, stop, continue item works when it names a behaviour and the reason: the moment it showed up or the effect it had. A bare “stop interrupting” gives the person nothing to work with.
• Write every “stop” as an action plus what to do instead. “Stop reopening decisions in the hallway” is usable, and “stop being negative” starts an argument.
• A real “start” is a new habit. If it is the “stop” with the wording flipped, you have written one item twice.
• “Continue” is the bucket people skip, and it is the one that tells someone what to protect.
• Give one or two items per bucket. The format suits a quarterly check-in or a team retro, and a serious problem needs a conversation.

What start, stop, continue is and the one line that makes it work

The format asks three questions. What should this person, or this team, start doing? What should they stop doing? What should they continue doing?

You’ll also see it called stop, start, continue, or keep, stop, start, and some teams call the whole exercise a start, stop, continue analysis. The order doesn’t matter.

What matters is whether each line carries a “because”. Compare “start communicating more” with “start sending the agenda the day before our planning call, because half the hour goes on working out what we’re deciding.” The second one names a behaviour, a moment, and an effect, so the person can do it on Monday. Every example on this page is written that way.

One more distinction before the lists. The same three buckets are used for two different jobs. As feedback, the subject is one person and the items describe what “you” do. As a team retrospective, the subject is the group and its process, so the items say “we”.

The first four sections below are feedback about a person, and the fifth is for a team retro.

Start, stop, continue examples for colleagues

Feedback for colleagues is about the work you share: handoffs, meetings, reviews, and what it’s like to depend on each other.

Start

• “Start sending the agenda the day before our planning call, because half the hour currently goes on working out what we’re deciding.”
• “Start tagging me when a design changes after handoff. I found out about last week’s change from the bug report.”

Stop

• “Stop answering questions meant for me in client calls. The client has begun emailing you about my part of the project, and I’d like to handle those directly.”
• “Stop approving pull requests the same minute they’re opened. Two went through with failing edge cases last sprint, and a ten-minute read would have caught them.”

Continue

• “Continue writing up decisions in the channel after meetings. It’s the reason I could pick the project back up after a week off.”
• “Continue asking ‘what would change your mind?’ in reviews, because it turns our disagreements into something we can test.”

If you want more raw material for a peer, the peer feedback examples library shows weak and strong versions side by side and helps you write your own from a real moment.

Start, stop, continue feedback examples for your manager

Stop, start, continue feedback for managers is mostly about what they control that you don’t: priorities, context, decisions, and their time.

Start

• “Start telling us when priorities change and why. In March the focus moved from growth to retention, and we kept working on the old goal for three weeks.”
• “Start sharing what you take away from leadership meetings, even in two lines, because we currently hear about decisions from other teams first.”

Stop

• “Stop rescheduling our 1:1 on the day. It has moved four of the last six times, and I save my real questions for it.”
• “Stop rewriting my documents before I’ve seen your comments. I’d learn faster from the comments, and I can’t tell what you’d change next time.”

Continue

• “Continue pushing back on deadlines from other teams before they reach us. It’s why the last release wasn’t a weekend job.”
• “Continue asking for my view before giving yours in planning, because it’s the one meeting where the quiet half of the team speaks.”

Writing to someone who decides your pay takes more care than writing to a peer. Upward feedback examples and questions covers how to say the hard part safely.

Start, stop, continue examples for employees you manage

When you write start, stop, continue feedback for employees who report to you, you have more context than anyone else on the form, so use it. Name the project and the week.

Start

• “Start flagging a blocked task the day it gets stuck. Last month I found out about the API delay from the deadline, and we could have moved people two weeks earlier.”
• “Start bringing one proposed solution with each problem. You usually have a good one by the end of our conversation, and leading with it would save us both time.”

Stop

• “Stop saying yes to every request from sales. Three of them landed in the same week as the release, and I’d like you to send them to me to prioritise.”
• “Stop polishing internal docs to launch quality. The onboarding guide took nine days, and a two-day first version would have been enough for the team.”

Continue

• “Continue writing the handover note before you go on leave. Nobody had to message you during your last holiday.”
• “Continue reviewing the newer engineers’ work the way you do, with a question and an example. Two of them told me it’s why they ask you first.”

What should a leader start, stop, and continue?

For a senior leader the stakes change, because their habits are copied by everyone below them. The useful items are about what the whole company sees.

Start

• “Start naming what we’re dropping when you announce a new priority, because teams are currently carrying both.”
• “Start joining one customer call a month. Roadmap decisions would land better if people knew you’d heard the complaints first-hand.”

Stop

• “Stop reopening decisions in the hallway after the leadership meeting. Last quarter the team heard two versions of the pricing decision and waited a week to see which one held.”
• “Stop answering every question at all-hands yourself. When the head of support answers the support question, people learn who to go to.”

Continue

• “Continue publishing the quarterly numbers, including the bad ones. It’s the main reason people trust the plan.”
• “Continue saying so when a call was wrong, as you did with the office move, because it makes it safer for everyone else to do the same.”

Start, stop, continue examples for a team retro

In a retrospective the subject is the process, so each item describes something we do as a team. Nobody should be able to read one and work out who it’s aimed at.

Start

• “Start writing the release checklist before release week, because the last two launches depended on one person remembering the steps.”
• “Start ending planning with a named owner for each decision. Three items from the last session are still unassigned.”

Stop

• “Stop holding the status meeting when the update fits in a message. We spent six person-hours last month reading the board aloud.”
• “Stop taking support requests in direct messages. They never reach the queue, and the same question got answered three times last week.”

Continue

• “Continue the Friday demo, because it’s the only place sales sees what shipped.”
• “Continue pairing each new joiner with a buddy for the first month. Both of this quarter’s hires shipped in their second week.”

Running it as a start, stop, continue exercise takes about half an hour. Give everyone five minutes to write items on their own before anyone speaks, group the duplicates, and then pick one item per bucket. Each of the three gets an owner and a date, and the next retro opens by checking them.

How to write a “stop” without starting a fight

“Stop” is the bucket everyone reads first and writes worst. Imagine two versions of the same point. The first says “stop being so negative in meetings.” The second says “stop listing the risks after the decision is made, and raise them while we’re still choosing, when they can change the outcome.”

The first is a verdict on a personality, and the person will spend the week defending themselves. The second is a change of timing they can make on Tuesday.

Three habits get you to the second version. Name the action you saw, with the meeting or the project it happened in. Add what you’d like to see in its place, because a stop without a replacement leaves a gap the old habit fills again. And keep “always” and “never” out of it, since one counterexample is all it takes for the person to dismiss the whole line.

There’s more on why always and never backfire in feedback if that’s a habit of yours.

“Start” has its own trap. If your stop is “stop sending updates late” and your start is “start sending updates on time”, you’ve written one item twice. A real start is a new habit the person doesn’t have yet, like bringing a proposed solution with each problem.

“Continue” is the bucket that gets a quick “keep up the good work” and nothing else. That’s a waste, because people can’t protect a habit nobody has told them is valuable. A specific continue is often the line a person remembers longest.

A start, stop, continue template you can copy

This is the whole template. The third column is the one that does the work.

Bucket	What	Because (the moment or the effect)	First step
Start
Stop			What to do instead:
Continue

If you’re filling in a form or sending a message, the same thing fits in three lines:

Start: ___ because ___
Stop: ___ because ___. Instead: ___
Continue: ___ because ___

Keep it to one or two items per bucket. A form with six bullets in each column gives someone eighteen things to react to and no idea which ones matter to you.

When start, stop, continue is the wrong format

It’s a light format, and it suits light feedback: a quarterly check-in, a project wrap-up, a retro. There are three situations where I’d use something else.

The first is a serious problem. Imagine a team lead whose colleague has twice presented the lead’s work to a client as their own. Writing “stop presenting other people’s work as yours” on a quarterly form puts a serious complaint in the same list as “start sending agendas”, and the person reads it cold with no chance to respond. That needs a conversation, in private, with the facts.

The second is a team where people don’t yet feel safe. Named feedback to a manager only works when the manager has shown they can take it. Until then, run it as a team retro about process, or collect the answers anonymously.

The third is a full performance review. Start, stop, continue makes a good closing section of a review, and a thin review on its own, because it says nothing about results or goals.

It does fit well inside a 360, where the three buckets become three open-text questions next to the ratings. The 360 version has its own conventions, and start, stop, continue examples for a 360 shows how the same lines read there. It’s also how I’d set it up in Lynxify.me: three open-text questions in a feedback round, so each person’s answers from five or six colleagues arrive together.

The three words are the easy part

Anyone can fill in three columns in ten minutes. The value is in the clause after “because”, and that clause costs you the effort of remembering a specific moment. If you can’t think of one, the item probably isn’t ready to be written down yet.

So for the form due on Friday: pick one start, one stop, and one continue. Give each a reason and give the stop a replacement. That’s three sentences, and they’ll do more than a page of bullet points.

If you’d like to collect those three answers from a whole group at once, you can start free with Lynxify.me and sign in with Google or Microsoft, with no setup call. A shared document and the template above work too.

Frequently asked questions

What is start, stop, continue feedback?

Start, stop, continue is a feedback format with three buckets: something the person or team should begin doing, something they should drop, and something they should keep doing. It is also called stop, start, continue or keep, stop, start. It works as feedback about one person and as a team retrospective exercise, and in both cases each item is only useful when it names a specific behaviour and the reason it matters.

What should a leader start, stop, and continue?

It depends on what their team has seen, so the useful answer is always specific to them. Common themes for leaders are to start naming what gets dropped when a new priority arrives, stop reopening decisions after the meeting where they were made, and continue sharing results openly, including the bad ones. Write each one with the moment that prompted it, such as the quarter when two versions of a pricing decision were circulating.

What are good start, stop, continue examples for employees?

Good examples describe an action and its effect. Start: “Start flagging a blocked task the day it gets stuck, because last month I learned about the delay from the deadline.” Stop: “Stop saying yes to every request from sales, and send them to me to prioritise.” Continue: “Continue writing the handover note before you go on leave, since nobody had to message you during your last holiday.”

Is start, stop, continue a retrospective or a feedback method?

Both. In a retrospective the subject is the team and its process, so items start with “we” and describe meetings, handoffs, or release steps. As feedback, the subject is one person and items describe that person’s behaviour. The buckets are identical, and the wording changes with who the feedback is about.

How many items should you give in each category?

One or two per bucket. Six bare bullets in each column give the person eighteen things to react to and no sense of which matter. One well-explained start, one stop with a suggested replacement, and one or two continues are enough for someone to act on before the next check-in.