Year in review template

Capture wins, lessons, and goals to align your team for next year.

Love it or dread it, the annual review isn’t going anywhere. The real challenge? Walking into a year-end team review with scattered notes, half-remembered milestones, and fuzzy priorities.

Mural’s year in review template gives you a structured, visual way to capture your year-end reflection and move seamlessly into planning. On one side, you’ll reflect on the past year’s highlights, challenges, lessons, relationships, and patterns in your energy. On the other, you’ll set a clear vision for the year ahead, including your guiding direction, most important focus areas, anticipated obstacles, growth opportunities, and collaboration priorities.

For Sales teams, this means capturing key deal wins and losses alongside pipeline trends, then setting targets to shorten the sales cycle and improve conversion. For R&D teams, you can document product milestones, technical challenges, and innovation highlights, and align next-year priorities around speed-to-iteration, reliability, and emerging opportunities.

What is a year in review template?

A year in review template helps you map out the past year’s milestones, lessons, challenges, relationships, and energy patterns to understand what worked and where you want to improve.

It’s more than a year-end retrospective exercise. You’ll leave with a narrative of the year and a practical plan to reflect and set goals, feed into yearly goal planning, and support yearly team planning moving forward.

Tip: Pair it with our End-of-year retrospective template if you want deeper end-of-year reflection questions for your workshop.

The year in review template helps you:

• Run structured year end team reviews that use the same visual flow (reflection, then vision) so conversations feel fair and consistent

• Make annual review conversations concrete. Replace vague recollections with specific events, metrics, and examples.

• Reflect and set goals in one sitting, and skip the gap between review and year end planning

• Support year end alignment by uncovering priorities across individuals and teams

• Create a year-long record you can use for performance summaries, promotions, and planning next year

How to use the year in review template

Step 1: Share the template and set intent

Duplicate your mural for the current year (e.g., “[Year] Reflection & [Year] Vision”) and clarify the goal is an honest record of achievements, challenges, and goals, not a performance trial.

Step 2: Complete the reflection side

Review the year’s highs and lows, lessons learned, meaningful relationships, and what gave or drained your energy.

Step 3: Review together

Walk through highlights and trends collaboratively. Use end-of-year reflection questions like: “What surprised us most?” or “Where did we consistently get stuck?”

Step 4: Shift to the vision side

Define your guiding direction, focus areas, anticipated obstacles, key relationships to build, and skills or capabilities you want to grow using a yearly goal setting framework.

Step 5: Close and revisit

Agree on your top goals and check in on them quarterly to maintain year end alignment and momentum.

When to use the year in review template (with examples)

• Annual performance reviews; Individual templates guide one-on-one conversations

• Year end team review sessions: Collaborate on shared wins, challenges, and lessons

• Leadership alignment for next year: Combine perspectives to set unified cultural, market, and technical priorities

• Professional development coaching: Consider your year alongside a coach, peer mentor or through self-reflection

Tips for running a year end team review

• Add a timeboxed agenda to stay on track

• Start with highlights for a positive tone

• Push for specificity in every category

• Balance individual and team reflections

• Limit goals so your focus is sharp

• Capture growth priorities alongside achievements

Related templates

• Retrospective template — Agile-style sprint or project reflections

• One year roadmap template — Align priorities for the next 12 months

• Objectives & key results template — Set individual and team OKRs

• Reflect on a recent project template — Analyze lessons learned after project completion

• Personal check-in radar template — Set individual goals for the year