Retro Board
Went well, to improve, action items.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Your share link and your manage link appear here once the retro is made.
A retrospective without the sticky notes, the wall, or the person holding the pen
Every retro has the same failure mode. One person stands at the whiteboard writing down what other people say, which means the retro is a record of what was said out loud in front of everybody, in the order people were brave enough to say it. The quiet ones write nothing. The thing that went wrong three weeks ago and has been quietly costing an afternoon a week never comes up, because bringing it up is a whole act of courage and mentioning it into a text box is not.
So this one is three columns and a link. Everybody types at the same time, into the same page, and the notes appear as they are written. Then everybody upvotes what they think is worth the meeting’s time, and each column sorts itself so the things people actually want to talk about are at the top before you start talking.
How to run one
- Name it after the sprint, the week or the project. “Sprint 14 retro” is enough, and it stops somebody writing about the wrong fortnight.
- Press Create retro. Two links come back.
- Share the first — six characters, so it can be read aloud on a call or written on a whiteboard.
- Keep the second. It is the manage link, and it is the only way to take a note down or close the board.
- Give everyone five quiet minutes to write, in all three columns, with nobody talking. This is the part that makes the difference.
- Then five minutes to read and upvote. Nobody explains their note yet.
- Work down each column from the top. Stop when the time is up rather than when the notes run out — what nobody upvoted is what nobody minded.
Three things worth knowing before you start
Upvotes are one per person per note, and reversible. Pressing the button a second time takes your upvote back, so nobody is stuck with a vote they regret and nobody can stack ten of them on their own note. The count beside each one is printed as a number, not just implied by the order, so the board survives a greyscale screenshot and a photograph of the meeting-room screen.
Notes are never merged, moved or grouped. There is nothing to drag here. Two people writing the same thing stay as two notes, and the fix for that is the upvoting rather than a tidy-up: people converge on the one that says it best. Notes also never change column, so a thing written under “To improve” that turns into a decision needs writing again under “Action items”, which is a sentence somebody should say out loud anyway.
Anyone with the link can write anything, under whatever name they choose.The name box is optional and blank goes up as Anonymous, which is the point on a board whose middle column is for what went badly. There is a word filter, and it is a first line rather than a wall. Every note carries a Report link that takes that one note off the air on a single click, the page carries one that takes the whole board down, and your manage link is what puts either back.
Good uses
- A sprint retro, remote or in a room, where the board goes on the shared screen.
- A project post-mortem, where the people with the most to say are often the most junior.
- The end of a quarter, an event or a launch — anything with a before and an after.
- A team that has drifted into a retro where three people talk and five nod.
When to use something else
A retro collects and ranks what a team writes; it does not choose between options somebody has already written down, and that is Live Poll. For questions an audience pushes to the top of one list, that is Live Q&A. For one word each with repeats making a word bigger, that is Idea Cloud. And if what you want is thanks rather than fixes, Kudos Wall is the right shape and this one is not.
Questions people ask
- Does anyone need an account?
- No. You make the board, you send the link, and people write on it. Nobody has to sign up, nobody has to give an email address, and nobody installs anything. The organiser can sign in if they want to keep it past ninety days and find it again without the link — that is the only thing an account does here, it is optional, and it changes nothing for anybody else. The link works in whatever browser is already open, which on a remote retro is the one the call is in.
- Can I change the three columns?
- No. Went well, To improve and Action items are fixed, and that is the whole shape of the tool rather than a setting nobody got round to. Three columns everybody already understands means nobody spends the first five minutes of the retro arguing about the format. If your team runs a different format — Start/Stop/Continue, Mad/Sad/Glad — the three here map onto it closely enough that the notes land in the right place anyway.
- Can I merge two notes that say the same thing?
- No, and it is worth knowing before you start. There is no grouping, no merging and nothing to drag: two people writing the same thing stay as two notes with two counts. In practice that reads fine — two notes near the top of a column saying roughly the same thing is the room telling you something, and you read them out together. What it means is that the counts are per note, so a topic split across three notes has three smaller numbers rather than one big one. Upvoting is what fixes that: people upvote the one that says it best.
- How many notes and upvotes does one person get?
- As many notes as they have, in any column, and one upvote per note — press it again to take it back. You can upvote your own note, which is fair enough: you thought it was worth writing. The only ceiling is the site's rate limit, sixty entries an hour from one connection, which is there to stop a script and not a person.
- Can I get rid of a note I do not want up there?
- Yes. Your manage link has a Remove button on every note, which takes it off the board for everybody and takes its words out of the page's data. You can put it back from that page until you leave it; after that it stays off. Anyone on the board can also report a single note, which hides it the same way, and reporting the whole retro takes the page down until you restore it.
- What happens to the board afterwards?
- It stays readable until ninety days after the last note or upvote, then the page stops working and everything on it is deleted within a day. There is no archive and no way to get it back, so copy the action items somewhere that outlives the meeting — a ticket, a doc, anywhere but here.