Read about features RetroTool has to offer and how you can use them to improve your retrospectives.
First of all: no limits to how you run a retro
Create as many columns, cards and action points as you need to fulfill the purpose of your meeting. You should also invite every participant that counts - they are the most essential ingredient to a great success of your retrospectives.
Features you need to run an online retrospective with a remote or hybrid team are totally free in RetroTool. We believe teams have the right to grow and expect they use it well.
Ready to use templates
Use our templates to jump-start your meeting:
Mad | Sad | Glad - great as a team health-check and teammates well-being.
Liked | Learned | Lacked - helps you summarize projects the team just finished.
Start | Stop | Continue - directs the team toward specific actions.
Familiar experience: like post-its on a whiteboard
In RetroTool each participant has their own Private Section in every column - it is their working space where only they can see what they wrote. It’s also up to them to decide what they will drag to the Public Section above.
To create a card you just write on the empty one in a Private Section and press Enter to save! We support Emojis in cards (you can type :rocket: or search using a ActionButton on a card). You can add another layer of meaning by using different card colors for different areas, for example: green are for process- and yellow for team-related topics.
It is extremely important to dive into the most relevant topics first, as they will yield the best result. With RetroTool you can easily surface those topics. After voting just sort the cards in each column by votes and you are good to go!
What is more thanks to the Secret voting you will achieve even better results as the team will not see how others vote until you disable the feature.
Additionally you can also limit how many votes a participant can have for the whole retro, in a single column and on a single card.
Action items are the most important product of the retrospective - they are keys to improve the teamwork, the product you are working on and the process you are using.
To create an action point you can simply open the Action points panel and type in what you want to do. We also recommend assigning a responsible teammate and selecting a due date - both help finishing the items.
We know finishing a retrospective within a meeting boundaries is challenging. To help you achieve this difficult task we’ve built a timer into the tool.
The most useful moments to use it are generating ideas, voting and creating action points. Participants mostly use all available time, so adding a limit to time-consuming parts of retrospectives helps with the time management and allows you to finish it with some tangible results.
In our paid plans we give you more freedom in shaping your retrospectives. More customization options, more tools for facilitating retros and improved privacy and security are there.
Advanced facilitation tools
Manage your meetings better with additional tools for advanced facilitation:
Use facilitator-only moderation,
Check if participants are ready to proceed without interrupting them,
Anonymous retrospectives are great in newly formed teams. For mature ones it might be much better to ask every participant for a name when they enter the meeting. Thanks to that your discussions will be much more deep, as you can directly ask a person who shared an idea what they have in mind.
Increasing engagement in retrospectives is a challenge. To help you grab participants attention and increase how fun it is for them we created an option to create cards with images:
Just paste an image in a new card (you can copy it even from a Google search!),
Or click the right ActionButton on a card and upload an image from your computer (supports GIFs as well).
Create a team to gain the biggest advantage of continuous retros: visibility and completing of action points. There’s no limit to how big a team is. RetroTool adjusts to you.
Build the team identity
Increase the bonding of the team giving it their own identity. Adjust the name and select a color for your team - they are visible in every piece they do together in RetroTool.
Using past experiences to bring a brighter future is the essence of retrospectives: gives you perspective and helps with setting up meaningful steps to improve. A list of past retrospectives is essential to move forward.
Delivering on items that you decided upon in a retrospective is the key to growing as a team. Visibility of team’s action points from a retrospective to a retrospective brings more clarity and better concentration on applying the changes that move the team forward.
