Run your first retrospective

Guiding a session for the first time is mostly a question of nerve: you know what a retrospective is, but not what to do in the room while eight people look at you. This guide walks through one session from beginning to end — a team of four to eight people, about an hour — and says out loud what you can say at each step.

Everything here is the product doing the work. You choose a format, the board arrives with the question and a run sheet, and your job is the room.

What you’ll learn

What to prepare before anyone arrives.
How to open the session and keep people writing instead of talking.
When to reveal the notes, and why not sooner.
How to turn a wall of notes into decisions people remember.

Before the session

Create the board. On your boards page, choose Start a workshop and pick the Retro format. The board arrives with three columns — Went well, To improve, Actions — and the question already filled in.

Read the question out loud to yourself. It is the one thing everyone sees, and it decides what people write. The default asks what helped and what slowed the team down this sprint; if your session is about something else, rewrite it now.

Decide about names. Under Set up the session you can select Hide author names on notes. For a team that talks openly, leave it off — knowing who wrote something makes the discussion easier. If there is tension, or if someone new is joining a group that knows each other well, turn it on and say that you did. You can switch it either way during the session, so decide once and leave it alone: names that reappear halfway through a retrospective change what people write next.

Check the voting bar. The Retro format switches dot-voting on for you, so the bar sits above the notes with five votes preselected. If you turned an existing board into a workshop instead of creating a new one, its own settings stay as they are: open Board settings and select Dot-voting on this board.

Create the link. Under Get people in, choose how long the link stays valid and select Create workshop link. Share it in the calendar invitation, or show the QR code on screen when people arrive. Nobody needs an account.

Look at the run sheet. Under Run the session you will find the suggested timing. Change it to match the time you actually have — a session you rush through is worse than a shorter one you finish. It is your note; participants never see it.

Open the room

Select Open the waiting room. People who follow the link now pick a nickname and wait; they cannot see the board yet, so you can still move things around.

When everyone is in, select Start the workshop and say what you are doing:

“You can see the board now. The question is at the top. We are going to write on our own first — I will keep everything hidden for ten minutes, so nobody has to worry about repeating someone else.”

Collect in silence

Select Start silent brainstorm. Everyone now sees only their own notes, including the people who write fastest.

Set a timer for ten minutes from the bar at the top. The clock is the same for everyone, which does more work than it sounds: people stop asking how long they still have.

The timer does not close the board. At zero it stops at 0:00 and everyone can keep writing; you decide when the room is done, and Close input is the button that actually stops it. That is a feature in the room: somebody who is halfway through a sentence gets to finish it.

This is the step first-time facilitators skip, and the one that decides the quality of the session. Without it the first three notes set the agenda and the quieter half of the room writes variations on them.

While people write, add a note yourself. A facilitator who only watches makes the room self-conscious.

Reveal and read

When the room is done writing — you decide that, not the clock — select Close input, then Reveal all notes, and read them aloud, one by one, without discussing them yet:

“I am going to read everything first. If something is not clear, say so — we will discuss after.”

Reading everything has a purpose beyond clarity: it says that every note counts, including the one somebody almost did not write.

Drag notes that say the same thing next to each other while you read. If people start discussing, let it run for a moment and then bring them back — the discussion is coming, and this is not it.

Decide what to talk about

Nobody has time to discuss thirty notes. Start a voting round from the bar above the notes and say how it works:

“Everyone has five dots. Spend them on what you want to talk about. You can place no more than one dot on each note.”

Nobody sees any votes while the round is open, not even you. Close the round when everyone is done and the results become visible at once. That is the moment the session turns from collecting into deciding.

Discuss, and write down what you agree

Work through the top-voted notes. For each one, the useful question is not “what do we think about this” but “what do we do about this”.

Open a note’s menu and use Spotlight to put the note everyone is talking about on every screen. It sounds small; it stops the four conversations that start when eight people are looking at thirty notes.

When the group agrees on something, label the note from that same menu: Decision or Action item. A label goes on somebody else’s note without changing their words. If an action needs an owner and a date, write a new note yourself in the Actions column — a note is yours to edit, so an action with a name and a date belongs on a note you wrote.

Use Open question for what you could not settle and Parking lot for what was interesting but not for today. Both are better than a discussion that quietly runs out.

Marking notes as you go is what separates a session people remember from a session people liked. Ten minutes before the end, stop and read the decisions aloud.

Select Finish the workshop. The board freezes: nobody adds, edits, moves or votes any more, including you. Hidden notes are revealed, an open voting round is closed, and everyone who has the link can open View results.

The results page brings together the question, the date, the participant count, the top-voted notes, your decisions, action items, open questions and the parking lot. From there you can print or save it as a PDF, copy it as Markdown for a ticket or a wiki, or download it as a CSV to work with in a spreadsheet.

Send the link in the same channel you used for the invitation, the same day. A result that arrives two days later is a document; a result that arrives while people still remember the discussion is a reminder.

Do it again next sprint

Open Board settings and select Duplicate this board. You get a clean copy with the same columns, question, settings and run sheet, and none of the notes, participants or votes. Change the name to the next sprint and you are prepared.

Good to know

If the room falls silent early, do not fill it. Ten minutes of writing feels long from the front and short from a chair.
A session that ends without a single decision is not a failed session, but check whether the question was too broad.
You can preview what the room sees at any time — the link sits under Run the session.
Someone who refreshes or briefly loses their connection comes back as the same participant. Whoever clears their browser data returns as a new one; their earlier notes stay on the board under the name they used at the time.
Workshop mode is available with Club Facilitator and Chosen Few. Everyone you invite takes part for free.