How a retrospective works

A SprintBee Retro is a facilitated ceremony, not a shared whiteboard. The team writes Notes privately, groups them into Topics, votes on which Topics deserve the meeting's time, discusses those, and leaves with a small number of owned Improvement Actions that come back for review next time.

This page is the shape of that loop. If you would rather be walked through one end to end, start with Run your first retrospective.

Where a Retro happens#

A Workspace starts with a Planning Room. The first time someone sets up a Retro, the Workspace also gets a Retro Room, and that room is then permanent: it keeps one join link across every Retro your team ever runs, and it holds the Workspace's Retro history. Open it when nothing is running and it says so — "No Retro is open yet" — and the same link works again once you prepare the next one.

One Retro is active in the room at a time. Facilitating requires a signed-in user authorized for the Workspace; participants join by link with no account.

The stages#

Prepare, Reflect, Organize, Prioritize, Discuss, Commit, Close. That is the backbone, and it is a rail you can move along rather than a wizard that traps you — you can step back into a finished stage to re-read it.

Stage	What the team is doing
Prepare	The facilitator picks the prompts, the identity and visibility modes, the vote allowance, the Retro Period and the timers
Review	Recording an Outcome Review on each Improvement Action carried over from last time
Reflect	Everyone writes Notes against the prompts, in the meeting or during a Note Window beforehand
Organize	Notes are revealed and grouped into named Topics
Prioritize	Each person spends a small vote allowance — three by default — on the Topics worth the meeting's time
Discuss	Working the Topic queue, capturing Takeaways and Action drafts
Commit	Reviewing the drafts across every Topic and promoting the survivors into owned Improvement Actions
Close	Freezing the factual summary and, on a paid plan, handing it off to Jira, Linear, Slack or Teams

The rail is not always the same length. Review appears ahead of Reflect only when the previous Retro left Improvement Actions to carry forward, so the team starts by checking in on what it already promised. Participants never see Prepare at all; it is the facilitator's setup screen.

Milestones that open one way#

Four moves cannot be undone, and each one closes something behind it.

Move	What it settles
Reveal Notes	Writing and editing Notes end for good
Open voting	Topic membership locks, so a later retitle cannot change what people voted on
Close voting	Results become visible to everyone
Close the Retro	The summary, Takeaways, and committed Actions freeze

What people can and cannot see#

Notes are anonymous by default, and Named identity is a choice you make in Prepare. Visibility is a separate choice: Private until reveal by default, or visible live.

In Private mode, participants see their own Notes plus a count, per prompt, of how many teammates have written something they cannot read yet — enough to watch the board fill without exposing anyone. The facilitator sees the same counts, not the text.

Votes are never attributable. Nobody sees who voted for what, including the facilitator and including Named sessions; per-Topic counts appear only once voting closes.

Raw Note text in a closed Retro is kept for 90 days and then purged automatically. Topics, Takeaways, summaries, Improvement Actions, and Outcome Reviews stay until the Workspace is deleted. Reading past Retros always requires a signed-in, Workspace-authorized user — a browser that once held a participant session never gains history access.

If a Note needs to come out sooner, a Workspace administrator can redact it from the closed Retro summary under Note privacy. Redaction deletes the stored text and leaves [Redacted] in its place, in both the summary and the Markdown export. It takes effect immediately, it cannot be undone, and it does not rewrite the rest of the closed summary — Topics, Takeaways, Improvement Actions, and Outcome Reviews stand as the team agreed them.

From conversation to committed change#

Action drafts are captured during Discuss, while the context is fresh. Commit is the cross-Topic review, where drafts are refined, deduplicated, or dropped. A Topic that produces no Action is a valid outcome.

Promoting a draft needs an action statement and a human-readable owner label. The label can name a person, a pair, a role, or a team, and needs no SprintBee account, so an anonymous participant can still volunteer. A success cue — "we'll know it helped when…" — is optional.

An Improvement Action then moves through five states: planned, in progress, completed, awaiting Outcome Review, and closed. The step that matters is completed to awaiting Outcome Review: finishing the work does not prove the change helped. Outcome Review is one team verdict — Helped, No clear effect, Did not help, or Keep observing — and reviewed Actions resurface when you prepare the next Retro. That is how the loop closes.

What each plan includes#

The whole ceremony is on the Free plan: the built-in templates and writing your own prompts, anonymous Notes, secret Topic voting, Takeaways, Improvement Actions, Outcome Reviews, and the structured closing summary.

The paid Pro plan — priced per Workspace, so it covers exactly as many Workspaces as you subscribe for — adds analysis and handoff: AI-suggested Note groupings, AI-assisted narrative summaries, cross-session and delivery Signals, creating linked Jira or Linear issues from Actions at Close, and sending the summary to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Those capabilities follow the plan of whoever owns the Workspace — the Organization that owns it, or, for a Personal Workspace, the person who owns it. See Plans and billing for the full comparison.