Run your first retrospective

A Sprint Retro in SprintBee is one guided session that moves through seven stages: Prepare, Reflect, Organize, Prioritize, Discuss, Commit, Close. This walkthrough runs a first one from an empty Retro Room to a closed summary with owned Improvement Actions. Expect 45–60 minutes with the team.

If you would rather see the shape of it before booking anyone's time, the interactive demo plays through every stage with sample data.

Before you start#

You need a Workspace, and you need to be signed in as someone authorized for it — the owner of a Personal Workspace, or an active member of the Organization that owns it. Facilitating reaches private Signals and past Improvement Actions, so it is never granted by the join link alone.

Your teammates need nothing. They join by link or room code, pick a display name, and start writing.

Retros are available on every plan, Free included. A few facilitator aids — Topic suggestions, connected Signals, and AI summaries — need a paid plan (Pro, Pro Plus, or Pro Ultra).

Open the Retro Room#

1. From the dashboard, choose your Workspace and open Retro Room. If the room has not been created yet, use Set up Retro Room first.
2. Select Prepare next Retro.
3. Copy the join link, or share the Retro Room code printed beside it.

The Retro Room is permanent. The same link works for every Retro your team ever runs, so it is safe to pin in a channel or a calendar invite. Someone who opens it between Retros sees that none is open yet and can return to the same link later.

Prepare the session#

Prepare reads as a short brief rather than a settings form. Work down it.

1. Set the Retro Period — the span of work this Retro looks back on. If a Jira sprint or Linear cycle is running, SprintBee offers it and asks you to confirm. Signals and prior Improvement Actions are drawn from this period, so it is worth getting right.
2. Read Context for this Retro: Improvement Actions awaiting review from last time, and any Signals. A Signal is a private observation you may choose to include; included Signals stay private until Discuss, then appear to everyone. Nothing you read here is visible to participants.
3. Check the three lines under How this Retro runs. Each already has a working default:
   • Reflection template — Balanced reflection, Start, stop, continue, Lean 4Ls, or Custom prompts you write for this session.
   • Privacy — Anonymous Reflections and Private until reveal are both on by default.
   • Voting and timing — votes per participant (1 to 5, default 3), and whether reflection opens before the meeting.

For a first Retro, change nothing except the Period and the template. Anonymous and private are the settings that make a new team honest.

If you turn on Open before the meeting, set a Reflection deadline that lands before the session starts and share the link now. Otherwise, start live Reflection when everyone has joined.

Reflect#

Participants write Reflections against each prompt. With Private until reveal on, each person sees only their own; you see how many people have contributed in Team progress, never what they wrote. Authors can edit or delete their own cards.

Give this five to ten quiet minutes. Then select Reveal Reflections.

Organize and prioritize#

Drag Reflections into Topics, or use each card's Move menu if you are on a keyboard or a touch screen. Give every Topic a short, plain title — "Review bottlenecks", not "Process". A single Reflection can stay a Topic on its own.

On a paid plan, Suggest a Topic offers a grouping only you can see. Nothing changes until you accept it, and you can rename it first.

When the board looks right, select Open voting. That locks Reflections into their Topics, so later title edits never quietly move anyone's card.

Everyone now votes for up to the limit you set and can change their mind until you close voting. Individual choices are never shown — not to participants, not to you, not even in a named session. When the room has finished, select Close voting and then View results.

Discuss and commit#

Topics arrive in vote order, but you drive. For each one:

1. Start the Topic timer. You can pause it, reset it, or add a minute; it announces time being up and never advances anything by itself.
2. Capture one shared discussion note — the decision, not a transcript.
3. Draft any Improvement Action while the context is fresh.
4. Select Finish Topic and continue, or Park Topic to skip it. Parked Topics still appear in the summary and come back as a Signal next time.

Then Continue to Commit, which is the cross-Topic review. Refine drafts, merge duplicates, delete the ones nobody meant. A Topic with no Action is a perfectly good outcome.

Every Action needs a statement and an owner label before you can continue. The label is free text — a person, a pair, a role, or a team — so an anonymous participant can still volunteer. A success cue ("we'll know it helped when…") is optional and worth writing.

Close and follow through#

On the Close screen, choose where each Action lives. Staying in SprintBee is the default and needs no setup. If Jira or Linear is connected in Workspace settings → Integrations & notifications, you can create a linked issue instead; a connected Slack or Microsoft Teams channel can receive the participant summary, and the exact destination is shown before you send it.

Select Close Retro. The summary is now final: Topics, vote totals, notes, and committed Actions. Download or copy it as Markdown from the confirmation screen.

Closed Retros live on the Retro Room page, and their Actions resurface the next time you prepare one — that is where the team records whether each change actually helped. Reading that history always requires a signed-in account authorized for the Workspace, however long a browser has held a participant session.