Mark Cipolla

Retrospectives, if done regularly, are a great opportunities to gently steer the ship as a team, with only small adjustments. They highlight new ideas, call out successes, and to help solve small problems and conflicts before they become larger issues.

When I was working at The Conversation, the team has has almost always had remote team members.

While attending RubyConf 2016, my colleague Keith Pitty and I noted that using a whiteboard, or other analog ways of running a retrospective, that made it difficult to fully join in the conversation. We thought that we needed a tool to have online retro boards.

So, being software engineers, we engineered some software.

In building RemoteRetro, we used it to run retrospectives on the progress of the development of it. We‘ve built the tool to scratch our itch, to solve our problem. We‘ve helped other teams also run excellent agile retrospectives, where every team member feels heard and included.

Everyone logs in, both remote and in-person team members. Or, throw it up on a tv/screen/projector, and have only remote team members join in while local members are guided by a facilitator. Or, no remote team members, and use it to like a scribe to keep a record of the sprint/iteration‘s retro items.

Up to you. Lots of ways to use it.

It‘s got a bunch of common formats, plus you can customise them. It‘s got timers, so you can guide your team to add their items, or to vote on ones important to the team.