Six weeks of work, most of it aimed at one thing: making the format you pick actually change how the retro runs.

Every format runs its own flow now

Choosing Sailboat used to change the column headings and not much else. Underneath, Sailboat, Plus/Delta, DAKI, Start/Stop/Continue and Six Thinking Hats all ran the same five stages: collect, group, vote, discuss, summary. That's no longer the case.

  • Sailboat sets the island first, so the team agrees where it's heading before talking about what's pushing and holding it back. Rocks are risks ahead rather than another category of complaint.
  • Plus/Delta is short again, the way a 15-minute format should be. Two columns, then what you'll change.
  • DAKI and Start/Stop/Continue go straight from prioritising to writing commitments, with a proper action stage instead of a sidebar attached to a discussion.
  • Six Thinking Hats runs one hat at a time, in order, which is the entire point of the format.

Two new stage types made this possible. Read-out is its own step now: once everyone has written, people present their own notes one at a time so the room hears them before anything gets grouped. Action items got promoted to a real stage as well.

Stage titles and coaching copy come from the format you picked, so a Sailboat session no longer tells you it's on "Classic Retrospective · Stage 6 of 6". New sessions get a name with some personality too: "Plotting the Course · Aug 11" instead of "Sailboat 2026-08-11".

The shared board

The board you put on the big screen (or share to the call) has been redesigned. Warmer background, a header that stays put across every stage, and a layout that scales with the screen instead of sitting at one fixed size.

The join panel is permanent now, on the right, with the session code and a QR code that stays readable while the retro runs. Below it, "In the room" shows who has joined. During collect, the board shows the categories the team is writing into instead of a running tally of note counts.

A few things it got wrong are fixed. Opening the board for a fresh session showed a blank page. Notes revealed during a read-out didn't appear until you refreshed, then disappeared when the presenter finished their turn; they accumulate and stay visible now. The board also fell back to a welcome screen while people were writing privately, which made it look like the session hadn't started.

The format pages on the site were rebuilt to match, each with its own accent colour and a detail page explaining how that session moves.

Emails

Every email was rewritten. The reminder email now tells you what's waiting: how many action items are open and how many are overdue, instead of only how long it's been since your last retro.

Three bugs went with it. Plain-text versions showed raw backticks around session codes. Dates could render month names in a different language than the sentence around them. And welcome and team-invite emails were being dropped by a background queue and silently never sent, which is the worst kind of bug to have in an invite flow.

Signing in and joining

The auth screens are a centred card again, with the logo where it belongs. Errors read like sentences now instead of showing raw codes like auth/wrong-password. The Google sign-in button shows a spinner while it's working, and guests joining by link go straight in rather than stopping at a confirmation page first.

Teams and settings

Settings work on a phone now. Navigation moves into a bottom sheet on small screens, and every section reflows properly down to 375px wide.

You can delete a team from the dashboard, member email addresses show on the members page, and the create-team modal asks for a name and description instead of three optional dropdowns nobody filled in. Deleting an action item or a session asks you to confirm first.

Fixes worth naming

  • Session export left out every grouped note, so a fully grouped retro exported as a nearly empty file.
  • Slack note capture only worked for Classic Retrospective and failed silently for every other format.
  • When a promotional upgrade expired, teams that were already paying got dropped to Free.
  • The participant count was one too low, because it didn't count the facilitator.
  • Joining a team already at its member cap left the joiner stuck with no way forward.
  • The dashboard showed admin controls for teams where you're only a member.
  • The resume prompt on the landing page offered sessions from over two weeks ago.
  • Clicking "Group with AI" twice sent two requests and the second one failed.
  • Pro+ teams were being routed to the smaller AI model.
  • First load is lighter, so the app starts faster on a slow connection.

On the privacy side, data erasure now reaches into the event store rather than only current records, exports include feedback and analytics, and participant names are no longer sent to the AI provider.

As always, if something isn't working as expected or you have feedback, reach out via the in-app feedback button. Thanks for using retrospective.fun!