Retrospectives give your team a structured way to reflect on what went well and what could be improved. Manager Toolkit makes it easy to set one up and run it live with your team. Here is how to get started.
Setting Up the Retrospective
Navigate to Retrospectives from the sidebar and click New Retrospective.
Give the retro a name, for example "Sprint 12 Retrospective" or "Q1 Team Review".
Choose a template. If this is your first time, Start / Stop / Continue is a simple and effective choice. See Retrospective Templates for more options.
Select the team this retrospective is for, set a session date, and pick a theme colour.
Save the retrospective. It lands in the Build top-level status, where you can tidy up columns and tweak the retro options (votes per participant, comments, reactions, show authors, auto-timer).
Sharing With Participants
Switch the top-level status to In Progress. The In Progress tab on the manage page surfaces the Sharing Link panel.
Copy the share link and send it to your team via email, Slack, or however you normally communicate.
Participants open the link in their browser. They do not need a Manager Toolkit account - the link gives them access to the session. First-time participants see a short tutorial that captures their preferred display name.
Running the Session
While the retro is In Progress, participants see three sub-statuses on the public retro page that the facilitator advances using the pills in the header:
- Draft - participants add notes to each column. Display names appear on notes unless you turned Show authors off. Pro users get AI suggestions in the add-note modal.
- Vote - once notes are in, participants spend their votes (3 by default) on the notes that matter most.
- Discuss - the facilitator picks the highest-voted notes one at a time and the team talks them through. Per-note comments, emoji reactions, and Actions live here, along with a Done signal per phase.
The manage page only shows three top-level tabs: Build, In Progress, and Completed. The sub-status pills (Draft / Vote / Discuss) live on the public retro page.
Extracting Actions
During Discuss, anyone in the room can add Actions against the note being discussed, with an optional assignee from the team. Pro users get an AI assistant that can suggest an Action for the current note - keep or discard it as you see fit.
When the discussion is done, switch the retro to Completed. AI theme tags on notes auto-link to your Key Themes so patterns surface over time.
Keep your first retro short - 30 to 45 minutes is enough. Timebox each phase with the retro timer so the discussion stays focused. You can always run longer retrospectives once your team is comfortable with the format.
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