Well hello there! We're back with another "snappy" update. There's a themed template for Halloween, quicker ways to group stickies, object snapping for board builders, and a sneak preview of the upcoming Mentions and Actions features!

Halloween Retrospective 👻

We've got a Halloween-themed treat for you - go check out the new Trick or Treat retrospective template!

Brand New Features

The Topic Tool gets a Powerup!

Hopefully you already use the Topic tool to group similar stickies and visualise themes... right? Well, now you can also:

• auto-create a topic from a bunch of selected stickies
• quick-set the colour of all stickies to the topic colour
• set the topic label as a Tag on the stickies (we have big plans for Tags in the works)
• tidy up the stickies grouped in the topic

Snapping!

Object snapping and guidelines are now available in Design mode when you drag or move layout objects around. Perfect for obsessive board builders.

If for some reason you don't like it, you can disable Snapping from the Grid Settings in the bottom left.

Coming Soon...

Mentions (Coming Soon)

Tag a colleague in a sticky or comment and they will be notified!

Actions (Coming Soon)

Create actions from your stickies and track them in your team space, or send them to your work tools.

Tip - you can already send actions from Metro Retro to your Jira project - and vice versa - with our Jira integration!

That's all for now, my beauties and beasts. Until next time!

Steve, Jamie, Steve, and Kit - the Metro Retro team.

Here's the latest from Metro Retro in this update:

New Templates!

From product discovery to project planning, and of course, activities for more engaging retros:

Draw Our Sprint One big shared easel for the team to creatively share how their sprint went!	What Could Kill Our Project? Starting a new project and want the team to evaluate risks? Use Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants to produce an action plan together.	Impact Mapping Visually connect your product features to business goals with an Impact Map.
Product Discovery Use the Opportunity Solution Tree to visualize product discovery findings.	Experiment Planner Planning a product experiment? The Experiment Planner helps you plan and run effective tests!	Project Timeline Plan your project roadmap on the Timeline Frame. Pick your dates, add swimlanes and arrange your project! (We’ll all agree not to mention the “Gantt” word here).

Jira integration updates

Updates to the new Jira integration from your feedback:

• There is now an editable Epic field on Jira cards
• You can choose the custom fields that are displayed on your Jira cards

Jira integration is available to all teams on a paid plan!

Bugfixes

• Fixed the bug when Account members were treated as an external guests when they tried to join a board that was opened up to everyone in the Account.
• Fixed the bug that broke bulk selection of stickies.
  • Reminder: You can double-click on a sticky with the Shift key held down to bulk select all stickies in the same container. Or triple click with Shift key held down to select all visible stickies, regardless of the container.
• Fixed not being able to search for a Jira item by the issue key (note - this is case sensitive).

Hello there! This update combines the playful with the practical. A music player, connector arrows, and Jira integration are the highlights. Dive in to discover all the latest features!

Gadgets

First up, we bring you five fun gadgets to make your sessions even more interactive. Consisting of a Jukebox, Counter, Spinner, Timer, and a Buzzer, that can all be placed on the board:

The gadgets are simple to use, but see the Gadgets Help for full details. A quick summary:

Jukebox

Choose from 49 handpicked tracks across 7 genres to set the scene for your next workshop. Your team might argue over the song choice, but trust us - try the Space Jazz collection. 

Tip - volume control

Each person now has their own volume control, including mute, in the bottom-left corner. It controls all sound effects and music played on the board:

Counter

The counter is for… counting. Use it for tracking score in team games or to track how many times “it depends” is said in your estimation session.

Spinner

Take the hassle out of making a decision and let the spinner decide!  Simply add your options and spin the wheel. You could use it to choose who talks next, or perhaps which feature to release - just don’t tell your stakeholders.

Timer

Add a timer to your board as a draggable object. Position it, set the time, and press play.

Buzzer

Use the buzzer to play sound effects. You could use it to signal when time is up or celebrate when the team make a decision.

Connector Arrows (Beta)

We’re pretty excited about the new Connectors. Link your stickies and cards with connecting arrows to show relationships and build diagrams.

Connectors are found in the left toolbar:

You can add a label to Connectors and customize the color, width, and style:

See the Connectors help for full details. The arrows are smooth to use, but as this is the first version there may be some interesting edge cases we haven't found yet.

Jira Integration (Beta)

Connect to your Jira projects and import your backlog as cards. Or send issues to Jira directly from your sticky notes.

See the Jira Help for the full details, but here is a summary:

• Import your issues to discuss in your retrospective.
• Import your backlog to any board, to visualize and arrange it how you want.
• Plan upcoming sprints and gauge workload.
• Run estimation and planning poker sessions.
• Create Jira issues from sticky notes.
• Stamp reactions and draw on Jira cards (show how you really feel about that issue 2748...)
• Immediate 2-way sync is available as a further option for connecting to Jira. See how to setup 2-way sync with webhooks.

Functionality and Limitations

With this first version you can view and edit these Jira fields: the issue title, priority, status, assignee, sprint, story points, issue type.

This is a beta version, so not everything we want to deliver is in yet. In future updates you will be able to view and edit more fields, including the description and comments. And we want to do some cool stuff with Metro Retro's tools - we see Metro Retro becoming the "playground" for your Jira backlog.

New Planning Poker Template

There’s also a new interactive Planning Poker activity template to use with the Jira integration. It has a new interactive workflow for speeding through those estimation sessions. Contact us to get access and a quick demo.

Other Updates

Hide Other Users

This neat little setting in your Preferences will hide everyone else while they are moving around the board, making for a calmer visual experience. Useful in larger workshops!

Take Over a Meeting

If there is a Meeting running on a board and the Host is no longer present, after 10 minutes any team member on the board can add themselves as the meeting Host:

Remove Workspace Members

Workspace members can now be removed from inside the workspace:

Text Tool Improvement

And in perhaps the most boring way to end an exciting update, here’s a small change to the Text tool.  You can now drag the Text tool to create a Text box, with scaling text. The Text box behaviour can also be set with the “Toggle Auto Height” option: 

If you have any questions on anything we’ve shared in these updates, please contact us. We love a chat! 😊

Cheers,

Jamie and Steve

Hi everyone - we are back with one of our biggest-ever updates. Below is the full changelog with preview videos where appropriate.  If you have any issues or feedback please get in touch with us on Intercom or at contact at metroretro dot io.  In other news we've also recently joined TinySeed! Their accelerator program will help us grow so we can keep improving Metro Retro.

Frames

We've added a Frame element for containing large layout areas or activities.  Frames are now under the Zones & Frames drawer which replaces the Zone icon in the toolbar.  Frames currently come in 3 flavours:

• Activity Frames - for containing meeting activities and enables hosts to temporarily hide areas of the board from participants.
• Grid Frames - for creating matrix, column or row layouts.
• Timeline Frames - for creating timelines or roadmaps.  These work great with the new Roadmap Card element (see below).

Frame Layouts (beta)

Grid Frames and Timeline Frames support "Layout Modes"; a new way to automatically organize stickies and cards within frames.  Currently there are two layout modes:

• Stack Layout - organize elements in stacks either by row or column and with full alignment support.
• Bar Layout - align elements to either row, column or both.  This is most useful for using with swimlanes via the Timeline Frame.

Tags (beta)

Tags are a new method of annotating Stickies and Cards with extra structured information:

• Tags can either be just a label or a label & value.
• Tags can be customized with color and symbol.
• Tags can be added by right clicking and choosing Add Tag, or...
• Tags can be quickly added by typing a #hashtag or wrapping a label/value in square brackets like this: [valueTag=50].
• Tags are currently in "beta" - we'll be expanding their use and application in 2024.

Roadmap Cards

The Roadmap Card is an element for building roadmaps and swimlanes:

• Synergizes with the Timeline Frame to capture/display dates based on the timelime.
• Customizeable with a wide variety of colours.
• Taggable for extra metadata on each card.
• Works best with a Timeline Frame set to Bar Layout oriented by row.
• Roadmap Cards are available from the Stickies & Cards drawer.

Shapes

This release includes a bunch of new shapes for creating designs:

• Added Banners.
• Added Stars.
• Added Badges.

Zones

• Zones now come in a variety of styles to make more interesting layouts.
• Zones of the same width/height placed next to each other will react with a different corner rounding and join style.

Other Improvements:

• Copy & Paste Styles now available from context menu or with SHIFT+C / SHIFT+V.
• Template Browser interface improved.
• Color Picker now has brightness slider for more color options.
• Colors now auto-preview.
• Shape types now auto-preview.
• Background grid now has a single size and fades out at > 75% zoom.
• Marker Tool UI improved.
• Arrows can be repositioned via ends.
• Ordering (send back, bring forward) behavior changed to be based on "what you see" and not overall zIndex to make ordering feel more natural.
• Overlay colours lightened to be less aggressive.

Bug Fixes:

• When creating Shapes/Frames/Zones by dragging area, elements within the drag area are now correctly contained within the new element.
• Mouse Wheel now works over toolbars and other widgets (for zooming).
• Fixed bug where mouse would get trapped clicking on the toolbar.

That's your lot!

Cheers all,
Steve & Jamie

Hey everyone,

With this mini-update, it's now easier to build multi-template boards and export your board to PDF after your session has ended.

Add Templates to a Board

You can now add templates directly to a board with the new "Object Tool". No more copy/pasting templates across boards!

How The "Object Tool" Works

• The Object Tool is active when the board is in Design Mode
• Pick a template and it will be auto-placed to the right of your board layout
• It includes all standard templates, and your team's custom templates (paid plans)
• In the future, it will be expanded to other useful objects and layouts
• Suggest or contribute templates here: Suggest a template

Export Board to PDF

You can now export your board to PDF from the board name in the top-left. You will be emailed a copy of your board once it is ready.

This is the first version of this feature, so please let us know any feedback!

New Illustrated Templates Coming Soon

Keep an eye out for a range of new templates being published soon:

• Hero's Journey Retrospective
• Kudo Cards
• Futurespectives: "What killed the project?" and "Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants".
• Improved drawing/sketching activities
• Squad Health Check
• Experiment Canvas
• Personal "Coat of Arms"
• Fun ROTI templates ("return on time invested")

That's all for now. If you have any feedback or questions, please use the live support chat in the bottom-right of your boards.

Jamie & Steve

Hi everyone,

This release brings improvements to the guest experience, as well as six beautifully-designed templates for you to get stuck into.

New Invite Options: Team Member or Guest

• Users with paid accounts now have the option to invite others as either Team Members or Guests to their team.
• Team members have full access to the team space and all functionality, whereas Guests only have access to the boards that have been shared with them.
• Guests can collaborate on your board without needing to sign up. It's perfect for working with external clients or with those stakeholders who like to swoop in and out.
• Guests get a basic guest dashboard, containing only the boards they have been invited to, keeping the rest of your team space secure.
• You can belong to multiple Accounts as either a guest or a team member. Use the switcher in the bottom left to switch between them.
• Guests can now be managed in the Admin dashboard.
• The “Account Viewer” role has been removed as a concept, and all existing Viewers have been converted to Guests, each with their own guest dashboard (see below). This makes it a lot clearer to an individual what they can and can’t do in a Metro Retro team.

A guest can only see the boards they have joined

General updates

• Improved Team Switcher: The team switcher in the bottom left now contains all teams you have been invited to, whether team member or guest.
• Updated Legacy Boards: The Legacy Boards view now contains all your personal legacy boards, no need to switch back to the old version.
• Performance improvements:  We have improved the overall performance of numerous API endpoints.
• Closed the Access to v52 with “Structured Meeting” functionality: We have decommissioned the older version with the Structured Meeting capability as it isn’t being used enough to warrant supporting it. It is on our short-term roadmap to create a better version of the Structured Meeting feature that allows you to plan a meeting agenda in detail before your meeting.

New Templates

• Scrum Values Assessment: A scrum team activity where the team rates themselves against the 5 Scrum Values, and decides how to improve their team practices.
• Elephant in the Room: “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room” — in other words, what are you not saying during our regular retrospectives? This is a challenging but rewarding retrospective activity that asks the team to raise the issues they’re avoiding. A toughie but a goodie!
• Genie in a Bottle: This retrospective gives each team member three wishes. A wish for themselves, a wish for the team, and a wish for the project!
• On the Radar: Reveal what people are thinking about a set of topics and prioritize the most important issues in the center of the radar.
• Value Proposition Canvas: Make sure your product or service actually addresses customer needs, pains and jobs to be done. Map your product offering to the target audience’s pains and gains!
• Empathy Map: Use the Empathy map during customer research to capture feedback and conversations in an easy-to-use, tangible deliverable.

Feedback

That's all for now - please let us know any feedback in the support chat, and if you're really having a great time, please consider writing us a short testimonial!

Cheers,

Jamie and Steve

Greetings all,

We're back with another round of updates for Metro Retro.  This update focuses on improving the in-board user experience for designing boards and running meetings!  The most important changes are covered in the video below:

Terminology Update

Before we begin, we would like to highlight that from this release forwards, we will be referring to meeting "facilitators" as meeting "hosts".  "Host" is a simpler term to read and write and is more broadly understood in industries that are not as familiar with Agile and facilitation.

Structured Meeting Removed

The Structured Meeting feature would have required significant updates to support the new editor mode changes in this update, and since we have plans to vastly improve the way structured meetings work, we’ve elected to temporarily remove the functionality in this build.  However, if you need to use Structured Meeting to run a meeting you already have planned, we’ve provided the ability to use the old version temporarily at: https://v53.metroretro.io. Please read the docs page before doing so: https://docs.metroretro.io/technical/using-v53-for-structured-meeting

Design Mode & Meeting Mode

The most significant change in 2.54 is the return of distinct editor modes (like Build Mode and Play Mode in Metro Retro V1).  Originally in V2, we moved away from this model as we were worried it would limit where we could go with the app in the future.  In hindsight, this was an error; it doesn't limit us and added a lot of confusion for new users.  

So, leaning back in the other direction, we've introduced Design Mode & Meeting Mode into V2 to create a distinction between board building and meeting participation activities.  Design Mode is for building board layouts and Meeting Mode is for working on board layouts with your team.

Design Mode has:

• Toolbar options optimized for designing layouts
• An improved and configurable layout grid
• A new widget at the bottom with locking and publishing options

Meeting Mode has:

• Host Menu for managing the session
• Grid hidden and locked elements frozen to prevent layout changes being made
• Meeting Mode widget at the bottom reflects collaboration functions including Private Writing and Hide Identities

Meeting Hosts can freely switch between modes during a meeting to make changes to the board layout if required.

Host Menu Rework

As part of the Design / Meeting mode changes, we’ve significantly reworked the Host Menu to improve its usability:

• Pause Meeting removed and End Meeting integrated as a button (to prevent accidentally clicking it to close the overlay)
• The Timer has been improved based on feedback
• Polls have been fully integrated (no longer a popup)
• Added some sweeet sliding animations

In-App Help

We’ve added an in-app help panel with some initial tutorial videos covering basic features and some of the gestures  This will serve as a framework for us to add help content as we roll out releases.  Expect to see more videos here soon!

Hide Identities (previously Anonymous Mode) out of Beta

Hide Identities is now out of beta and includes:

• Updated name and icon
• Integration with meeting status widget (bottom of the UI)
• Participant list removed when activated
• All participants now wear the “bag over head” hat
• Changes made to improve the way “your” stickies are tracked locally
• Important: As before, sticky ownership is stored locally and not sent to our servers while Hide Identities is active.

General Improvements:

Finally, here is a list of miscellaneous changes in this release (at least the ones we can remember):

• The Host of a Meeting can now reveal anyone's hidden sticky notes by right-clicking on a sticky note and selecting the "Force Reveal" option:
  
• Improved the readability of the Ready Check button.
• Improved behavior of moving and resizing elements at high zooms (basically you should be able to move things easier when zoomed out)
• Improved behavior of moving multiple objects (it should keep the selection now when pressing in an empty area inside the selection net)
• Fixes various issues when cloning stickies when identities hidden or private writing enabled.
• Fixed some bugs with Private Writing not always working as expected
• Oh yeah, and you can change the colour of a sticky note now.  Like, really!

New Templates:

There are four new beautifully-illustrated templates to use in your next meeting, plus a handy Weekly Status template.

P.S. Did you know you can suggest templates for us to build? If you have one to share, let us know!

Icebreakers

• Weather Check-in - how was your week, and what's your personal forecast for next week?
• Energy Levels Check-in - how are your energy levels today?

Retrospectives

• Weather Report Retrospective - what was our sprint "climate", and how did we adapt or take advantage?
• Energy Insights Retrospective - Discover what drains or recharges your team's energy!

Project Management

• Weekly Team Status - stay on the pulse of what's happening with your Projects & People.

Weather Report Check-in

We've also written a short guide on how to be a great virtual facilitator: 10 tips to help you run great virtual meetings.

Lastly (I promise), if you've got this far we'd really appreciate if you can tell us what you like and don't like about Metro Retro in this short survey. Your responses are used to help us plan the next updates!

And as always, if you have feedback or questions, you can find us:

• Via the support chat
• On email at contact@metroretro.io

Steve & Jamie

Hey everyone!

This update brings the ability to comment on your sticky notes with the new Comment Tool, as well as a couple of smaller updates and seven new templates.

Comment Tool

You can attach comments to sticky notes, task cards, and index cards. 

Comments allow you to add extra detail to your stickies while keeping your boards nice and neat.

How comments work

• The Comment Tool is in the left toolbar
• Comments can be added to sticky notes, task cards, and index cards
• Comments can be added by anyone who can edit the board
• You can edit and remove your own comments
• You can add emoji reactions to a comment
• The facilitator can turn off comments in Meeting mode
• There is also a comment option in the right-click menu
• Comments made in Anonymous Mode stay anonymous forever
• Comments can be optionally included in the data export

The rest of the updates

1. New templates - There's an assortment of new activities and exercises for your team sessions: Niko Niko Calendar, Risk-taking Retro, Team Skills Retro, Waste Snake, Kudos Tree, Mind Map, and the Meeting Agenda template.
2. See voting results - click the vote count on a sticky or group to see who voted.
3. Import Legacy Boards - if you still have boards in v1, the import process is much faster, and comments are now included.
4. New concept: checkbox on index cards - because you can never have enough to-do lists, we've added mini checkboxes on index cards. To add a checkbox, type [ ] at the beginning of a new line, and when you finish editing the index card, it magically turns into a checkable item:

Tip: how to import legacy boards

For those of you who have been around here a while - if you want to use your legacy v1 boards in your v2 dashboard, use the dropdown at the top of the "All Boards' screen:

We hope these updates help you stay organized and on top of progress. May your discussions be fruitful and your projects on time ✌️

Let us know what you think about the updates below!

Jamie and Steve

Hi Everyone,

This release focuses on enhancing the participant experience when you share your boards - making it faster and more streamlined to join a board and get into the action.

Invited participants now see simplified options - join or just view the board

In addition, the release includes a few other updates:

• Multi-account joining. You can now join boards that are in other accounts without having to leave your current team. If you join another team you can switch between them from the account name in the bottom left.
• Named guests. You can use your profile to join a board as a guest, rather than being logged out and forced to use a temporary guest profile.
• Guests can claim their account. If you join a board as a temporary guest (join without signing in), you can now signup with email and password to claim that account.
• Change to paid plan invites. For paid plans, people are no longer automatically added to the team when you share a board link. Instead, they will use a guest slot, if available. To invite new members to a paid account, you must invite them from the dashboard. Note - free plans still require everyone to join the team account to participate on a board.

Reminder - easier sharing

Lastly, a reminder that since the last release you can make a board instantly editable to anyone by setting "Can be joined by" to "anyone with the link". This disables the waiting room and entry approval process:

Change the join setting to 'anyone with the link' to disable the waiting room.

That's all for now!

Steve & Jamie

Hi Everyone, 

Version 2.52 of Metro Retro is here.  Highlights in this release are Anonymous Mode (beta) and better sharing options for guests:

• Anonymous Mode is here (in beta).  Anonymous mode lets your participants write stickies and vote without it being tracked back to them. You can use this in a variety of scenarios - such as to reveal hidden issues in your next retro, prevent bias while brainstorming, or even to play icebreaker guessing games.
  
  Turn on anonymous mode whenever you need from the meeting controls. From then on, anything written or voted on during anonymous mode stays anonymous, forever. Nothing can ever be tied back to an individual. Turn it off to go back to regular mode.
  
  This feature has been requested multiple times since the launch of Metro Retro.  It was a difficult concept to implement both technically and from a UX perspective. We are feeling good about the way it works, but have labeled it as "beta" because we would like the opportunity to for everyone to try it and feedback on how it works, just so we can be sure it's the right way to do it.

• Boards now have more sharing options.  We've added the ability for you to allow guests to "auto join" a board instead of always requiring an approval via the waiting room. In the sharing menu, choose 'Can be joined by: anyone with the link'.
• We've also removed the 24h expiry on guest access.  Once approved or joined, guests will have access until revoked directly by a team member.

• Gestures widget has moved into the toolbar.  Originally we thought it would be better for the Gestures to be away from the "mutate the board" tools, but in reality it was confusing and for a whole load of reasons just not a good idea.  So, it's now in the toolbar at the bottom.

• Shadows removed on Shapes & Zones.  Until this release all Shapes and Zones were rendered with a slight drop shadow.  Rendering the shadows is relatively expensive and contributes to lag during panning and zooming in complex layouts.  We've taken the decision to permanently remove shadows from Shapes and Zones in order to improve rendering performance of the app.  This should have very little noticable impact on your board designs, though in some cases bounds between shapes may be less visible and require tweaking.
• Disable Shadows setting added.  In addition to the changes on Shapes and Zones, you can now disable all shows on all objects (Stickies, Cards, etc) under Settings > Controls & UI > Disable Object Shadows.  If you are suffering from poor performance when panning and zooming we recommend enabling this setting.
• Festive decorations are now enabled.  A little later than we would have liked - festive decorations are now on.  As usual you can disable these by enabling Scrooge Mode under Settings > Controls & UI.  Don't forget to press the snowman's belly!

Note On Service Stability & Connection Issues:

Over the past month or so we have seen a growing active user base in V2.  This has caused strain on or system that we should have been on top of, but in a few instances we were not and it caused either notable degraded performance or short outages at peak times.  

In the past two weeks we have taken steps to mitigate these problems by upgrading hardware on our primary database, app-servers and web-gateway servers.  We also identified and have patched two bugs that were causing dropped connections to not reconnect properly, which often resulted an "unstable connection" popup while on a board.  These fixes and infrastructure upgrades should prevent further stability problems in the service.  

We will continue to monitor the situation and add capacity where required.  If you or any of your colleagues are seeing service problems, please check the status page at https://status.metroretro.io or contact us at contact@metroretro.io.

That's all for now - cheers all!

Steve & Jamie