With Easter just around the corner we thought it would be an egg-cellent idea to create some new themed templates. Gather your team and get cracking with our new Easter Retrospective and the Easter Egg Dash Icebreaker. Also in this release; new options for sorting and arranging sticky notes and email notifications for assigned Actions and Mentions.

New Templates:

Easter Retrospective 🐇

This Easter-themed retrospective helps a team reflect on recent work, burrow into topics that need deeper exploration, as well as decide actionable steps for improvement.

• Collected Eggs: What went well?
• Broken Eggs: What didn't go so well?
• Rabbit Holes: Any issues or ideas you would like to raise for deeper discussion?
• Bunny Hops: What small improvements can we make to help us reach our goals?

(Bonus - This template also includes the Egg Dash Icebreaker!)

Try the Easter Retro Template

Easter Egg Dash Icebreaker 🎉

Race against your team to claim as many stickies as you can. Then once all stickies are claimed, check under each sticky for an easter egg. Who will find the most eggs?

This will get everyone energized and ready for your meeting, so all you have to do is decide the winner's prize! (Steve suggested an afternoon off, but that seems a bit eggs-tra).

Here's our team competing to find the most eggs (some took it more seriously than others):

(Tip - there are two versions of this one, select the 'Large' version from Template Library if you are more than 10 people).

Try the Egg Dash Icebreaker Template

New Features:

Arrange and sort sticky notes (Beta)

For the teams who love a tidy board or as a way to quickly organise sticky notes for quick prioritization.

• Sort by: Votes, Person or Alphabetical
• Arrange in customizable columns and rows.

Note - this feature is in Beta - we are releasing this early as we find it useful, so we hope you will. Remember that you can undo (Ctrl + Z) any action.

Email notifications

Never miss another Action or Mention from your team. You now get an email notification when assigned an action or if you're mentioned in a board. Notification emails are sent in three ways:

• When the Action or Mention is created
• Monday morning (3am UTC) - A weekly digest of your upcoming Actions
• Daily Reminder - Your actions due today

All notifications can be turned off or on from your account preferences, under the Notifications menu.

Catch you in the next update.

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

In this release we've updated the dashboard to improve navigation, made it easier to jump back in to your recent boards, and for those who like a branded experience in their software, added the ability to upload your company logo. 

You will also find a new voting gadget to help with decision making and we've made some small but fun updates to what you can do with sticky-notes. 

Please Note: If you don't see these updates in your dashboard yet, this is because your team needs to be transitioned to the new version, which is in progress. Get in touch if you want to jump up the queue.

Recent Boards

A quick way to jump back in to your most recent board session. This view shows boards across all your teams, ordered by 'Last visited'.

Voting Gadget

Drag and drop a voting gadget on to any board. Use our pre-sets or customize to suit your needs. Your mouse is hidden to others - so only you can see your selection and votes are anonymous until the reveal button is clicked.

Sticky-note fill

Add images, emotes, team tokens or gifs to your sticky-notes, because why not. This feature only works on empty sticky-notes.

Activity log

For Enterprise customers only. Admins can now see a fully detailed activity log for all teams and boards in the Admin panel.

Updates and Improvements

• Organization settings have been moved to the top of the left side menu
• Open your Org Settings to add your company logo
• We've added a 'Recent Boards' view to the dashboard. Selecting this will show the boards you've been working in across all your teams.
• The team member list has been moved to the Boards content area and will only show those members who are currently. It will also show if they are in a board.
• Default board sort order has been set to show 'Last Updated' first. You can change the sort order using the dropdown option in the top right.
• Changes to the Teams and Boards views in the Admin backend.

Jira issue import

• Added a story point field to the issue picker in Jira import.
• Changed the sprint filter in Jira issue import from picker to search. This helps teams with many sprints and improves performance.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue in the Fibonacci Estimation template where an estimate choice would sometimes be displayed as the incorrect person.
• Fixed long decimals showing in the results of the number Poll.

Catch you in the next update.

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

In this release we’re introducing Actions and Mentions, two great ways to keep the discussion and momentum going once the meeting ends.

Please Note: If you don't see these updates in your dashboard yet, this is because your team needs to be transitioned to the new version, which is in progress. Get in touch if you want to jump up the queue.

Want the TLDR? 

Watch our demo video to learn more about our latest features, Actions & Mentions. For everything else, keep reading. We packed quite a bit in to this release.

Actions

Actions can also be created from the Action Items view in your team dashboard.

Read the full guide here

Action Items Dashboard

Manage your actions directly from your team dashboard. A great way to get a summary update before your next meeting. Need to set an action not directly related to a board? You can add actions from here too.

Need to edit an action without going into the board? No problem, actions have two way sync with the sticky note you originally created them on.

Read the full guide here

Import Action Items

Insert your team actions to your next meeting board in seconds, removing any clumsy copy/pasting.

Mentions

Type "@" in a sticky to mention a team member and notify them.

Communicate across boards with your team, draw attention to content you want to collaborate further on and leave feedback that will get noticed. 

Great for when you need to share an idea or keep your team informed.

Read the full guide here

Updates & Improvements

• Team Tokens: All team members will now be available in the token drawer, even if they haven’t yet joined the board.

• Rich text editor for text blocks. Headers, lists, bold, italics.

• Admins can search and sort members in the ‘people’ screen for easier member management.

Bug fixes

• The dateline in the timeline frame is now showing the correct day
• Scroll function on Jira import function now working correctly
• Jira issues imported to the board are now aligning correctly (no overlap)
• Connector arrows render properly in Safari browser

Have an awesome day 💪

Catch you in the next update.

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

Try the new Thanksgiving retrospective template - a celebration of gratitude!

Enjoy a 3 course meal together, no expenses spared, and reflect on your latest release, sprint, or last quarter of work. Positive vibes only please. 

Don't forget to share some pie with your team mates. 🎉 

We hope you enjoy our latest themed template and for all of those who celebrate, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Catch you in the next update.

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

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