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Closing a retro

Closing freezes the board and turns the retro into a record. Nothing is deleted and nothing is archived — everything stays readable, just not editable.

  1. Select Finish & summarize in the dock — or End retro, which is always available there regardless of phase.
  2. Check the confirmation. It shows the session’s tallies (cards, votes, comments, people) and states that the board becomes read-only for everyone.
  3. Select End retro.

Every open client freezes at once. Participants get a read-only banner on the board with a View summary action; nobody sees an add-card box, a vote control, or a comment composer again.

On a guided board, the dock’s primary action becomes Finish & summarize only once no un-discussed card remains in the Review list. On a Live board it reads End retro throughout.

A closed retro’s default destination is its Summary — opening it from the Retros list, or from a board link, lands you there.

PanelWhat it shows
HeaderTitle, format, close date, run duration, facilitator, and who was there
StatsCards added, votes cast, comments, participants, and team temperature out of 5
Top votedEvery card ranked by dot votes, with its column, author, and comment count
Where the energy wentA bar per column, scaled against the busiest one
Across retrosWhich themes are repeating and growing, run over run — a paid capability
Keep it movingReopen, frozen board, CSV export, run it again

Team temperature shows an em dash rather than a zero when nobody answered. See Moods and temperature checks.

Export cards & votes (CSV) downloads one row per card — its column, its text, its author, its vote count, and its comment count — ordered by column and then by the card’s position on the board.

On an anonymous board the author column reads Anonymous; no participant identifier is ever written to the file.

View the frozen board opens the board itself, laid out as it was, with every control gone. Useful when the summary’s ranking isn’t the shape you need — for reading a single column in full, for instance.

Run it again next sprint takes you to the create flow with this retro’s format already chosen, so you only have to name the new board.

Boards migrated from the older ScatterSpoke may have no format on record. Those skip straight to the templates gallery for you to pick one.

Only workspace admins can reopen a closed retro. For everyone else, no reopen control renders anywhere — not on the summary and not on the frozen board’s banner.

An admin selects Reopen retro from the summary’s Keep it moving panel, or from the banner on the frozen board. The retro goes live again for everyone with the phase, cards, votes, and comments it had, and the board becomes the default destination again.

Reopen when the session was ended by accident or genuinely wasn’t finished. For a follow-up conversation, Run it again is the better tool — a reopened retro overwrites its own record, and you lose the closed reading of what the team said at the time.

A closed retro carries a Talk to this retro action that opens Ask grounded on that board — for comparing it against past runs, or drafting the follow-up.

On a paid plan, the summary’s Probe deeper row also offers to draft an Agent Survey that interviews the team about the top-voted card, asynchronously. The draft lands under Surveys for you to review; nothing is sent on your behalf.