Moods and temperature checks

A temperature check is a single question the board asks each person once: How did this sprint feel? One tap, 1 to 5, and it’s done.

It runs quietly beside the retro rather than as a step in it. Nobody has to be walked through it, and answering takes about a second.

Where it appears

A strip under the top bar, shown to anyone — Seat Holder or guest — who hasn’t answered yet, while the board is:

• in the Feedback phase on a guided board, or
• at any time on a Live board.

The five buttons carry labels on hover: 1 Rough, 2 Meh, 3 Okay, 4 Good, 5 Great.

Tapping one dismisses the strip permanently for you and replaces it with a small thermometer pill in the top bar showing the room’s running average. Hovering the pill tells you how many people have answered.

Re-answering replaces your previous value rather than adding a second one.

Why one tap

Every other way of taking a team’s temperature costs the session time it isn’t worth. A round-the-room check-in eats five minutes and gets you performances; a separate pulse survey gets you a response rate. A strip that’s already on the board and needs no explanation gets you most of the room, most of the time, for nothing.

The trade is fidelity. A number between 1 and 5 doesn’t tell you why, and it can’t. It’s an indicator, and its value is almost entirely in the series rather than the reading — one 2.8 tells you very little, and the third 2.8 in a row is the most useful thing on the board.

What is reported

Only the average and the count. Ever.

The individual answers exist — the system has to know whether you’ve already answered — but the only shape they’re ever read back in is the aggregate. There is no per-person view, no facilitator’s list, no export of individual moods, and the CSV export doesn’t carry them.

That constraint is what makes the answer honest. A 1 that could be traced back to you is not a 1 anyone is going to tap.

Note

Anonymity here is unconditional. It is not a setting, and it does not depend on the board’s Anonymous switch or its access mode — an attributed, members-only board still reports temperature as an aggregate only.

Where it shows up afterwards

The closed retro’s Summary carries Team temperature as one of its five headline stats, to one decimal place out of 5. A board where nobody answered shows an em dash rather than a zero — no answers is not the same as a bad sprint.

Reading it well

Read the trend, not the number. Whether your team’s baseline is 3.4 or 4.1 says more about the team’s calibration than its health. Movement across three or four retros is the signal.

Watch the count as much as the average. Nine answers out of ten is a reading. Three out of ten is a different finding, and usually a more urgent one.

Don’t chase it. A temperature that becomes a metric to be improved becomes a metric people manage. If the room learns that a low tap produces a meeting, the taps go up and the information goes away.

Follow a drop into the cards. The number tells you something moved; the board tells you what. A drop with an obvious theme clustered under it is a retro that already found its own agenda.