Ever felt like your retrospectives are a waste of time?

Hey everyone,

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I'm building a retro tool and I was wanted to look for feedback from developers specifically on their thoughts and feelings regarding retros and their effectiveness. I've always felt like retros have this great inspirational goal of continuing to improve your team over time, by removing your pain points and reminding yourself of what pushes your team forward. In practice on all the teams I've worked on, nothing of value got brought up, we always just talked about the last couple of days, and spend a ton of time writing things down and never got enough time for discussion or follow up. On some teams it was better than others, but never really felt like we were getting all the value we could.

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The tool I started building is called RetroRabbit and tries to solve these problems in a couple simple ways:

1. You can add notes anytime throughout your sprint so you don't forget to talk about anything important
2. Notes are anonymous by default, so people are more inclined to share their real feelings (I know in a 'well performing team' this shouldn't be a problem and people should be open, but in practice I rarely saw this happen)
3. Notes are submitted entirely through Slack so no new logins or tools or websites need to be remembered. This increases the chances of your team adding notes since its frictionless
4. Anyone can upvote notes from their phones at review time so you can easily bring the most valuable topics to the top and discuss those first, bringing the most value with little wasted time

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I'm curious, do you find your current retrospectives effective? Do you think a tool would be useful to your team or would you prefer to do things with pen and paper? I'd love to start a discussion in general just to see if people are feeling like their retrospectives are giving their teams the value that they have been promised, or if its just a time to pat yourself on the back, and complain about the teams you depend on not prioritizing the work you need.