Action items are the commitments a retro produces. The point of the whole loop is that they don’t get lost. Each one keeps an owner, a due date, and a status, and SmartRetro keeps them in view — nudging owners, flagging overdue work, and carrying anything unresolved into the next retro’s brief.
Where they come from
Most action items are created on the retro board with the Action button on a card — see Running a retro. You can also add one directly from Action items → New Action. Either way it captures a title, an optional description, an owner, a due date, and an optional link to a key result (see Objectives).
Status and overdue
An action item moves through Open → In progress → Completed, or Cancelled. Open and in-progress items are “active”; anything active past its due date is overdue and is flagged in red.
The Action items page shows the whole set with a stat strip — total, open, in progress, done, overdue, and completion rate. Filter by status, filter by team or assignee, search across every field, sort by any column, and hide columns you don’t need. Your column and filter choices persist.
Scope
Like the rest of the app, the page follows the team switcher: one team’s follow-through, or All my teams with a team column on every row. See Teams and scope.
Nudges
Overdue and due-soon items nudge their owner in Slack (when Slack notifications are on — see Slack). SmartRetro sends a due-soon reminder once as the date approaches and one overdue notice after it passes, so owners get a prompt without being spammed. On an overdue item you can also press Nudge owner to send that reminder yourself; the button confirms once it’s sent.
Carry-forward
An action item that stays open across a retro doesn’t disappear — it’s carried into the next retro’s brief, and SmartRetro counts how many cycles it has survived. An item shown as “Carried ×2” has gone unresolved through two retros. That count is the honest signal that a commitment keeps slipping, so the team can decide to finish it, reassign it, or drop it on purpose.
Completion is detected, not just claimed
When an item is exported to a tracker, SmartRetro cross-checks its state against the tracker daily. If the tracker shows the work merged or closed, the item is flagged as externally completed so you can confirm it — completion is detected, not only self-reported. When the two disagree, that mismatch itself becomes a signal in the feed rather than being quietly resolved.
Export
Action items can be exported to a connected tracker (Linear today), with a link back to the created issue and de-duplication so the same item isn’t exported twice. See Trackers.
Next
Follow-through is one half of the loop; the prep is the other. See The brief for what carries into the next meeting.