This is the path from a fresh account to your first retro with real follow-through. Most teams get there in one sitting.
1. Finish onboarding
When you first sign in, SmartRetro walks you through setup: connect a signal source, name your team, invite teammates, and schedule your first retro. You can skip any step and come back — everything in onboarding is also reachable from Settings later.
2. Connect a source
Signals need a source. Connect Slack, your code host, or your tracker from Settings → Integrations. Connections are read-only and default-off: nothing is read until you opt a channel or repo in. Until a source is connected, the sidebar shows “Not listening yet.”
You can run retros without any sources — the board, voting, and action items all work — but the signal feed and the brief stay empty.
3. Schedule the retro
Go to Retros → New Retro, pick a date and a template (Mad/Sad/Glad, Start/Stop/Continue, and others), and assign it to a team. The Retros page shows the upcoming retro with its brief status; the brief finalizes about 24 hours before the meeting.
4. Run the meeting
Open the board from the Retros page. A retro moves through phases — collect, vote, discuss, done. Everyone adds cards, votes on what matters, and the discussion turns into action items with owners and due dates.
5. Watch the follow-through
After the retro, the Action items page tracks every commitment. Overdue items are flagged, their owners get nudged, and anything unresolved carries forward into the next retro’s brief.
Where to go next
The guides on teams and scope, the signal feed, and the retro brief cover each part of the loop in depth as they land here. For the data-handling specifics, see Trust & security.