Recall answers one question: did we ever decide or discuss this? It searches your team’s stored history — retro cards, AI summaries, themes, and watched Slack channels — and links back to every source. Nothing outside your organization is ever searched.
Using it
Open Recall from the sidebar and type a topic — a few plain words work best, like “deploy freeze,” “standup format,” or “error budget.” Results appear as you search. Each result shows what kind of thing it is, when it happened, and an excerpt, with a link straight to the source:
- Retro card, Retro summary, and Theme results open the retro they came from.
- Slack message results open the original in Slack. If the message has since been deleted, the result says the source is no longer available rather than showing a broken link.
Quoted phrases match exactly; unquoted words match more loosely. If nothing matches, Recall tells you so and suggests trying plainer topic words.
From Slack
The same search is available without leaving Slack. Type /smartretro recall followed by a topic and you’ll get the top results with links back, visible only to you. See Slack.
What it searches, and what it doesn’t
Recall reads only what your team already has in SmartRetro: retros your team ran and Slack channels an admin opted in. It’s scoped to what you can see — it never reaches into another organization, and it never invents an answer. It points you at the real decision, in the real place it was made. For the specifics of what’s stored and for how long, see Trust & security.
Why it matters
Teams re-litigate settled questions because the answer is buried in a thread nobody can find. Recall is the “we already decided this — here’s where” button. It works best when the loop feeds it: retros run, signals given verdicts, the brief reviewed. The more history your team builds, the more Recall has to draw on.