A signal is something in your team’s working activity that crossed a threshold worth your attention — a blocker raised twice with no answer, a service that keeps paging, the same theme showing up in a third retro. The Signals feed is where they land. It stays quiet by default: most activity never becomes a signal, and what does always links back to its source.
What the feed shows
The feed covers a rolling 14-day window by default and orders the most pressing items first. Each signal carries a severity band:
- High — needs you now. These drive the red “needs you now” count in the sidebar and on the team switcher.
- Medium — worth a look this week.
- Watch — noted, not urgent.
- Recurring — a pattern that has shown up across retros; the loop hasn’t closed it yet.
Signals come from every connected source — Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Linear, Jira, CI, and PagerDuty — plus correlated signals, where SmartRetro ties events from more than one source into a single pattern (a merged PR that says done while its tracker issue is still open, for example).
Where did this come from?
Every card has a Where did this come from? link that expands its provenance: the exact messages, events, or prior retros the signal was built from, each linking out to the original. If a source can’t be shown — a deleted Slack message, an event aged out of retention — the card says so plainly rather than showing a dead link. The rule is simple: if we can’t show the source, we don’t surface it.
Giving a verdict
Signals wait for a human call. Each card offers four verdicts, and each one teaches SmartRetro something:
- Real — yes, this matters. Confirms the pattern and nudges the threshold for similar ones down a little.
- Noise — not worth surfacing. Raises the threshold for that shape of signal.
- Topic — worth discussing at the retro. The signal is queued for the next brief’s Team-selected topics section — a promise that it comes up.
- Mute — stop showing this shape for a while. Suppresses future signals of the same shape for a set period.
This is the compounding part of the product: the more verdicts your team gives, the better the feed matches what you actually care about. Verdicts are counting, not guesswork — they tune per-team thresholds directly.
Filtering and the quiet ones
Filter the feed by severity or by verdict — for example, Unjudged to find signals nobody has weighed in on yet. Held-back items live in a Show suppressed drawer: muted shapes, dismissed signals, and would-be patterns below the current threshold. From there you can Unmute a shape or Restore a dismissed signal, and it returns to the feed.
Scope
Signals follow the team switcher. In a single team’s scope you see that team’s routed signals; in All my teams you see everything, each tagged with its team, and signals not routed to any team tagged Org-wide. Routing is set by channel mapping — see Slack and Teams and scope.
Next
Signals with a Topic verdict flow into the brief; the ones that become commitments become action items.