The brief is the prep work you’d want a strong EM to do before every retro — assembled for you, delivered about a day before the meeting. Instead of starting from a blank board and fresh memories, the team starts from what actually happened since last time.
What’s in it
A finished brief has up to six sections, in this order:
- Summary — a short narrative of the window since your last retro.
- Themes from last retro — what the team grouped and discussed last time, so recurring threads are visible.
- Carry-forward action items — commitments from previous retros that are still open. These don’t disappear; they follow the team until resolved.
- Team-selected topics — signals your team marked as worth discussing in the signal feed. A Topic verdict is a promise that it comes up at the next retro; this section is where that promise is kept.
- Needs attention — signal patterns from the window that point at friction.
- Worth preserving — practices that held up well this window. Sections only appear when there’s something in them; an empty “Worth preserving” isn’t padded with filler.
Every pattern in the brief traces back to its source, same as in the feed.
When it arrives
The brief is delivered roughly 24 hours before the retro’s scheduled date. A sweep runs hourly, finds retros happening tomorrow, and finalizes their briefs. If your team has Slack notifications for brief delivery turned on, the brief lands in your channel too.
The Retros page shows where things stand:
- Brief ready — delivered and waiting for review.
- Assembling — a retro is scheduled and the brief is still gathering.
- Building baseline — this is the team’s first retro, so there’s no “since last time” yet. The first brief has less to say; the second one is where it earns its keep.
- Not scheduled — no upcoming retro, so nothing to assemble.
How the window is computed
The brief covers everything since your last closed retro — its completion time is the starting line. Signal patterns, carried items, and topics are all gathered from that point forward, so nothing is double-reported across meetings.
Using it
Open the brief at Retros → Review brief. Read it before the meeting — five minutes is enough — then use Start retro from this brief to jump straight to the board. During collecting and voting, the board keeps a Since Last Retro card visible so the context stays in the room.
The brief works best when the loop around it is healthy: sources connected, verdicts given, action items owned. See Signals and Action items for those halves.