Outro - A new take on retrospectives for progressive teams

Product Hunt! 👋Long time no see👋! Very excited to be back with my second project. For the past 18 months (515 hours to be exact), I’ve been building an app called outro.co. Outro is for team retrospectives. It has one purpose - to get your team to run retros that are *actually* helpful. Wait - what’s a retrospective? A retro is a candid, team-wide discussion about how the team is doing, both the accomplishments and the challenges. When done right, it creates more effective, more close-knit teams. A good team retro has 3 clear outcomes: 🤗 It builds a sense of camaraderie and makes us feel like we’re all in this together 🔑 We come to rely on the retro as an open forum for discussion with the whole team. Communication is key for a highly-functioning team 📈 Our team improves by 1% each time (1.01 ^ 365, etc.) And they really, really work. As a Product Manager, I’ve been hosting or participating in retros since 2011… every single week. I’ve seen the difference it makes, and I’ve seen how few teams do it well. Good retros do exist, they are incredibly valuable, and there are objectively good reasons why your team should start building the habit now. If you work alongside a collaborative team in any industry, and you like the sound of working better together, then I’d love for you to check this app out. And if you do check it out, please please send me your feedback. Thanks for reading 🙌

Outro is an awesome way for teams to celebrate one another, and work together to improve on a regular basis. Taylor, one of the makers, is a serious believer in retros. We first met while working together at Crowdtap, a startup where the whole team really dedicated themselves to this ritual on a weekly basis, and it showed. When Taylor sent me what he was working on, it really resonated with me. More teams should be doing this to improve productivity and morale.

Until outro, there hasn't been a good tool for running/managing retros, and most retros are a bit slipshod. Outro comes with an opinionated way of running retros which leads to excellent results, and makes running retros the right way incredibly easy.

Pros:

Outro is such an amazing, easy-to-use, lightweight way to run retros. It helps you run retros without any other orchestration needed.

Cons:

Need to be able to sort the issues by priority ascending/descending and also would be nice to sort by other criteria.

Great job @taykcrane

@taykcrane it looks great. thanks! one question: is there a way to share / export the concerns? Our team is working with trello as well as individual todolists. Therefore it would be necessary to get them out of outro - otherwise they'll be ignored until next Friday

I work on a team with the maker. We have been using Outro for our retros for a long time now, and I've seen the tool mature over time and got to participate in providing feedback as it was developed. If I ever move on from my current role, I'll advocate for my new team to adopt Outro to support our retros.

Pros:

Summary email helps keep track of action items & owners. Persistence of unresolved past concerns & action items.

Cons:

Doesn’t track kudos against team members. Doesn’t include additional metrics on the closing screen (e.g. this week's vs. past weeks).

Our team has been using Outro for a year and it's become a crucial component of our culture.

Pros:

Clean, intuitive interface. Makes it easy to assign action items associated with concerns to owners so that change *actually* happens.

Cons:

Would love a Slack integration

I work on the creator's team, we've been using Outro for our retros. It ends the week on such a positive and forward-thinking note as we come together to discuss what went right and what needs to be addressed.

Pros:

- easy to use - lets the team give credit to people - great animation on the kudos button/ending sequence

Cons:

- does not save kudos from and to

Retros are, in my opinion, the most important part of a healthy, productive team.

Pros:

Outro makes retrospectives easy and beautiful. It helps keep track of owners and tasks, which is essential to good retros.

Cons:

Outro focuses on concerns, and while it has a kudos feature, it doesn't track why someone gave a kudo. I like to know what's working!

Very cool! Meetings are extremely expensive so tools like Outro to make them more efficient can have major effects on productivity!