Product Update: Public Team Rooms

“You know what my favorite part of starting a trial is?
Creating a new username and password!”
- No One Ever...Literally Not Even Once

Does this sound familiar?

You find a great new product - but no one on the team wants to give it a shot because the thought of creating yet another username and password (that contains one uppercase letter, two lowercase letters, eight numbers, four symbols, your first dog’s middle name, and your social security number - obviously) is just too overwhelming?

Ugh, amiright?

That’s why we’re so excited to announce the launch of our newest product update…

Public Team Rooms! 🥳

Ok. Cool. So what’s a Public Team Room?

Public Team Rooms allows users access the room without having to create and memorize yet another login, making it easier than ever to start running retrospectives with your team.

As we now have two types of team rooms, Public and Private, you might be wondering which is the best choice for your team.

We often refer to the benefits of psychological safety and keeping Private Team Rooms; but we also understand that sometimes, Private Team Rooms just don’t make sense for specific retros and / or teams. Take a look at some use cases for Public Team Rooms below.

• External Contractors - Sometimes an external team member needs to participate in one specific retro. Requiring this person to first be invited by an admin, creating a new username / password, and verifying their email only holds up the rest of the team.
• One-Off Retros - Not all projects will require regular bi-weekly retrospectives. For example, short-term projects with a variation of your normal team might only call for one or two retros, but not enough to justify the nuisance of creating new login information.
• Large Teams - Consider the largest team you’ve ever worked on, even bigger, in fact; corporate giants if you will. Teams of dozens (if not hundreds) of people run into huge roadblocks that can take hours to address with this barrier to entry. By creating Public Team Rooms, teams of this size can now easily hop into a room and begin their retro.
• Get to the Point: Sometimes you simply want to quickly and easily start the trial with your team to see if Retrium is as great as you’ve heard. Using a Public Team Room is a great way to easily run a retrospective during your free trial of Retrium without creating new login information. Simply go to app.retrium.com and start your retro! It’s now that easy!

Now with all these examples of how Public Team Rooms can benefit your retros, you might be thinking to yourself, “well if it’s so great, then why would I want to have a Private Team Room anyway?”

To answer this, let’s take a look at three common attributes of successful retrospectives - safety, consistency, and trust.

• Psychological Safety - As we’ve mentioned before, psychological safety is a huge contributor to the success of your retros. By keeping your team rooms private, you’re allowing team members to speak freely and confidently, knowing that their anonymity is being protected. This, in turn, allows them to come forward with critical feedback that might otherwise be kept to themselves.
• Long-Standing Teams - With long-term projects come long-term retrospectives. Some teams will have to meet regularly for months on end before a project is completed. In such cases, having a place for past notes and action items to live is imperative to ensuring that they’re completed efficiently and effectively.
• Overbearing Bosses - Not all notes are good notes. That being said, not all feedback that’s given during a retro is worthy of being shared with your higher-ups. Having a Private Team Room ensures that the only information getting back to your boss is information that was decided upon amongst the team.

We’re thrilled to be able to offer you faster access to Retrium through Public Team Rooms. We’re proud of the psychological safety and anonymity that we’ve created with our classic Private Team Rooms, but can’t wait to help with these particular use cases that call for a different approach.

Try Public Team Rooms Now!

If you have the Enterprise Edition of Retrium, and have questions about how this may impact you and your teams, please reach out to your Org Admin or our customer success team. 👍

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