Realtime Meetings
Work Games includes built-in realtime online meetings that turn team discussions into actionable outcomes. No separate tool, no screen-sharing a whiteboard, no sticky notes lost after the session ends. Everything happens inside the same platform where your work lives — and every insight can become a task or goal with one click.
Meeting Types
Retrospectives
Retrospectives are structured reflection sessions held at the end of a sprint or work period. The team examines what went well, what could be improved, and commits to concrete changes for the next cycle.
Research shows that team debriefs improve performance by 20–25% (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013). Work Games makes retrospectives easy to run, engaging to participate in, and actionable by design.
How It Works
- Choose a template — Pick from the template library based on your team's current needs
- Invite the team — All team members join the realtime session from their workspace
- Contribute simultaneously — Everyone adds cards, thoughts, and reactions at the same time
- Vote and discuss — The team votes on the most important items and discusses them together
- Create action items — Convert insights directly into tasks or goals in your sprint backlog
Template Library
Different templates serve different situations. Rotating formats keeps every retrospective fresh and prevents the disengagement that comes from repeating the same exercise every sprint.
| Template | Best For | How It Works |
|---|---|---|
| Start / Stop / Continue | Quick tactical reviews | Three columns: what to start doing, stop doing, and keep doing |
| Mad / Sad / Glad | Processing a difficult sprint | Three emotional categories to surface feelings analytical formats miss |
| 4Ls — Liked / Learned / Lacked / Longed For | Monthly or quarterly reviews | Four categories capturing positives, growth, gaps, and aspirations |
| Sailboat | Strategic planning | Visual metaphor: wind (accelerators), anchor (blockers), rocks (risks), island (goals) |
| Starfish | Granular process improvement | Five categories: Keep Doing, More Of, Less Of, Start Doing, Stop Doing |
| Three Little Pigs | Lowering defensiveness | What was built with straw (fragile), sticks (adequate), or brick (solid) |
Why templates matter: Derby & Larsen's Agile Retrospectives (2006) documents that structured formats outperform open discussion. Different templates activate different perspectives — an emotional template like Mad/Sad/Glad surfaces concerns that an analytical template like 4Ls might miss.
Brainstorming Sessions — Coming Soon
Brainstorming sessions are a new meeting type designed for idea generation, problem solving, and creative planning. The same realtime infrastructure that powers retrospectives will support structured brainstorming with techniques like:
- Brainwriting — Silent individual ideation before group discussion, ensuring every voice is heard
- Dot voting — Democratic prioritization of ideas after the generation phase
- Affinity mapping — Grouping related ideas into themes for clearer decision-making
- Timeboxed rounds — Timed phases that maintain energy and prevent discussions from stalling
Brainstorming sessions will share the same one-click task creation as retrospectives — the best ideas go straight into your backlog.
Stay tuned for the brainstorming sessions release.
Key Capabilities
Realtime Collaboration
All participants see updates instantly — new cards appear as they are written, votes update live, and discussions flow in real time. No refreshing, no waiting, no "can you share your screen?"
One-Click Task & Goal Creation
The most important capability: any card, insight, or action item from a meeting can be converted into a task or goal in your sprint backlog with a single click. The item is assigned, tracked, and completed alongside your regular work. This closes the gap between reflection and execution — the #1 reason retrospectives fail.
Participation Equity
Templates include phases where all members contribute simultaneously (writing cards before anyone can see others' responses). This structural parallelism ensures quieter team members contribute with equal weight to vocal ones. The format itself enforces balanced participation.
Meeting History
Every meeting is saved with its full context — cards, votes, discussions, and resulting action items. Teams can look back at past retrospectives to see if patterns recur, whether action items were completed, and how the team's concerns have evolved over time.
Why Built-In Meetings Matter
Most teams use a separate tool for retrospectives — a whiteboard app, a shared document, or sticky notes on a wall. This creates three problems:
- Logistics friction — Scheduling, opening another app, inviting everyone, explaining the tool. Every step reduces the chance the meeting actually happens consistently.
- Context loss — Insights live in one tool, tasks live in another. Action items from the retrospective must be manually copied into the project management tool — and most aren't.
- No follow-through tracking — There's no connection between what the team decided in the retro and what actually changed in the next sprint.
Work Games solves all three by making meetings part of the same workspace where work happens. Launch from your sprint, create tasks that land in your backlog, and track follow-through automatically.