Empowering Remote Agile Teams: Tools for Async Estimations and Retrospectives

[Solidini]

In the world of Agile project management, collaboration and communication are essential. But in this time, a lot of teams are working remotely and realize that synchronous meetings are not always needed and take valuable time from your team.

For agile teams that want to keep communication flowing and maximize productivity,  we are introducing Async Poker and Retro Notes. These tools help teams work together effectively, prepare more thoroughly, and make meetings shorter and more purposeful.

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Async Poker

Start estimating user stories and tasks asynchronous. Why meet with the whole team to spend time talking about tickets and estimating them if everyone already agrees on the story points? Let everyone read the work, ask questions and provide estimates asynchronous. See if the estimates are aligned and assign the story points. Limit your meetings to only relevant topics to discuss, or skip them at all.

Plan and track a poker session

Assign your estimate on the ticket

More info or want to try it out? See Async Poker on the marketplace or contact us!

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Retro Notes

Retrospectives done right. Every team is impacted by the well known recency bias in retrospectives. The meeting starts, team members start thinking about the last sprint and can only come up with what happened yesterday.

With Retro Notes, the retrospective is no longer a single meeting, but becomes an ongoing exercise. Anyone can leave notes on a ticket that they are working on or have just completed. Others can view the notes whenever they want and leave a comment or vote. Once the team feels it's time for a synchronous retrospective, you start a retro session and pull in all relevant notes from the specified time span.

Create Retro Notes on your work

Start a retro session

Use the retro board for you retrospective

More info or want to try it out? See Retro Notes on the marketplace or contact us!

[Luis Ortiz - Catapult Labs]

This is such an important conversation, especially with so many Agile teams working remotely! 🌍 Async estimations and clear communication are game-changers for keeping work moving without adding meeting fatigue.

One thing we at Catapult Labs have seen in the last 7 years working with distributed teams is that clarity around priorities and follow-ups can sometimes get lost when ceremonies move async. It’s not just about estimating efficiently, but also ensuring that stand-ups, retrospectives, and continuous improvement stay just as effective without face-to-face discussions. (Check out our tools for Agile Ceremonies in our marketplace listing). 

We've found that when teams combine async estimations, lightweight stand-ups, and retrospective insights, it creates a smooth feedback loop that keeps everyone aligned and focused on delivering value.

Curious—how are other teams here connecting async estimations to their broader Agile rituals like backlog refinement and retrospectives? How do you ensure that insights from async sessions don’t get lost and continue driving progress?