The Story of an Experimental Retro Tool That Got Thousands of Users With $0 Marketing

I’d like to share a story about how we got a product into the hands of real users in ONE week.

I work at a software development consultancy that helps clients solve real problems and launch market-tested products. In July of last year, colleagues and I had just finished projects that had remote stakeholders. To keep these stakeholders in the loop, we’d have them join our end-of week retro. We normally run our retros on a whiteboard, but with remote stakeholders, that wasn’t feasible. We resorted to Google Spreadsheets and then Trello. Neither were optimal.

Since we were in between client projects, Abhi (our Engineering Manager) came up with the idea to create a product to solve this problem. We had 4 engineers, a Product Designer and myself (a Product Manager) – so we had a balanced team, which was great!

This is a story about how we, as a team, built something we love and how the speed at which we got the product into the hands of real users has led to some great growth metrics without any real marketing.