We bring some seasonal changes in the lead up to Christmas (a holiday we very much enjoy in the Ludi team):

1. Massive Christmas Retrospective
2. AI-Driven Topic Groupings
3. Seasonal Board Decorations

New: Massive Christmas Retrospective

The Massive Christmas retro template is a retrospective with four parts: a festive memory game to warm up, a themed reflection, a wish for next year, and a team battle to finish. Everything you need to end the year.

AI driven sticky note grouping (Beta)

AI-driven sticky note grouping is now generally available across all teams, in Beta.

Select a bunch of stickies and ask the AI to analyse and group them into topics for you. It can even break down topics into smaller groupings.

This feature needs to be enabled by the Owner of the Account in AI Settings.

Seasonal decorations

You will have noticed that we added some seasonal decorations to your boards. They’re interactive — click around to spot the surprises.

Turn off Seasonal Decorations

But if you don't like them, you can turn them off in your Preferences from the top-right menu:

Bonus Article: How To Stop Your Backlog Getting Out Of Control

A new post from Steve Whitfield, Co-founder & CTO

He shows how we keep our own backlog to just a few cycles’ worth of work, and how we use Ludi for the messy front end of planning - screenshots included.

If your backlog feels like a Christmas list that’s been added to for ten years, this one’s for you.

That's all for now, enjoy!

The Thanksgiving Retro template is back in the spotlight this November as a perfect way to focus on the positives with your team.

There's also a product update alongside - enjoy!

Thanksgiving Retro Template

Use the Thanksgiving Retro template in your next retrospective to help your team celebrate success and give thanks - something we can all forget to do.

Page - New Element Type

We've added a new Page element, designed for writing long form rich text into your boards in a nicer way than using the Text element.  You can create pages from the Stickies & Cards draw in the top left of the toolbar.

Sorting Objects

We've added new sorting options when you select multiple objects. The options depend on the object type you have selected, like these Jira issue cards:

Spinner - Add Your Team

We've added a bunch of fun quick-set options to the Spinner, such as the team member selection letting you spin to decide who talks next:

Board Details in Dashboard

And More

• When mentioning people with '@', the list now prioritises relevant people (i.e. participants & team members first).
• Admins can now see which team each person belongs to in People Management. 
• Admins can now see the privacy settings of boards in Board Management.

Coming Soon

For a sneak peek of our upcoming 'AI Grouping' feature, watch this clip.

We'll announce when this is available - hopefully soon!

Today we're releasing some major updates to Ludi, focused on improving the board experience and sharing, plus lots of other cool updates.

Updated Board UI

No More Design Mode

Super Lock

Tip: Locking and Unlocking

When building boards, use the right-click menu to lock and unlock the entire board. Right-click anywhere on the board background to open the menu:

Mini-map

Board Sharing Updates

We’ve simplified board sharing to three levels of "trust": Team, Organization and Open. Choose who can join your board without approval:

• Team: Your team can join the board instantly.
• Organization: Anyone in your ‘org’ can join instantly.
• Open: Anyone with the link can join instantly (subject to your plan's guest limits).

New: Invite Via Email

Please note: People joining the board are still subject to member and guest seat allocations, driven by your plan.

Icons ❤ 

More Hats! 👑 

You can push Shift+H to cycle through the hat collection, but for the more discerning hat enthusiast, click on your own profile image in the top right and select ‘Wear Hat’ to browse the full range. Welcome to the Hat Club.

Platform and Feature Improvements

Here are a few of the smaller improvements coming out in this release:

Improved board joining

• We've improved the routes for people joining boards, so there should be less confusion and more joining.

Tokens

• The Team tokens now auto-populate with your team pictures before they join the board, which means you can use them when designing activities.

Shapes: New styles

• New shape styles for making layouts or diagrams.

Polls

• Added a count of responses to each poll answer, in addition to the percentage.

Available seats

• Added visibility of seat count when inviting new team members

Account Access Control

Add your trusted email domains in the Admin settings to allow new members to auto-join your organization account.

• Set the approved domains to enable auto-joining for your colleagues when they visit a board for the first time.
• Set a default team for new users when they join. Optional, but recommended for Starter plan teams.

Updated Invite and Join Request Management

• Admins can view invites sent by email, and approve or deny any account join requests made by new users.

Catch you in the next update.

Kit, Jamie, Steve and Steve - the Ludi team

We've updated the Jira integration so it works better with more complex projects, and it’s still fast and simple to use.

It makes Ludi a great place for those refinement, story slicing, right-sizing, estimation, poker planning, scoping, or three amigos sessions... whatever your team calls it.

1. Improved ticket creation - now you can pick your issue type, with a new upload process to input your mandatory fields.
2. See all of a ticket's details - edit the issue title, description, and fields inline, add Jira comments.
3. Support for more custom fields - pick additional fields to display on your Jira cards.

This update means you can now do things like:

• Update user story details during refinement sessions
• Break up and assign epics, stories, tasks in your board
• Create actions in Jira at the end of your retro
• Convert a Ludi story map to epics and stories in Jira
• Collect bugs or feedback in your boards and choose which to track in Jira
• Pull your work items into a board to plan ahead

Video Demo of Jira Updates

Watch Jamie, Co-Founder, run through the latest updates in this Loom video:

Metro Retro has a new name!

We've been on an incredible journey since 2019, and it's time for a name that matches our expanded vision. While we started as your go-to retrospective tool, we've grown into something bigger, a space that makes remote and hybrid collaboration genuinely human.

Our customers have always told us how much fun they have in Metro Retro, how could you not with all our gadgets, hats, confetti and the ability to slap your teammates (with love of course), so we wanted a name which better represented and embodied the interactive, engaging, and collaborative spirit that defines our platform.

So after months of workshops and thousands of potential names later, we’re excited to introduce Ludi, a name which lets us take what we’ve done for your retros, and apply that sparkle to every time your team meet online.

We’ve written a short blog post on the name change which you can read here.

Have an awesome day 💪 

Kit, Jamie, Steve and Steve - The Ludi team

Get creative with our latest updates to the Marker Pen and Reaction emojis. Plus, for Enterprise plans, we've added a new approval workflow for member invites.

Marker Pen

For the artists in your team or those who really miss drawing big red arrows on a real whiteboard.

• Draw anywhere on the board
• Draw directly on Sticky-notes, Task cards and Index cards to attach your drawing to those objects.
• Draw inside Zones or Frames and the drawing will move with the Zone/Frame when you move it - drawings inside of Zones/Frames can still be selected and moved independently
• Drawing over the edges or outside of board objects will create a drawn object which you can freely move around the board.

Edit your marker pen drawings, with the pointer tool (V) selected:

• Click on a marker drawing to move, rotate, adjust line thickness or recolour
• Double-click a marker drawing to edit, you can now continue to draw, or use the marker eraser to remove drawings: - Note - The eraser removes an entire line, not just the area you click on.

Emoji Reactions

When you need more than words to express yourself, or if you just like to add a bit more fun to your boards.

You can now add emoji’s directly to your board using the Reaction tool:

• When you place a reaction emoji on the board background (outside of an object) it becomes an editable object which you can move, resize and rotate
• The Reactions tool will now track your ‘Recently used', making it easier to reapply your most used reactions.
• Eraser function added to Reactions. Click to remove emojis from the board or objects.

Invite Approvals

(Enterprise plans only)

Organization Owners and Admins can now choose to enable an invite approval process, from the People Management screen:

• This feature implements an admin approval process on all invites sent by members.
• When a member tries to send an invite, Admins will receive an email notifying them that a new invite has been requested:

• The Admins / Owners can approve or reject invite requests from the People Management screen.
• When an invite is approved, an invite email will be sent to the new member, inviting them to the Organization Account.
• Logged-in members will be taken directly to the new account & team.
• If the invitee does not yet have an account they will need to create one before joining the team.

Notes

• When Invite Approvals are enabled, members can invite others by email only. Inviting with a link is disabled.
• Note - no approval step is required when an Owner or Admin invites a new member.

Catch you in the next update.

Kit, Jamie, Steve and Steve - the Metro Retro team

With Easter just around the corner we thought it would be an egg-cellent idea to create some new themed templates. Gather your team and get cracking with our new Easter Retrospective and the Easter Egg Dash Icebreaker. Also in this release; new options for sorting and arranging sticky notes and email notifications for assigned Actions and Mentions.

New Templates:

Easter Retrospective 🐇

This Easter-themed retrospective helps a team reflect on recent work, burrow into topics that need deeper exploration, as well as decide actionable steps for improvement.

• Collected Eggs: What went well?
• Broken Eggs: What didn't go so well?
• Rabbit Holes: Any issues or ideas you would like to raise for deeper discussion?
• Bunny Hops: What small improvements can we make to help us reach our goals?

(Bonus - This template also includes the Egg Dash Icebreaker!)

Try the Easter Retro Template

Easter Egg Dash Icebreaker 🎉

Race against your team to claim as many stickies as you can. Then once all stickies are claimed, check under each sticky for an easter egg. Who will find the most eggs?

This will get everyone energized and ready for your meeting, so all you have to do is decide the winner's prize! (Steve suggested an afternoon off, but that seems a bit eggs-tra).

Here's our team competing to find the most eggs (some took it more seriously than others):

(Tip - there are two versions of this one, select the 'Large' version from Template Library if you are more than 10 people).

Try the Egg Dash Icebreaker Template

New Features:

Arrange and sort sticky notes (Beta)

For the teams who love a tidy board or as a way to quickly organise sticky notes for quick prioritization.

• Sort by: Votes, Person or Alphabetical
• Arrange in customizable columns and rows.

Note - this feature is in Beta - we are releasing this early as we find it useful, so we hope you will. Remember that you can undo (Ctrl + Z) any action.

Email notifications

Never miss another Action or Mention from your team. You now get an email notification when assigned an action or if you're mentioned in a board. Notification emails are sent in three ways:

• When the Action or Mention is created
• Monday morning (3am UTC) - A weekly digest of your upcoming Actions
• Daily Reminder - Your actions due today

All notifications can be turned off or on from your account preferences, under the Notifications menu.

Catch you in the next update.

Kit, Jamie, Steve and Steve - the Metro Retro team

In this release we've updated the dashboard to improve navigation, made it easier to jump back in to your recent boards, and for those who like a branded experience in their software, added the ability to upload your company logo. 

You will also find a new voting gadget to help with decision making and we've made some small but fun updates to what you can do with sticky-notes. 

Please Note: If you don't see these updates in your dashboard yet, this is because your team needs to be transitioned to the new version, which is in progress. Get in touch if you want to jump up the queue.

Recent Boards

A quick way to jump back in to your most recent board session. This view shows boards across all your teams, ordered by 'Last visited'.

Voting Gadget

Drag and drop a voting gadget on to any board. Use our pre-sets or customize to suit your needs. Your mouse is hidden to others - so only you can see your selection and votes are anonymous until the reveal button is clicked.

Sticky-note fill

Add images, emotes, team tokens or gifs to your sticky-notes, because why not. This feature only works on empty sticky-notes.

Activity log

For Enterprise customers only. Admins can now see a fully detailed activity log for all teams and boards in the Admin panel.

Updates and Improvements

• Organization settings have been moved to the top of the left side menu
• Open your Org Settings to add your company logo
• We've added a 'Recent Boards' view to the dashboard. Selecting this will show the boards you've been working in across all your teams.
• The team member list has been moved to the Boards content area and will only show those members who are currently. It will also show if they are in a board.
• Default board sort order has been set to show 'Last Updated' first. You can change the sort order using the dropdown option in the top right.
• Changes to the Teams and Boards views in the Admin backend.

Jira issue import

• Added a story point field to the issue picker in Jira import.
• Changed the sprint filter in Jira issue import from picker to search. This helps teams with many sprints and improves performance.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue in the Fibonacci Estimation template where an estimate choice would sometimes be displayed as the incorrect person.
• Fixed long decimals showing in the results of the number Poll.

Catch you in the next update.

Kit, Jamie, Steve and Steve - the Metro Retro team

In this release we’re introducing Actions and Mentions, two great ways to keep the discussion and momentum going once the meeting ends.

Please Note: If you don't see these updates in your dashboard yet, this is because your team needs to be transitioned to the new version, which is in progress. Get in touch if you want to jump up the queue.

Want the TLDR? 

Watch our demo video to learn more about our latest features, Actions & Mentions. For everything else, keep reading. We packed quite a bit in to this release.

Actions

Actions can also be created from the Action Items view in your team dashboard.

Read the full guide here

Action Items Dashboard

Manage your actions directly from your team dashboard. A great way to get a summary update before your next meeting. Need to set an action not directly related to a board? You can add actions from here too.

Need to edit an action without going into the board? No problem, actions have two way sync with the sticky note you originally created them on.

Read the full guide here

Import Action Items

Insert your team actions to your next meeting board in seconds, removing any clumsy copy/pasting.

Mentions

Type "@" in a sticky to mention a team member and notify them.

Communicate across boards with your team, draw attention to content you want to collaborate further on and leave feedback that will get noticed. 

Great for when you need to share an idea or keep your team informed.

Read the full guide here

Updates & Improvements

• Team Tokens: All team members will now be available in the token drawer, even if they haven’t yet joined the board.

• Rich text editor for text blocks. Headers, lists, bold, italics.

• Admins can search and sort members in the ‘people’ screen for easier member management.

Bug fixes

• The dateline in the timeline frame is now showing the correct day
• Scroll function on Jira import function now working correctly
• Jira issues imported to the board are now aligning correctly (no overlap)
• Connector arrows render properly in Safari browser

Have an awesome day 💪

Catch you in the next update.

Kit, Jamie, Steve and Steve - the Metro Retro team

Try the new Thanksgiving retrospective template - a celebration of gratitude!

Enjoy a 3 course meal together, no expenses spared, and reflect on your latest release, sprint, or last quarter of work. Positive vibes only please. 

Don't forget to share some pie with your team mates. 🎉 

We hope you enjoy our latest themed template and for all of those who celebrate, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Catch you in the next update.

Steve, Jamie, Steve and Kit - the Metro Retro team.